Taking a break from watching fucking awful films in order to prevent my depression brain from simply spinning its wheels deeper in the mud, to instead play Deus Ex for the same purpose. The first one.
I am having the time I usually do with video games, which is to say I enjoyed bits of it, and then it went "well, if you liked that, here's the same thing but harder and tiresome for ages lol" and I'm contemplating putting it the fuck down again.
(This is the...something like the tenth time I have attempted to play Deus Ex? And this time I have got as far as the Paris level, which I believe is a considerable chunk of the way through, and much further than the other times.)
I find it fascinating that the criticisms of DX3's boss fights in the original release — which, exrtremely rarely for me, I managed to play all the way through! And it upset me in a way no other video game has before or since! — can equally validly be levelled at DX1: it promises a bunch of ways to approach things, and does its best to provide avenues for them, until the logic of video game level design says "now put a big fuck-off nails-hard fighty bit!" and if you built your dude to do it sneaky-like: lol, lmao, now we shoot your face off. Wanted to see the rest of the game? lmao!
So, an aside about Deus Ex: Human Revolution —
DX3 upset me because there's a plot bit where your loading-screen-framing-device VTOL gets shot down and your Assigned Recurring Banter NPC pilot can either survive or die the next setpiece, depending whether you built your guy to survive boss fights or to be sneaky-like you fool. And because I go sneaky-type every time, and I suck at shooters, said NPC bit it.
That's not what upset me. What upset me was the subsequent level where you start in an orientalised Hong Kong cyberware chop shop where they rip cyberware out of dead people and black-market sell it on, and lo: Assigned Banter NPC is on the slab because I suck so bad at shooters. And that upset me a little bit, and I had the immediate impulse to go, "Nobody left behind! I failed to save them, but I'm not leaving them to this," and hard on the heels of it I realised without having to investigate that there's...nothing to be done. You can't say to anyone, "BTW, give me my friend's corpse, you fucks," you can't take it out of the level with you, it's just a ragdoll physics prop now. You could ragdoll drag it off and stuff in it a closet, if the level design bothers to provide one, which I can't recall but probably didn't because it's not a bit of the game which calls for Combat Avoidance Affordances.
And that, the knowledge that the designers had got me, that I kinda viewed this NPC as my character's friend, and I'd got them killed and now the game didn't regard that any more deeply than "Oh well! See, here's a physics object representing a narrative branch," and there was this body and I couldn't save that from parts harvesting....
That fucked me up.
I finished DX3, but I didn't really enjoy anything after that point. I was upset and I couldn't...get back into caring about it the same way. Because they'd hurt me. Because reducing a dead friend to meat for corpse-thieves and having my character not even really acknowledge it, just run on rails to the next plot point instead of railing that I wasn't leaving them....
Yeah, me and DX3, we have beef.
...aside: fin.
And! The thing is! You can see the roots of that right there in DX1! There's a hostage situation and patrolly stompbots with interlocking patrol routines in an interconnected space where any disturbance brings, like, four of the fuckers down on you. And my crappily built unoptimiiiiiised character can't bring down even one, because I just haven't managed to hoard the right loadout from previous missions. And I can take advantage of the lol AI to sneak past one and open the door where the hostages are, and the first thing they do is book it, right into the stompbot patrol routine I just gamed, and they get wiped the fuck right out.
And this entire mission has all of, like, three lines of unvoiced dialogue framing it, so I don't care about these NPCs the same way. But you trot back and go, "Well, did all I could," (which is...actually true, yes) and get, like, three more lines of dialogue going, "Oh no! Not your fault. Go to NEXT_PLOT_POINT," and, yeah.
It sure does contextualise DX3 for me, in a way I hadn't been able to see it before, as a graphical facelift and sorely needed UX upgrade and fuck-all else, in over a decade of industry "progress".