Yet despite all this, Prague’s old-world qualities and architecture shine through, and there are plenty of moments where you could easily be on a virtual tour rather than in a game. There are checkpoints everywhere, separate security checks for augs and non-augs, and people looking at you suspiciously from the corners of their eyes, wary that you might freak out at any second. Prague is a place where the simmering tensions over augmentations that we’ve seen in previous Deus Ex games have boiled over into paranoia and prejudice. But that era is ending, which is why you’ll see a lot more blues and greys in Prague, as well as heavy, oppressive architecture that’s inspired by brutalism.” “There are still elements of the cyber-renaissance dream, and you’ll see those colours in areas that continue to hold out for augmentations. “The world has changed in Mankind Divided,” she says. The notably colder colour palette and futuristic architectural flourishes of Prague are termed by DeMarle as “corporate brutalism”. It’s a world in which augmented people face discrimination from non-augs following the catastrophic events at the end of Human Revolution, when the Illuminati (that low-hanging fruit of ‘shady organisations’) unleashed a bug causing augs to turn uncontrollably violent.
There’s a symbolic reason for this too, according to the game’s writer Mary DeMarle – the ‘Cyber-Renaissance’ that the golds and blacks represented is under threat in Mankind Divided. Gone is that gold-and-black hue we’ve become used to, and strikingly we actually see normalish daylight (for the first time in the entire series, if memory serves?). The city is identifiably Prague – a mixture of stone buildings and colourful-but-faded facades of old townhouses integrated with the electronic keypads and metallic structures and technologies that we associate with Deus Ex. What makes Prague stand out is that even though it still adheres to that formula, it feels like a real-world city not so far removed from our reality (unlike the oppressively dark, metallic hubs of its predecessors). Each game features several locations that you visit at different points in the plot – all filled with streets, backalleys, sewers, vents, hideouts, apartment complexes and bars. My excitement gauge creeps up from ‘quiet’ to ‘vocal’, as I explore one of the most impressive city hubs I’ve ever seen in a game.ĭeus Ex has always rigorously followed the semi-open-world city hub formula.
As I wander the streets, the progress made in the half-decade since Human Revolution becomes apparent. It’s richly detailed, rife with lore, and brimming with atmosphere. But then the introductory formalities end, and I’m thrown into the city hub of Prague, fully open for exploration.
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