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 organizations that would prefer for people to be satisfied with things as they appear.
Deus Ex is set in 2052 and generally follows the genre expectations of cyberpunk, making it just as prescient for our present moment as “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report” and “Ghost in the Shell.” 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 as part of an effort to further subdue an embattled populace, already terrorized by a militarized police force and forced to eke out a living within inhospitable cities.
With our own Covid-19 pandemic and lab leak theories looming large in the rearview, Deus Ex manages to feel more relevant to today’s politics than it did at the turn of the millennium. Fears around the Y2K bug feel quaint next to the rapid-fire list of catastrophes that have descended on us since.
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The post The Open Secret Behind the Shadowy Conspiracies in Deus Ex appeared first on New York Times.
