Deus Ex, the stealth shooter that turned 25 this year, has not aged well in many ways.
It blithely parrots conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds without mention of their antisemitic roots; flattens Hong Kong, a city with a rich culture and history, to warring triads and heavy accents; and wraps its blocky figures and oversize architecture in a Y2K aesthetic. In his long leather trench coat and technical shades, the protagonist looks like he was dressed by the Wachowskis.
Yet a bright, creative core does manage to shine through. With a world rich in detail, Deus Ex helped lay the foundation for the immersive simulation subgenre that lets players decide what kind of game they want to experience. Its cities are labyrinthine, crossed over with endless false turns and cleverly obscured hideaways crammed with cached weapons and narrative vignettes.
You are rewarded for carefully combing through every dark alley, picking every last lock and poring over even the most seemingly innocuous email inboxes. It’s a game about secrets, after all. About shadow organisations that would prefer for people to be satisfied with things as they appear.
Deus Ex is set in 2052 and follows the genre expectations of cyberpunk. Giant, unaccountable corporations control Deus Ex’s society in place of a weakened and corrupted government. Vice and debauchery abound, distractions from the diminished state of things.
One mission takes place at a genetic research company called Versalife, whose gleaming upper stories lined with cubicles and office workers hide subterranean labs creating freaks and monsters. It’s also producing an artificial global pathogen called Gray Death.
Deus Ex, which followed immersive sims like System Shock (1994) and Thief: The Dark Project (1998), makes conspiracy its central concern, and not in a superficial way. Inquisitive players get an early glimpse at the shadowy conspiracies taking place beneath the surface — literally, in this case — if they find the underground hideout of a weapons smuggler in a futuristic Hell’s Kitchen. Breaking past the false walls of another character’s home reveals the apparent falseness of her supposed loyalty. Nothing in Deus Ex is ever as it seems.
It’s possible, as the intrepid tactical agent JC Denton, to dash directly to your objectives in New York, Hong Kong and Paris. You can sprint past the confused guards on Liberty Island and make your way straight to a terrorist leader. You can hustle through the home base of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition, not pausing to peek at even one unmonitored computer terminal.
But you’ll be missing out on valuable items, helpful upgrades and large swaths of the story. The more you snoop, the clearer the game’s themes reveal themselves to be. Going off the beaten path rewards players with a hint at who’s pulling the strings.
Where its sequels tend to guide players down more rigid pathways — either the stealthy approach of crawling through ductwork or busting through a front door, guns blazing — Deus Ex is never quite so binary. You can use tranquillizer darts and stun batons, or you can opt for heavier weapons, but you aren’t forced to follow either path exclusively.
Some levels will encourage a quieter approach. It makes sense to approach others more aggressively, such as the exploration of an already wrecked and ravaged sea lab.
The elite troops of a secretive cabal are ethically easier to dispatch violently. Other enemies, like the press-ganged sailors standing guard over a container ship you’re meant to scuttle, deserve more sympathy.
There’s little to stop you from mixing and matching styles; the game encourages different approaches and provides the tools to take them. Deus Ex could take a dozen hours to complete. Or a hundred. More than anything else, the game encourages digging deep and taking time. It’s the only approach that will provide players a chance at uncovering its many secrets, its hurried confessions, its staggering conspiracies, all hidden in plain sight.
Games have become endlessly more complex in the past two-plus decades. But Deus Ex remains a valuable template for a certain kind of approach to games and interactivity. It presents a world that begs to be explored and a narrative that demands our full attention.
Unlike many of its contemporaries, Deus Ex was never simply a shooting gallery, there to blast through and just as quickly forget. Its depth and detail, its quirks and idiosyncrasies are embedded in gaming’s cultural memory. The grim setting, with its many parallels to how ours turned out, remains a warning.
Yussef Cole/NYTNS
