You have heard me gosh over Deus Ex for as long as I have been a member of this site. I'm sure it drove some of you nuts.
But I could never quite put my finger on why that was... on why I couldn't stop recommending this 24-year-old game to anyone who would listen. Well, that --hopefully-- ends now.
This isn't going to be a review, but a sort of love letter to a game that changed my entire understanding on what gaming is and should be. I don't expect it to make a lot of sense, but I hope that it'd at least get you to try it out yourself if you haven't already, because that'd be my gift to any non-players still out there.
Welcome to the new millennium! An incredibly fun time when the UN have shoot-outs with homegrown terrorists on random alleyways.
Deus Ex was the first game to give me a sense of validation. Before that, I would always have a nagging feeling at the back of my mind telling me that I was just wasting my time with whatever I was playing at the time. And while I will forever treasure my time with those (alleged) time-wasters, the fact remains that very few of them made me feel like I was accomplishing something the way Deus Ex did. The "Goomba Massacre of 1995" was a pivotal moment of my childhood, but it wasn't particularly memorable. Fighting my way through Liberty Island just to have a conversation with the guy I was sent in to capture? I can tell you exactly where I was during that one and what my thoughts were.
My enchantment with the game started long before I even got to play it, as I can perfectly recall reading a 2001 review for it. I had never seen a gaming outlet give such untamed praise to something and that drew me in like a magnet... but, alas, they also gave a couple of stern warnings among the all the confetti and balloons: they told me in no uncertain terms that I would need a beast of a computer to run it (which I simply didn't have) and that the game was not going to be translated from English (a language I couldn't speak at the time). For several years I would come back to the screenshots accompanying that article and wonder what was I missing out on. It was almost maddening, but I took it extremely well because I was already used to my computer being unable to run stuff... what was yet another missed experience? It changed nothing.
But I could never quite stop thinking about that one game, and things came to a boil after I had been hired to review abandonware games for a site. I remember how I got to rummage through the suggestion box after finishing the requested review of Call Of Cthulhu: Shadow Of The Comet (a delightful little game with a lot of a value and not enough love). After filtering through some not very interesting-sounding titles, I noticed that someone had entered Deus Ex as their requested review. I remember being taken aback by it and deferring to the editor, because I simply didn't believe that game released in the year 2000 was a good fit for the site.
The editor told me to go nuts.
I went ahead, bought the game on site's money and... the stupid thing didn't work. The thing seemed to be hellbent on giving me N64 flashbacks, but I learned rather quickly that it wasn't actually an issue with the game, but with the OS I was using at the time -- Windows 7 really didn't like the way Deus Ex executed its files and prevented it from properly launching itself. Once that hurdle was cleared, it was game time.
As much as I liked the combat, it's the quiet moments of conversation and world-building when Deus Ex really shines.
My first impressions of the game were really strong, but I'm not gonna sit here and act like I was taking it all in... I was doing a job and I had to try the game just long enough to give it a fair review, so I ended up playing just about an hour and leaving it behind. But that one hour kept coming back to me, and I kept replaying all the awesome stuff I got to do while exploring the utterly gigantic first map in my mind. I eventually came back to it, determined to "break" the game, to find the point where my antics would just not be acceptable to it and cause a game over... but that moment never came. The developers seemed to have taken everything I could do into account and kept being ready to respond to even my more outlandish ideas. I wasn't merely hooked, I had swallowed the line and sinker, too.
But... hold on. What's this game actually about? According to Wikipedia:
Sounds good, huh?
At one point I had two different games going and played a "mirror match" with each other, doing the exact opposite things in each of my playthoughs just to see what would happen.
My character tooled towards finding back entrances and talking his way through many situations got an easier time and kept finding rewards, whilst the absolute war criminal I had created on my other game kept antagonizing everyone for sport and ended up knee-deep on enemy corpses. Both approaches were stupidly fun, but what won me over was the simple fact that they were possible. I didn't fail my first mission by brutally murdering the guy I was sent in to capture, nor did I win anything extra by sticking to that plan. I was making my decisions and living with them. That was huge for someone like me, who was so utterly used to getting "boxed-in" by the Manichean approach that so many other games had... like they couldn't let you be anything but the absolute good guy who didn't kill his teammate for a rifle that he normally wouldn't get for another two missions.
