As a strongly self-selecting PC gamer, there have been times in my life I’ve tried to convince myself I didn’t like something because it wasn’t ‘hardcore’ or PC enough. For almost a year in high school, I pretended to not like BioWare games—to no one else in particular, just in my own mind palace—because I watched a loud man on YouTube say they were quite bad indeed.
So too, more recently, with the Deus Ex series. I played the hell out of Human Revolution, Eidos Montreal’s 2011 prequel/reboot, in high school. I must have rolled credits on it at least twice before ever making it past the halfway point in the OG classic, and yet for a long time I think I’d subconsciously talked myself into looking down my nose at it: too dumbed down, too different. Give me Deus Ex? Yeah, that means Dentons and GEP Guns, I never asked for Jensens or explosive revolvers!
I was definitely still of on my Steam Deck and loaded into its opening sequence. Pre-robot-arms protagonist, Adam Jensen, is preparing to go with his ex-girlfriend and current coworker (yikes, that’s a bit awkward isn’t it?!) on a trip to Washington DC for her to present revolutionary new research on robot arms. Spoilers for a 12-year-old game to follow, but Megan is actually the worst girlfriend in history and has performed indeterminate, surreptitious human experiments on Adam, who in addition to being an ex-SWAT guy who refused to shoot a teenager when ordered to, is also a very special boy, implied to have been grown in a lab, who can take on robot arms and other, assorted augmentations or ‘augs’ without rejecting them and needing a drip feed of drugs to cope like most of the population.
