The king of immersive sims The immersive sim genre is pretty hard to define. What sums it up most succinctly is probably 'player freedom'. But not freedom in the Skyrim sense, where you have a big open landscape that allows you to go north, west, east or south at your leisure. Most immersive sims operate on a linear mission structure with comparatively small levels, but within these levels the player can choose between a wide variety of different approaches to complete their objectives (sneaking, shooting, hacking, talking, etc.), some of which may not even have been anticipated by the developers. Deus Ex, despite being 25 years old, is still the gold standard for the immersive sim, both for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. First of all, it has immaculately designed, open, large and vertical levels that always leave the initiative in the hands of the player. It has a solid, if imbalanced, character progression system where you can level up and specialize in a lot of distinct skills and augmentations (super powers) like sharpshooting, demolitions, lockpicking, invisibility, superhuman strength, increased running speed and even swimming, and gives you a ton of options in regards to how you apply these skills in the missions. It lets you sequence break story events and levels, like prematurely shooting certain bosses or making improvised ladders out of defused wall mines to get to normally inaccessible spots on the map. It's a game that puts you in the driver's seat and gives you a ton of agency in comparison with a lot of modern games, which are usually much more curated. It doesn't tell you where its secret areas, items and pathways are, but lets you discover them yourself through careful observation of your environment and by paying attention to hints dropped by NPCs. It's the type of game where you can credibly say that no two playthroughs are exactly alike. Deus Ex has a bit of the 'infinite variety' feel of a rogue-like, yet it is also tightly designed and story driven. To illustrate how open and player driven this game is, we can compare it to the later entries in the series, which in my opinion failed to replicate its freedom. Human Revolution, for instance, had context sensitive abilities, something the developers of Deus Ex would have considered unthinkable. In Human Revolution, you would go to a certain spot at which point a huge sign would pop up and tell you "YOU CAN USE THE WALL PUNCH AUGMENTATION HERE (and only here)", whereas Deus Ex simply gave you the Wall Punch (or whatever its equivalent was) and let you do whatever you liked with it. Human Revolution would interrupt the flow of the gameplay with cutscenes that yanked control away from the player and forced them to do harebrained stuff like walk into an ambush or have a long conversation with a villain, whereas Deus Ex allowed you to spot the ambush and shoot the villain in his head before he even had a chance to start his monologue. Human Revolution had quantifiably smaller and less imaginative levels and fewer skills to choose from, and it also merged important, distinctive abilities (like Lockpicking, Hacking and Electronics), resulting in easier gameplay and fewer unique character builds. I don't say all of this to take anything away from HR or the other Deus Ex games, but merely to demonstrate how Deus Ex, despite being the oldest entry in the series, is still the best*. It had a design ethos of absolute freedom that most newer games will do away with to some extent in the service of making everything just slightly more streamlined and accessible. *For newer immersive sims that carry the torch of Deus Ex better than its own sequels, try Dishonored 1 & 2 or Hitman: World Of Assassination. They adhere much closer to the immersive sim philosophy if you ask me. In Deus Ex, the water actually does turn the frogs gay Deus Ex's exquisite gameplay mechanics and design ethos are only half the reason why it's a good game, though. The other half of its success is owed to its magnificent writing and presentation. Deus Ex is quintessential cyberpunk. It takes place in a dystopian future where all possible conspiracy theories, from the Illuminati to Area 51, have turned out to be true, and it constructs a tale around this absurd premise that actually ends up asking some very thought provoking and relevant questions about issues like class struggle, government authority, freedom, tyranny, terrorism, AI, technology and many other political topics. This is another way in which Deus Ex is a better game than its sequels and many modern games: It's completely and utterly unafraid of tackling controversial, hot button issues. Can you imagine releasing a game post covid where one of the main plot points is a manufactured pandemic made in a government lab? One of the myriad reasons getting a (proper) remake of this game seems unlikely is that such topics would simply be too divisive in today's political climate, but Deus Ex, refreshingly, doesn't care (or was simply made in a time where you didn't need to). Its writing is gloriously deranged, funny, real and deep all at the same time. The intelligent and knowledgable writers gave themselves license to include theories and ideas that may be considered in poor taste, fringe or even downright ludicrous, but are still fun to toy around with in a fictional setting, and, astoundigly, ended up coming together in a very cohesive and thought provoking way. It's a far cry from the safe and hamfisted race metaphor that made up Human Revolution's plotline, that's for sure. The game looks and sounds the part of a cyberpunk dystopia too. Despite being old and low-res, the visual design of Deus Ex is very cohesive and convincing. Unlike most far-future cyberpunk settings, it has a degree of realism. Old and new blends together in ways that seem plausible. Run down buildings in New York juxtaposed against futuristic robots and drones patrolling the streets. An augmented agent with blue, mechanical eyes and nano-wiring on the sides of his skull wielding a regular, old school handgun that wouldn't look out of place in the hands of Clint Eastwood. Resistance fighters being hunted by menacing Men-In-Black-like cyborgs in the ancient, medieval catacombs of Paris. In the same way the real world doesn't immediately do away with 'dated' architechture or technology the minute something new comes along, Deus Ex contains plenty of visual elements that look at home in our own timeline, but spices things up with new and interesting things here and there, so that we still have a sense that this universe is fundamentally different than ours. The music has to be mentioned as well. I'm really bad at describing music so I'm not even going to try, I'll just stick to saying that it's really, really good. The UNATCO theme is iconic at this point. In conclusion 10/10. Don't let the dated graphics keep you from playing what is arguably the best game ever made.
Read more