I was also in love with the fact that I could spend a literal hour just roaming around a map, but not feeling like I was hurting my progression or wasting my time by doing that. An augmentation canister might be discovered behind a random box, or I could get ahead in the game by hacking someone's computer and reading what they had TRULY been up to. The game totally rewarded me by taking my time on almost every area. Again, that wasn't normal for me at the time.
The true charm of the game, however, came from the world the developers had built. Because, as much fun as it was to kill everything that moved, a lot of the time the best experience was obtained by chatting with random people all over the world, understanding their views, ideas and personal philosophies... and while it was a little hilarious hearing a random bartender dropping truth bombs left and right, it didn't feel contrived. All those characters inhabited a world so broken that they only way they had to keep their sanity was by being very informed of what was going on around them. A homeless person might tell you about the state of the clinics as the deadly "Grey Death" rampages through the land and not feel like a complete lunatic, because you both know that what he's saying is actually true. Every character in Deus Ex has at least something of value to say, and I fully commend the game for it, even if some of the most interesting people you come across are really not that important for the overall plot (or even the specific area you are in). I also commend the game because none of these people are sacred within their world... you can go on a shooting rampage and destroy all the population of a small area without even getting told off for it. The setting is so bleak and human life is so incredibly worthless that you can just do that.
I have always liked the "retro-futuristic" look that some areas had. I can't even tell what some of that stuff is, but I'm all for it!
On one of the truly defining moments of the game (at least for me, because this happens really early on), a certain character you can talk to begs for food and eventually gives you some security codes that they managed to take a glance of from their hiding spot. If you give this person food, you get the codes and your life is suddenly a lot easier because you don't have to fight through an enemy stronghold. But you can totally feed this person, obtain the codes, and immediately shoot them in the back as they are leaving, retrieving the candy bar you had traded them from their corpse. I even went a step further and slammed their body into a nearby police boat, because I thought for sure that that was going to get me told off. But it didn't happen, and I got to keep playing the game like nothing had happened. I was being a complete psychopath and the game still didn't stop me. That was all I needed to hear to fully commit to it.
And speaking of hearing... the music is amazing.
Such an unexpected earworm. According to legend, this version of the theme song was originally rejected, but management couldn't get it out of their heads.
They not only have one of the catchiest theme songs ever, but they also have four distinct tracks for each and every level (conversation, exploring, ambiance, and combat). I wasn't particularly pleased with some of the sound effects they used (the shotgun is plain weird), but I would be lying if I said that that dented my experience any.
Now, the graphics weren't good even for 2000. Everyone looks like an action figure and their animations are super basic... some of the NPCs actually behave as if there is a second player controlling them, with the amount of circle strafing, inconsistent patterns and spastic moves they perform as they try to get you killed. I can't decide whether I liked that or hated it, but it was something I couldn't stop noticing.
But the true heart and soul of Deus Ex doesn't reside within its technical capabilities, nor its looks or sounds. This is a game where creativity is king (which, ironically, was the slogan the company used while working on Daikatana) and so you get to experiment like crazy, sometimes even getting rewarded for it.
I remember how smug I felt when I started placing mines on a wall and then had some enemies trigger them as they spotted me and came running to put an end to that. I also had a lot of fun wandering into a part of the HQ that my character wasn't supposed to enter and getting told off for it (finally!). And just the idea of antagonizing my co-workers and random NPCs was oddly satisfying to me, because that honestly felt real. If we worked together and I became a nuisance, what would you do? Shoot me? Yeah, no. Most NPCs put up with almost everything you can throw at them with remarkable Stoicism, and that's great.
Deus Ex might actually hold the record for most bathrooms you visit in a videogame. Its world might be horrible, but it isn't lacking accomodations.
What's even greater is that you get to exploit game mechanics for some unintended fun that the game nonetheless reacts to... Deus Ex remains the only title I have ever played where I could kill someone by throwing random office supplies and decorations at their head.
I could truly go on for days, but that would be against what I had set out to do here. I wanted to get you interested on my favorite game of all-time, not dissect it like some sort of weird HS science project. Hopefully, this love letter will result in this being the next game you play... and if that's the case, I'd love to hear about it!
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it Is almost like an addiction. Like what’s the pile of pixels and polygons gonna do? Sue me?
