The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Adam Jensen is a murderer.
There, I said it. He’s a complete sociopath asshole. I loved every minute of playing as him. People would accuse of him being just that, and I would just nod my head, and then shoot them. Yep.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an amazing game. It’s flawed in a lot of ways. For example, the hiding and shooting controls on consoles are kind of fucked up! Not so much that you can’t get used to them, but they’re really weird. There are plenty of other little things like that, such as not being able to defeat bosses without murdering them. That particular problem, however, was not a big deal for my Adam Jensen, because he murdered EVERYONE.

It took a few hours of playing before I realized that I was playing a “bad” character for the first time in my entire RPG life. It wasn’t that I wasn’t helping people, or telling people to fuck off. I wasn’t doing that. But in a game with so many non-lethal options, I went out of my way to kill everyone, even when it was not necessary. I would get caught breaking into a house to rob it, and I would murder all the police within a several block radius, and just step over their bodies for the rest of the game like it was nothing. I refused to give a character a weapon so he could survive because I required ALL THE GUNS in order to kill EVERYONE IN THE BUILDING. This was my Adam Jensen. Innocent or not, if you were in any way in my way, you were dying.

Once I realized this, I had fun playing up that persona. I broke into every single office at my place of business and stole everything, even though I was supposed to be the person in charge of making all that happen. I won the completely awesome “social battles,” of course, but I was no longer doing it because I was impassioned or anything. I was doing it purely to manipulate and get what I wanted. In one particular conversation, I bluffed my way into getting information from a guy, and then right after the conversation ended, pulled out a shotgun and shot him in the face. I was doing things in a game I hadn’t done before. It was kind of fantastic and fresh. I am always a goodie-two-shoes, but something about this game really made playing a guy like that, even if just in my head, incredibly fun. Knowing I had so many options, but chose to kill anyway, made it so. Often I’d find the way to sneak by, and then I’d just turn around, slide out of the vent, and start firing randomly until I aggroed everyone. That’s just how my Jensen rolls.

The game really assumes you want to not murder everyone, though. All the dialog in all the various pick-an-endings all involve Jensen saying that he tried to be responsible with his newfound power, which my Jensen TOTALLY DID NOT. I also found a certain mission I went on where I was chosen because I had proven I had the “skills” to get the job done, and then was asked not to kill anyone, really funny. Clearly I didn’t have any skills on NOT killing people. I did complete that mission, but I made sure to knock out all the guys and leave them sleeping face down in a pool of water, because drowning is a “non-lethal takedown,” right?

Even without being a dick, Deus Ex: Human Resources is a fantastic game that you should play if you give a shit at all about RPGs. Again, there are little things that will annoy, but the game often gives you multiple options on how to solve any crisis. You can shoot everyone, like I did, but there are many other ways to go about it too, which is just fantastic. I hope the game gets a good sequel that irons out the bugs. I will play the shit out of that, too.