One of this blog’s repeating themes is how bad I am at stealth games. Patience and spatial awareness are among the things I am least equipped to bring to what I play. Deus Ex: Human Revolution‘s mostly first person infiltration action is very heavy on both. That means that in my hours with it I made it not very far, very slowly. I cannot say very much about how its story progresses, or about the flaws of repetition that some reviews at the time mentioned. I can tell you, though, that I found constant failure enthralling in a rare way.
Some of Human Revolution’s strengths are ones I have seen in other similar games. Its all-encompassing attention to aesthetic goes even beyond that of Hitman games, another series which started with an Eidos-published game in 2000. Human Revolution is a cyberpunk world of technology and surveillance, depicted through a stylish use of orange and black for everything. Augmented main character Adam Jensen, with his long coat and shades and assured monotone, has more than a hint of The Matrix about him.
Looking through his eyes, you get the assistance of an increasing range of technological aids, and the minimalist iconography works as both cool and functional. When you get hurt, colours fuzz out of sync as a reminder that this is a mediated look at the world. Its hacking mini-game is one of the more elegant ones around in both appearance and mechanics. Moving around and interacting with things is a pleasure. The only thing that fails to live up are the blurry pre-rendered cutscenes, which stick out as rather closer to its millennium origins than anything else.
The aesthetics are a real contribution to how it works, but the bigger one is the careful provision of different options. There are always several ways into places, depending on your skills and ability to spot them, and the routes are there to mix and match as much as more or less aggressive approaches are. I soon found myself doing things like sneaking into one entrance, finding a code relevant to another, and backtracking to use it. It all comes with the constant tension of the potential to be caught and turn into a firefight that will likely end in defeat. The resultant freedom to improvise different ways to sneak around and see them work or fail in unexpected ways is great, even when it’s mostly the latter.
More impressive still is how this carries through to dialogue. You choose between different approaches, with options both summarised and provided in full. Other games like Fallout: New Vegas impress with their options but frequently use dialogue boxes as a way to present and process different actions, or at least choose which information to provide. Human Revolution’s feel much more like genuine conversational options, with the potential consequences much less clear and the feel of another tense stand-off as a result. Like the rest of the game, it’s so well-executed that I would have loved to have been able to get to more of it.
Top of the charts for week ending 27 August 2011:
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