DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION DIRECTOR'S CUT

Fun with robot arms in the self-serious sim.

- Ted Lichfield

As a strongly self-selecting PC gamer, there have been times in my life I've tried to convince myself I didn't like something because it wasn't 'hardcore' or PC enough. For almost a year in high school, I pretended to not like BioWare games - to no one else in particular, just in my own mind palace because I watched a loud man on YouTube say they were quite bad indeed.

I was definitely still feeling that trepidation when I reinstalled the Director's Cut of Human Revolution on my Steam Deck and loaded into its opening sequence. Pre-robotarms protagonist, Adam Jensen, is preparing to go with his ex-girlfriend and current coworker (yikes, that's a bit awkward isn't it?!) on a trip to Washington DC for her to present revolutionary new research on robot arms. Spoilers for a 12-year-old game to follow, but Megan is actually the worst girlfriend in history and has performed indeterminate, surreptitious human experiments on Adam, who in addition to being an ex-SWAT guy who refused to shoot a teenager when ordered to, is also a very special boy, implied to have been grown in a lab, who can take on robot arms and other, assorted augmentations or 'augs' without rejecting them and needing a drip feed of drugs to cope like most of the population.