For a significant portion of the last 20 hours, Deus Ex has made me inexplicably angry. That might not come as a surprise to anyone who's read my previous posts on the game, but believe it or not, I've been trying to restrain myself, because my feelings towards the game were not reflective of any identifiable property that it might possess. My working theory was that it was a holistic thing - Deus Ex does a good job of making you feel alone and without support, trapped in a desperate situation where you have to carefully marshal your resources and choose your battles in order to have any chance at survival, let alone advancement. I thought that maybe such deliberate gameplay was too at odds with my normal "kick in the door and only halfheartedly aim" approach to shooters. However, I recently played Velvet Assassin, and while it was not at all the sort of game I'd ordinarily choose to play, its survival elements were even more extreme than Deus Ex's, and yet I was not so consistently irritated.
It wasn't until around hour 19 that I finally realized what was bugging me. It's the damned flashlight. It's always been the damned flashlight. Even in Hong Kong, which had the additional problem of being a confusing urban maze, the light levels were a major component of my distaste. It's not that the game is dark. It's that your flashlight uses the same bioelectric energy as your combat implants, so I was subconsciously avoiding its use. All the time I was sneaking around, conserving ammo, or navigating without a map (activities that test my patience even under the best of circumstances), I was doing it while squinting.
I couldn't say why I would do such a thing. It can help me see by focusing light more narrowly, but it can't magically change a pixel from black to white. Honestly, I wasn't even aware I was doing it. Yet that constant, low-level physical discomfort managed to bleed over into my assessment of the game as a whole. It's a phenomenon I've long found fascinating - the mind can transform the meaning and context of feedback from the body when it is uncertain about the feedback's origin, but even so, it's the teensiest bit embarrassing when you notice it happening.
I now have a dilemma. Even though I'm armed with the knowledge of why the game has been making me so cranky, I'm not sure this is a problem willpower alone can solve. Thus I have the perfect excuse to stop playing at 20 hours. However, that would make this the third story-driven rpg in a row I gave up on before the end. I have a feeling that I'm pretty close to finishing the story, and would estimate it as taking no more than 25 hours. Plus I'm kind of interested in how the story will work out.
The thing I'm starting to realize about Deus Ex's story is that, despite the greyness of the environments and the inherent self-seriousness of the cyberpunk genre, it is actually gleefully absurd. Basically, it's set in a world where every half-cocked conspiracy theory is true. I'm working for the Illuminati to stop a conspiracy from within the Illuminati that is orchestrating the UN and the European Union to subvert national governments and impose control by the intellectual elite, using false flag terrorist operations and the secret cure to a deadly disease that they themselves released. Most recently, I explored a cathedral that used to be the headquarters to the secret surviving Knights Templar, where they were paid tribute by the Bilderberg group.
I can't help wondering how tongue-in-cheek this is supposed to be. Played straight, it can be disconcertingly right-wing. The NSF and Silhouette (basically the French version of the NSF) both seem like they're reactionary nationalists whose only redeeming quality is that they oppose the super-evil conspiracy. And the Templar bank is extraordinary for the fact that it uses gold, despite the practice being completely nonsensical in a cyberpunk, post-information economy.
I wouldn't say that Deus Ex has a particularly political slant, but given the nature of its subject matter, maybe it should. The baroque excess of its "all-conspiracy-theories-are-true" mythology screams out for satire, but the studied neutrality of its presentation means that notional satire has no particular target. I'd prefer it if this game were either a little less ridiculous or a whole lot sillier, but I'm still looking forward to seeing how this will all work out.
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