The Stack

I expect I’ll be posting about this game more frequently soon, because I’m catching up to the point where I left off last time. I’ve passed the point where Paul, the brother of player character J. C. Denton, officially turns against UNATCO, and I’m basically at the point where J. C. does so as well — although I haven’t taken the plunge, saving it for a fresh session. Remember the bit I described before, where in my previous go-through I had jumped off a building, because after I got to the top it was suddenly swarming with enemies? Somehow, I had forgotten the plot-significant detail of exactly why it had been suddenly swarming with enemies: on the way up, they had been friends.

I still say that the folks that Paul has thrown in with, the NSF, aren’t much better, at least when it comes to respect for human life. The main thing they have going for them is that they haven’t been responsible for atrocities on the same scale and depth as those of UNATCO and its secret masters, but that’s mainly attributable to the fact that they don’t have as much power. I really want a pox-on-both-your-houses option, and I suspect that one will be provided before too long — I vaguely recall that a mysterious third party helps J. C. out during the upcoming escape sequence. I’ve seen it said that part of the 0451 vibe is that the player character serves as a balancing force between two catastrophic extremes: Ryan’s callous individualism and Lamb’s oppressive collectivism in the Bioshock games, the destructive chaos of the Trickster and the inhuman order of the Mechanists in Thief. I’m not really convinced this applies to Deus Ex, though. The two sides here don’t really seem like opposing ideologies. It’s military-industrial complex vs reactionary militia. That’s just two flavors of conservative warmonger.