"By the way, Denton, stay out of the ladies restroom. That kind of activity embarrasses the agency more than it does you."

Going straight from playing a rebellious youth in Jet Set Radio Future to being po-lice. On one end of the spectrum you have counter-culture skater gangs sticking it to the man through weaponized art, and on the other you have JC Denton performing extrajudicial killings with the GEP gun, clicking his tongue and going "What a shame." Cop Weatherby is back!

Deus Ex is a game my friend Larry has been trying to get me to play for the better part of the last two decades. My first real exposure came from the Recut, which he and I still quote to each other regularly, but everything else I've absorbed has been through osmosis and from playing the two prequel games, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. I have no good excuse for taking this long to beat Deus Ex, really. I've tried at least a half dozen times and have always bailed around the second chapter, likely intimidated by how long the game is. However, I've long gotten past my issues with committing to lengthy video games, and I figured it was high time I saw Deus Ex through.

For a game released in the year 2000, Deus Ex gives the player an impressive amount of freedom in how they choose to approach objectives, and how they wish to play protagonist JC Denton as a character. One of the first things you can even do is answer a dialog choice about whether you want to take the stun prod (a non-lethal takedown is always the most silent takedown) or the GEP gun and just blow everything to hell. Do you want to be thoughtful? A master hacker, a philosopher who can talk his way out of most dangerous situations, or avoid them entirely through subterfuge? Or do you want to play the game like I did and steal credits from Maggie Chow's bedroom, alerting her maid who makes a beeline for the emergency alarm switch as soon as Maggie's cutscene is over, causing you to panic and explode both of them with a rocket, thus accidentally allowing you to bypass an entire mission as Maggie's improprieties are exposed to you during your hasty retreat through her private lab? You make your own fun!

No one problem is designed with a single solution in mind, even if one is presented in an obvious way. Much of Deus Ex's fun is borne from how much you can just fuck around with its world. Need to get to a room but a ton of guards are stationed in the adjoining hall? Good thing there's a pin full of dangerous mutant animals nearby. Hack the door open, release them, then turn the turrets on to mop up what's left. Maybe you want to clear the barracks in the heliport out by tossing a bunch of LAMs in through the vents or take pot shots as you scurry through the walls between vantage points, or just flood the whole damn place with poison gas. Fuck it! The world is your oyster, because uh, that's all the world is.

Outside of the moment-to-moment gameplay, this freeform approach to Deus Ex's world is a bit more muted. Dialog choices usually only result in short term impacts both mechanically and narratively, even more weighty decisions might only earn you a handful of different conversations later in the game. Early on you're given the option to follow orders and assassinate a top level NSF operative or kill your partner instead. The choice to kill the NSF agent is presented as being morally questionable and against UNACTO's code of conduct despite the order coming directly from your CO's mouth. This may provide the illusion that you can either play JC as a hardcore company man or rebel and follow your own personal sense of justice, but regardless of what you do, JC will shortly thereafter defect to the NSF. This is of course due to the limitations of the time in which Deus Ex was released. The amount of agency you're given is still remarkable for 2000, and if anything it's to Deus Ex's credit that it was able to lay such a sturdy foundation for other games to build off of.

The plot itself is wonderfully weird and corny, and extremely indulgent in conspiracy theories that would make your average QAnon freak blush. You're telling me there's a government made virus and the cure is being used as a form of population control? Now where have I heard that before... You could take most plot threads, call into Coast to Coast AM, and convince Art Bell to go along with you. Of course, that's because most of these conspiracies have some basis in the real world, at least insofar as them being based on theories that have long been speculated to, like chemtrails, or grey aliens being housed in the bowels of Area 51. This used to be fairly harmless nonsense, once upon a time. At least JC isn't visiting any pizza shops with the GEP gun in tow.

Speaking of, I absolutely adore JC. The way some of his dialog is delivered is just so catty. Hearing him go toe-to-toe with the pure smarm of antagonist Bob Page is a delight, and though some of the line delivery isn't what I would call conventionally good, it is also impossible to imagine Deus Ex sounding any differently. It's peak 2000s video game voice acting, neither bad nor great, yet fun in its own unique way. There's a reason why lines from Recut like "Number one: that's terror. Number two: that's terror," or "Don't think you know the commander. I know the commander because he is my pal. Here's a picture!" are stuck in my head, and it's not just because they've been edited from multiple lines to sound like something funny, it's because the way those lines are spoken are so enjoyably off-kilter to begin with.

But none of this is important anymore. I've merged with the Helios AI. We are as one. Omnipotent, all-powerful, immortal. It is time I stopped talking about Deus Ex and begin governing the world in the only way my Denton knows how... Like a complete god damn idiot.