Playing turn of the century classic Deus Ex in the Year of All This 2023 is a bit of a weird time. The gameplay is extremely my shit, but on prolonged exposure I start to wonder if that's actually because, being committed to a multi-approach sneaky-shooty-hacky possibility space, it necessarily cuts down how exacting any of its individual gameplay systems are — it's a jack-of-all-trades, necessarily shallow and forgiving implementation of all of them; I'm bad, so bad, at video games, but its skill demands are yanked down within my reach by its own ambitions. So there's that.
Its 90s, X-Files-esque treatment of "Conspiracies!" as a harmless light entertainment vibe looks...quaintly naive, these days, let's put it that way.
It's extremely funny to me that this thing was ever held up as an example of a smart video game; an erudite one, a literate one. Sure, it's literally got a bunch of stuff to read in it...if you want to, and it's relatively heavyweight reading material, for a video game, being that they didn't write it themselves; but some 14-year-olds read Ayn Rand and I promise they're not the titans of thought they imagine themselves afterwards, either.
The three endings — ascend to personal secret god-emperorhood, hand the world over to one of the established conspiracies, or unplug the internet and (so the game straightfacedly asserts) all global comms, trade, and order will instantly and irrevocably fall over for ever but at least we saved the village by destroying it, chums — are, for a game that's been so often hailed as being smarter than your average video game, extremely...not. They're just not. "Oh no, we blew up the internet, Dark Ages for ever!" lol
And JC Denton is such a bitchy little curmudgeon, isn't he