Fractured Reality

Earlier today (or rather yesterday, as it is now) a friend asked me to recommend him a game to play over the Christmas holiday. He hasn't had much time to play in the last couple of years, so there's a large range to choose from. In the end I came up with 3 - Beyond Good & Evil, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and (because he's never played it for very long) Deus Ex. All three are wonderful games - BG&E for its gorgeous graphics and audio, its fresh ideas and general action-adventurey goodness, Sands of Time for the sheer fun of platforming and its clever story-telling technique, and Deus Ex for...

And then I realised something. Since the day I first completed it I have hailed Deus Ex as the best game in existence, but I've never been able to say precisely why. It's the way it transcends genres effortlessly - a feat which so few games even try, let alone succeed in. It's a first person shooter, it's a role-player, it's a story-driven adventure. And while the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts could ever be, each of those parts alone would make a better game than many in their respective genres. And there's more - you can be stealthy, go for all-out assault, snipe from afar...I even know people who've completed the game without killing anyone other than the necessary minimal few.

It's the way I have come back to it again and again since its release 5 and a half years ago, and it never feels old or even remotely dull. The way the title music sends shivers down my spine and each location brings fond smiles as I remember events that occurred and realise I get to do it all over again.

The genre crossover had been done before with System Shock, and it's certainly been done since, but to my mind nothing else has ever achieved that pinnacle of gaming perfection, when everything ties together so tightly that the process of reviewing it is all but impossible. It's like trying to break into a smooth hard sphere - there's no purchase - no clue of where to start. It's at times like this that I give up, and just hand over the CD. If pictures speak more than a thousand words, Deus Ex is a veritable dissertation on all that is right and good about game development. If this is not the game for you, maybe you should consider a new past-time.