Hey Elon Musk, I know your fucking nerd fans love that you used JC Denton on twitter as a profile pic, but the one most likely to be a part of an evil organization of rich assholes running the world is you, you fucking fascist billionaire. Fuck Elon Musk.


Also good game, fun times with soy food and cybernetics.

EDIT: this review is funnier after the whole twitter thing. I’m glad that pompous dickhead is finally getting publicly humiliated so thoroughly.

Writing: 5/5
Gameplay: 5/5
Art Design & Visuals: 3/5
Voices & Sounds: 4/5
Atmosphere & Immersion: 5/5

Every design choice here matters - not a single oversight in terms of it's gameplay, letting the player have complete freedom from top to bottom. It's ridiculously enthralling, with the game shifting and morphing with your own play style while at the same time allowing for a ton of replay value.

Deus Ex is a game about a lot of things: how censorship grips the media, capitalism's slow eroding of society, and how a corporation can manipulate governments for it's own monetary purposes, but it's also, first and foremost, a rock solid, nigh perfect RPG. It's so good and deserving of pretty much every level of hype that has been put on it.

A lot of games claim to be inspired by Deus Ex, but it’s hard to tell what that actually implies. The most common elements would be an open approach between action and stealth, character upgrades focusing on opening up new routes, and a plot with room for player choice. While Deus Ex has all these things, they only capture the surface level of what is so impressive about the game. What stands out is the level of reactivity to the player that’s much more than just chastising players who kill too much. It’s actually just the opposite, to give one example. Taking out a terrorist cell with lethal force will have some people within your organization respect you more, but others will quietly voice their distaste. Characters will react to the path you took, the weapons you used, or if you did something really bizarre. A lot of choices aren’t presented in a binary way, and choosing to thoroughly assess your options can even affect the outcome in its own rite. It’s extremely impressive how elegantly the game reacts to all the ways players could interact with it, so getting invested in it and being perceptive actually pays off. Antiquated presentation makes the buy-in for that experience relatively high, but it’s worth the personal investment even after so many games have tried to serve as the definitive successor.

Note: Learning to appreciate an old game shouldn’t mean you have to appreciate a barely functional game. I highly recommend Kentie’s launcher, which lets it work perfectly on modern systems. No gameplay or art assets are modified.

Hong Kong is one of the best levels I've ever encountered in any game, ever.

The rest of Deus Ex is all just as strong, too.

My non-lethal run started out as a teeth-pulling, save-scumming stealth game (still fun, even if a bit basic and slow as such) and gradually evolved into ballistic-armoring, speed-boosting, and occasionally straight up invis-walking past enemies. The progression that the augmentations afford is incredible and empowering, but never so strong that one approach feels obviously superior--a tough proposition even among the best immersive sims. Admittedly, if you're not feeling creative, some newer Arkane games occasionally run into this thanks to the omnipresent strength of blinking around. System Shock 2, while a master class in atmosphere, doesn't really have that many viable playstyles. Thief is an incredible stealth game, and I love it for that, but Deus Ex director Warren Spector had bigger ideas: he wished you didn't have to play Thief as a stealth game in the first place. Deus Ex is the first great, even masterful execution of that idea.

Another thing that is striking about Deus Ex, even to this day: almost all of the meaningful choices in the game, where possible, are presented through mechanics, systems, and open-ended situations rather than menus, text boxes, or button prompts. Want to kill or spare a character? Just do it. (It might not be easy, but that only makes it more immersive.) Want to avoid learning the passcode to this door? Stack some boxes to climb into the window. Or do whatever else you want. Only you can judge yourself. Try to stick to the approach you feel is right, or experiment wildly. It's all here. It's all tight, atmospheric, and--as clunky as the stealth, shooting, and AI can seem--it all works together as a brilliant clockwork contraption of mechanics, simulation, and downright satisfying game design.

0451/10

Excetuando-se o o visual (que, como esperado de qualquer tipo de tentativa de ser realista, envelheceu tão mal quanto a tecnologia gráfica evoluiu) e as primeiras missões fraquinhas, é um game que envelheceu absurdamente bem. A gameplay cheia de liberdade e o mundo sistêmico com várias possibilidades de interação são amarrados lindamente com um enredo e temas excelentes e pertinentes até hoje. Tudo é muito bem integrado e consistente - além de divertido pacas. Uma menção especial para a interface: todo RPG deveria ter a possibilidade de adicionar e deletar notas. Por que diabos isso não foi adotado por todo gênero?

Monumental, uncomfortable and humane, Deus Ex used to be the biggest omission from my gaming experience and I finally sat down to play it in 2020, the year when game's prodigious far sight reached terrifying heights.

It is still to this day a model example of fantastic game design aided by visual coherence. Early 3D look leads to no visual clutter, making all important details and interactables pop and catch the eye, guiding you through complex environments with invisible hand. Aspects like limited inventory space or aim reticle shrinking when you stand still seem constraining at first, but they teach you punctuality and preciseness, leading to better understanding of environment, power and available resources. From the bumpy beginning Deus Ex nurtures you to do measured choices when dealing with problems which carries from gameplay to story, and you'd be pressed to find a game that does it so seamlessly.

There was a certain moment though when it's all clicked. The note about partitioning New York into segregated blocks to counter the terrorist threat hit way too close to home. It reminded about my own country's safety theatre. How with an excuse to prevent attacks the government tightened up the security in public places in a way that probably won't be too helpful against terrorism, but is very handy to keep surveillance and inspection of people while also implanting the idea of constant danger in minds of populace. And that's... exactly what was going on in Deus Ex. And they predicted this development back in 2000. Kind of an impressive prognosis, isn't it?

That's the power of Deus Ex you see everyone talking about. In bold strokes it makes assumptions about the future which land eerily close to reality, and this state of artful hyperrealism creates an incredible sense of investment. It's quite rare for a game to make me look in every note, read every e-mail and diary. Even rarer when a game manages to have me seek exposition, not dread it. I just couldn't get enough of this world and wicked reflections of us it manages to create.

Of course it's still a game, an entertainment. It's dumb, self-aware, it's full of silly video game things and it doesn't want to be taken seriously. Down to the core Deus Ex is still just a incredibly fun and campy adventure of a lovable secret agent untangling the conspiracy of goofy villains whom you love to hate. But it also wishes to enrich and challenge your worldviews like some of the best written media does. And that's undoubtedly very special.

A game where choice matters and taught me linear story telling is fine, what the player does with tools to create their own agency is what's truly important.

The director:
Some years ago, I gave a talk at The New School in New York and afterwards did something I never do – went out for drinks with folks who’d been in the audience. At the bar, one of them sat down next to me (he was a little drunk) and asked ‘how could you make that right-wing piece of propaganda?’. Before I could answer, another guy walked up and, having overheard, said ‘right-wing propaganda? It was left-wing from start to finish!” The fact is, they were both right I guess, based on how they’d played. I was really tickled by that.”

Old men



are the future.