Of course the game had to end in Area 51. You can't have a game about conspiracy theories and not include the grandaddy of them all. I couldn't tell you why I wound up in Area 51 - the main villain was the head of a corporation and a private citizen, not the US military, and while there were aliens, they were kind of perfunctory. They hung around in the basement being deadly, radioactive guardians, but didn't have much individual character. I got no sense of their culture or personality from my brief, shotgun-heavy interactions with them. In fact, I can't even really be sure they were aliens. It's just as likely that they were simply genetically engineered guard animals that happened to look like aliens. Disappointing.
Towards the end of Area 51, I was offered a choice. Depending on how I approached the final level, I could either destroy the global communications network, ushering in a new dark age of competing city states; kill Bob Page, allowing the Illuminati to take over and rule the world from the shadows; or merge with the Helios AI and become a god-like overseer, directly ruling the world with my new, superhuman intelligence. I picked the third option for two reasons - first, it seemed like the least bad choice for the world at large. The guy pushing the new dark age was a Chinese gangster, who naturally would want a world where he and his cronies didn't have to worry about the law, and the guy who wanted to put the Illuminati in charge basically just wanted to reset the world to its 20th century status quo of competing nations and unaccountable plutocrats. The AI was creepy as hell, but at least it seemed to lack the ego that would doom the other paths to disaster.
My other reason was purely pragmatic. The AI ending was the easiest to pull off. I didn't have to wander around the facility for an hour and half looking for various doo-dads and macguffins to trigger the process. I just had break into a room and then return to a different room. Did I doom humanity with my laziness? Only the sequels will tell.
Since my last post, I've made peace with Deus Ex's light levels. It took some conscious effort, but I was able to relax when I encountered darkness, and grudgingly use my flashlight instead. That had an enormous effect on my mood, and while I'll never fully adore the game's resource management elements, I wound up finishing the story with ammo, bioenergy, and health packs to spare, so maybe I was just being a huge baby about it.
So, how do I sum up my experience with Deus Ex? If I'd played it in 2000, it would have blown my mind. It might not have been as visually stunning or generally well-constructed a game as Majora's Mask (which is what I was playing when this game came out), but the openness and non-linear nature of its levels really is something remarkable. I once compared it unfavorably to Skyrim, but I realize now that was unfair. Skyrim gives you freedom in how you build your character, and that allows a different approach to the dungeons, but those dungeons were mostly fancily-decorated tubes. It took me awhile to appreciate that Deus Ex doesn't do that. There were locked doors I failed to go through, air vents I bypassed, and walls I didn't climb, but if I had, if my collection of augments, chosen skills, or available equipment had been different, I could have unlocked whole new paths through the levels. Deus Ex is one of the few games out there where going from Point A to Point C doesn't necessarily entail going through Point B, and I respect that.
That being said, I'm not eager to revisit this game. It has a rhythm to it that just doesn't jibe with the way I like to play games. Going back and exploring the various side-passages and alternate routes would involve dealing once more with limited supplies, inaccurate shooting, and sudden and unpredictable fragility (seriously, it seems like half the times I reloaded, it was after being taken down by a single rocket or well-placed shot), and that's just not my style. I'm sorry I was so hard on it earlier, due to my own stubborn refusal to engage with the game's mechanics (even if I think "limited light" is a terrible mechanic for a video game), and as I often am when I move out of my comfort zone, I'm glad I gave it a try, but I can't deny that I'm glad to be moving on.
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