Dues Ex
Choice. That, fundamentally, is the purpose of interactivity. 2000’s Deus Ex opens with a simple choice made by the player on an understated wharf on Liberty Island. The rickety wood panels are rendered in graphics that were archaic even when the game was released, but their juxtaposition with the patrolling chicken-legged mech is unsettling even so. If the player’s decision rewards him with a hefty sniper rifle, then protagonist JC Denton will remark that he wishes to “pick them off from a distance.” His response, even if it might not quite fit with the player’s internal thoughts, reflects back upon you nevertheless.
But gosh. Doesn’t every game do that? The contrived moral choice has to have become as typical a back-of-the-box bullet point as “Blast them with a dozen different weapon classes!” Deus Ex’s strength is not that it somehow glimpsed, however momentarily, through the obsidian curtain and involved the strategic decisions of the player in a way that every subsequent game ignored. The strength is that the game is astonishingly clever in roughly eight-hundred different ways and is crafted at every turn such that your input always remains dynamic and satisfying. The moral choices are never black-and-white, they ask you to differentiate between terrorists and freedom fighters, and ask whether an ideological dark-age is worse than an actual one.
Even today the level design is breathtaking. It’s hard enough to craft a linear path through a series of corridors, littered with dozens of locked and barred doors – each impossible gate symbolises a decision the player was never allowed to make. But it’s a whole other kind of challenge to create a series of intertwining paths with their own strengths and weaknesses. Paths which the player can leap between at will, ignore completely, or embrace with a stubborn single-mindedness. Whether you use words, or guns, or non-lethal guns, or computer-hacking skills, or (most impressively) a combination to achieve your goals, Deus Ex leaves you with the feeling that you came up with the solution on your own.