Deus Ex: MD - A Transhuman Future

A Rock, Paper, Shotgun editorial waxes philosophical about the transhuman world Adam Jensen lives in, and what it Deus Ex: Mankind Divided says about our own humanity.

Shower scenes seldom Make You Think, unless it’s about what exactly you’re getting for that Premium Netflix subscription, but if anything sticks out for me about the impressive yet oddly unexciting Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [official site], it’s the sight of Adam Jensen washing his hair. Eidos Montreal’s latest presentation begins in Jensen’s new Prague apartment – a casually affluent man-den where you can phone other characters, watch newscasts that track your decisions through the story, answer emails, tinker with crafting resources, and generally get acquainted with the sleek, cadaverous sort-of-human in your charge.

As in Human Revolution, this adds a welcome domestic dimension to a protagonist otherwise defined by his ability to hide from people, sweet-talk them or blow them to pieces. We see Jensen wake, activate his own heads-up display with a groggy command, swing his gleaming kneecaps out of bed and pad across a dim expanse of consumables, standby lights and the Renaissance oil paintings so beloved of Eidos Montreal’s artists. We see him trot into the bathroom and turn on the tap, and for the first time since I laid eyes on Mankind Divided back in early 2015, it feels like all that talk about the precarity of identity in a cybernetic world is coming to a head.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided looks to tick every box its predecessor did, and the streamlining of the relationship between infiltration, exploration and battle is nicely judged thus far, but it’s rather telling that the thing I recall most vividly from my hour or two with the game is that thoughtful spell in the shower. Deus Ex offers up a lavish fiction – the art direction, as ever, brilliantly expresses social tensions in how it melds or bashes together a range of period influences. But it has yet to really capture my attention and rock my preconceptions, whether in terms of how I sneak and shoot, or as regards the overlap between its fraught, messy world and ours.