The Stack

And so I’m on to Hell’s Kitchen (or a small fragment of it, anyway), on the west side, just south of Central Park. This is traditionally a poor immigrant neighborhood, and is depicted as such in media, but in reality it’s been mostly gentrified for decades. It even goes by the name “Clinton” now to try to shed the old name’s slummish connotations. I recall the Netflix MCU Daredevil series was set in Hell’s Kitchen (because you basically couldn’t do otherwise, the character is as strongly bound to the place as Batman is to Gotham City), and used the destruction wrought on the city in the first Avengers flick as an excuse for why the neighborhood is back to being as run-down and dangerous as it was in the 1970s. Deus Ex gets the same effect from the general breakdown of American society.

Here, I think I’ve finally given up on trying to save absolutely everyone’s life. I really kept that up longer than I should have; the main reason I kept at it in the Battery Park segment was that Anna Navarre, one of the player character’s pointedly evil cyborg colleagues, kept insisting on congratulating me on losing my inhibitions about killing, and I didn’t want to let her have that satisfaction. ¹Ultimately, it turns out there’s a known bug that sometimes makes her say that even when she shouldn’t. Ah well, I know I’m doing a pacifist run even if she doesn’t. But Hell’s Kitchen has a section where UNATCO is in a shooting war with the NSF, just like Battery Park did, only larger. Holding back every possible casualty there just seems too onerous. I’m still trying to keep anyone from dying because of me, though, even by accident.

It’s a section with good diversity of action, with branching and side-quests and sub-levels. Less than a block away from that shootout, there’s a bar where you can question the locals. Appropriately enough, many of the locals are worried about all the shooting going on nearby. Some of the interiors seems to me a bit more ambitious than the environment models can really support, though: much like in Tomb Raider, the world is built to a scale for action and adventure, not normal human inhabitation.

And below the streets is the secret hideout of the MJ12 troopers with their ridiculous G. I. Joe outfits. As much as the game’s dialogue and in-game reading material aims at being more serious and thought-provoking than your typical circa-2000 FPS, there’s always something to stop the player from taking it too seriously.