Deus Ex series. Video Games With the Best Stories
Table of Contents
INFORMATION
- Genre: RPG
- What's good beyond the plot: the freedom to choose our own way – we can deal with threats with wit, force or avoid them altogether by sneaking past them.
Before CD Projekt RED decided to tackle the cyberpunk genre, there was only one high-budget SF video game series out there – Deus Ex. Originating back in 2000 under the visionary eye of Warren Spector, the project was inspired by a bleak vision of the future dominated by corporations, an intrigue covering the successive layers of conspiracies hidden within conspiracies and the freedom of approach to solving problems that was beyond anything we've seen at the time – it was up to us whether we wanted to deal with them by force or wit.
So many warm words cannot, unfortunately, be said about the sequel released three years later, titled Invisible War, in which all of the above elements were greatly simplified, making the game much more mediocre. It seemed like the series was done for... until, in 2011, a new studio managed to resurrect its former glory in a prequel. Human Revolution presented the beginnings of a revolution involving cybernetic implants used to modify the human body. The slightly more coldly received but still excellent Mankind Divided took the subject further, presenting a bleak picture of a world in which terrified humanity began to treat people with implants as inferior beings.
The Deus Ex series is all about dense web of intrigues and conspiracies – the entire storyline is based on unravelling subsequent mysteries, and learning one of them usually leads to several others. The strength of the plot, however, lies primarily in a very accurate prediction of the direction in which we are going – towards mega-corporations that are essentially self-governing entities, towards media used by the richest to shape opinions of simple minds, or people being humiliated and treated like cattle because they are different. We see way too many similarities to our reality here for them no to startle us.
