Currently Playing: Deus Ex Mankind Divided
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is set in near-future Prague. That's right, not any American city, but the Central European country Czech Republic's capital, Prague. This is the first of many brave, impressive and exciting choices that the designers of Mankind Divided made. It's a game about apartheid. About terrorism. It's full of stories, from a few lines of overheard incidental dialogue on a street corner to entire, game-length conspiracy quests, about what it truly means to be human.
The Prague setting is arguably the most impressive thing about the game. Prague is a city generally speaking likely to be less familiar to your average player (I'm talking in broad brush strokes here) than the usual digital stomping grounds of New York, San Francisco or Generic Blown-Up Middle Eastern Village Number 5. It's like when Watch Dogs was set in Chicago and there was this huge collective excitement that America had this whole other city that nobody had ever told us about! The Prague setting as imagined in Mankind Divided is a mixture of the old and the new, the traditional and the post-modern, and it has a certain scruffiness, a touch of faded pride and uneasy compliance, which complements the narrative themes nicely. Prague is an ideological war-ground, between Communism, (or Communalism, if you prefer,) rampant, aggressive, predatory Capitalism, and grinding Fascism, with no faction able to really draw the lines between where they end and the others begin. The ordinary people are caught between, small pieces in a puzzle conspiracy much larger than their own lives, trying to navigate between the lines and get by, head down. The "Sympathetic Policewoman," the disgraced pharmacist, the cult leader's distressed father, the semi-robotic hooker, even Alina, the friendly disabled ex-Marine you can chat to in the Interpol base, all have their own variant on the same story. It should make the game repetitive, but it does not. It is testament to the skill of the writers that they can spin so many individual stories out of one core theme, and do so on a scale that tells the stories of the little people in the street whilst ostensibly being a story about the big guns - the Illuminati - at the top.
Speaking of scale, we should take a moment to acknowledge how big HR Prague is. The city has multiple zones, numerous buildings, a massive winding sewer system underneath and various rooftop routes above. This is true 3D thinking; the complexity of designing something this big as a sandbox blows my mind. And within the city, there are large, complex buildings, such as the labyrinthine Palisade Bank, for example, which has nine floors. Most buildings have multiple entrance/exit points and are spread across multiple stories, connected by vents, stairwells, lifts and traversable window-sills, allowing you to plot out stealth routes between vantage points to baffle and beguile your enemies. I played a stealth run, killing only one person in the entire game (I ran out of EMP grenades) and the joy of the game comes from flinging yourself between floors, popping out and mugging people like a vicious Jack-In-The-Box, then disappearing without trace. As their buddies yelp and panic, I sit inside the safe room they thought was secure, reading their personal emails and shotting their whisky.
I haven't finished playing yet (this is "Currently Playing", not "Have Played") but that's more than ok by me. A Deus Ex game is an experience, a master-class in writing and environment and atmosphere. It is always best when it is happening, not when it has happened; I know the ending will be deeply anti-climactic and disappointing, they always are. How can you make a grand denouement out of "You made some choices but the Rich Old White Dudes Who Rule The World TM were maybe one step ahead of you?! [Dun dun duuuuuun!]" You can't. It's not fair or possible. I'll bet money that irritating ol' Eliza Cassan will probably waffle a whole bunch of news items at me and then the end credits will roll and that'll be it until the next game. And that's fine. If we really did get a satisfactory ending, with a good explosion and a car chase and the world being fixed by an angsty hero guy, then the Deus Ex games would be over, and that's not what I want. I want more of these stories of a shiny but bleak future and more of these subtle, intriguing, flawed worlds to explore. Jensen will have to wait a while for answers yet.
