While in between big releases in the 2024 calendar year I decided to re-experience a game I had played as a young buck. The choice I landed on was one of the best Immersive Sim games I have ever played... Eidos Montreal's 2011 classic.

If you are not very versed in video game terminology, an Immersive Sim is a game that places you in a set of sandbox levels with multiple paths to achieve your objectives and that is played in a first person perspective. Another distinctive characteristic of this genre is the heavy reliance on consequence-based outcomes. They usually are a lot deeper than your standard RPG and really restrict your ability to ignore your responsibilities in favor of gathering tin cans from the neighboring market.

I had started this game as an exploration into how my opinion is morphed by nostalgia. I wanted to see if by playing this game now I would be less enamored by it than I had as a youngling. The conclusion is that strong game design and good art-styles truly never go out of fashion.

Gameplay

One of the defining factors of what makes an immersive sim game great is the way in which you can solve the problems you are faced with. Be it alternative pathways, options to solve conflicts via dialogue, or approaching a given combat encounter in a lethal or non lethal way, a good immersive sim needs to have as many of these options available and having a tangible impact on the outcome.

Deux Ex: Human revolution absolutely nails this characteristic, making tons of different avenues available for your selection pleasure. Skill-unlocked pathways, stealth, player ingenuity and pure brute force are all available for you to choose between... provided you can live with the consequences. Combat is usually the most clunky of them all, suffering from the late 2000s floaty controls syndrome, but it can nonetheless be very efficient if you spec your character towards this.

Stealth feels like the most developed of these alternatives, both in rewards and in associated skill trees. You can hack, you can use obstacles to hide behind and you can even go invisible. The levels provide many alternative routes, both horizontally and vertically, making every successful "Ghost" achievement feel rewarding. I have played the game stealthily and had a great time. I often found plenty of ways to avoid detection, generally making use of verticality to observe enemy patrols and possible side-alleys and executed my conceived plan with satisfying precision.

There are also boss fights which are decently memorable in setting, but hardly memorable in gameplay. Usually the bosses have one gimmick that allows them to feel different to each other, but generally the strategy always remains: hide behind a box and empty your magazines on their chest.

World and Side Quests

These two topics are tightly interwoven because one's quality can easily influence the other. A sandbox needs to be just big enough to host a wide variety of spaces, but also small enough to not feel daunting. Level design also plays a major role in this, as it needs to guide you via an invisible hand to locations of interest.

Gladly, Deus Ex is excellent in this regard. The game has 2 distinct large levels in which it hosts all of its side quests. The complexity of these quests is usually rather small, with them boiling down to accessing a restricted space and interacting or retrieving an object. They are often main-story adjacent both in location and in characters so I think they do the job of flushing out more details in the cities of Detroit and Hengsha.

From a world design point of view, the space carved by the artists and level designers is well-realized and still looks very good to this day, with the slight foggy filter look that's very characteristic to this period. The 3D objects in the world feel believable and present a good amount of polygons, so the act of going back in time to experience a game from 13 years ago did not hurt as much as I thought. Speaks volumes to the timeless design from this time period.

Story

The story approaches a subject that I feel will hit very close to home in 5-10 years time and is already starting to creep in with the Neuralinks of the world. The game plans to explore how augmenting the human body without the proper safeguards can lead to corruption and abuse. I feel the structure of the story is also very well realized, in the sense that the game does not show its hand early and have you be on a wild goose chase.

The twists and turns present here are quite engaging, even though I feel a few of them are a bit loosely wrapped up in the end.

It is a very valid question though: what is biological progress, and what are the costs of achieving it. Corporations will forever seek to cut the corners of safety and legislation in order to gain greater and greater capital, but what could be the costs of underregulated human evolution.

The luster of become more-than-human or achieving immortality is obviously a topic humanity has concerned itself with ever since it's earliest days, but such pursuits can ruin us if not properly kept in check... but by whom should they be kept in check? How can we trust anyone to have the interest of something so vague as "the betterment of the human race" in mind.

The questions stay open, and my guess is that we will find out these answers soon enough.

Conclusion

I must admit, my perception of this game has shifted a little bit since my initial playthrough 10+ years ago. I was too young to understand the complexity of the questions the game asked at that time.

Now though, I can firmly say the story tackles a story that is extremely actual and engaging, and one that I think has been unjustly forgotten from the list of gaming greats. The gameplay and world still stand the test of time, and the hardware requirements are now achievable by even the slimmest of Ultrabooks, so it is my hope that some people dig into this masterpiece even though it is not "new and shiny"