The DeanBeat: Why Donald Trump should play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus EX: Mankind Divided has been in the works for several years, but its sci-fi plot is a prescient allegory for our U.S. Presidential campaign, where a divisive politician has capitalized on fears of terrorism and people who are not like us. Donald Trump ought to play this game, if only because it holds a mirror to his demagogue’s tactics of using race, religion, and the war on terror for his own personal political gain.

The cyberpunk story plays out the consequences of an incident where a nefarious man decides to divide humanity into two factions. His shadowy organization pits “natural” humans against mechanically augmented humans, or “augs.” In the previous game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the aug hero Adam Jensen tries but fails to stop the “aug incident,” where a signal sent to a chip in every aug’s head compels them to slaughter as many natural humans as possible. More than 50 million people die in a massive genocide before Jensen can stop the signal.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes place in 2029, two years after the incident. Now we have a state of “mechanical apartheid,” where augmented humans are discriminated against and segregated into ghettos like the Jews in Nazi Germany. Jensen is still trying to find out who keeps trying to pin terrorist incidents on innocent augs. Meanwhile, the augs have created their own underground resistance to deal with the oppression of the naturals. All of this is recounted in a 12-minute cinematic that paints the grim state of the world and catches the player up on what happened in the last game.

It is a tale that will remind you of other sci-fi media, such as the Blade Runner film; the I, Robot novels; and the Battlestar Galactica reboot. But it says a lot about the maturity of video games as a medium that a major blockbuster game carries such a relevant message. And it is a warning that if you play with fire, you can start a massive wave of hatred that can bring an unspeakable conflagration to the world. It is a mirror for our own times, indeed.

“We didn’t try to change the story to fit real-world events,” said Oliver Proulx, producer of the game at Eidos Montreal, in an interview with GamesBeat. “The themes we chose just resonate. Cyberpunk helps with that kind of interpretation. Unfortunately, some themes are a bit more prominent today than when we started designing the game.”

Mankind Divided’s story is powerful, and it holds a lot of lessons, if you can survive its numerous flaws and bugs in the gameplay (I sure hope they fix the big ones in the first day patch). I’ve played it for many hours, and these are some of my impressions, and I’ll have more to say later on, once I finish. For now, I’ll focus on why the story pulls you in and compels you to keep playing. This story is what I like most about the game.

Jensen discovers a conspiracy that threatens to bring the world to an all-out civil war. At the outset, he is sent on a mission with a natural human military team to intercept an arms deal. All goes well until a mysterious security force with augmented capabilities shows up and tries to steal the arms shipment. Jensen begins to track down the conspirators. But he is nearly killed in a terrorist bombing at a train station in Prague, where the aug incident took a huge toll and the oppressive backlash against the augs is everywhere. The bombing takes a lot of civilian lives, and calls for revenge and crackdowns ensue.

It’s up to Jensen, who wasn’t affected in the aug incident and who doesn’t take sides, to solve the mystery of who triggered the incident before things get out control again. As he gets his augmentations repaired after the bombing, Jensen learns he has been equipped with some experimental superpowers that will help him with both stealth and combat missions. Jensen has to use his skills in combat, spying, silent movement, and hacking to infiltrate the places where the secrets are held. With each mission completed, he gets more resources to enhance his augs. But it’s all for naught if he can’t stop the conspiracy.

The variety of augmentations add a lot of fun, but they’re also grounded in reality. Jensen can’t use them all the time, as they drain his energy sources. So he can’t just charge into combat every time. Stealth still dominates the gameplay, and that is fitting because Jensen is up against some very powerful politicians, multinational corporations, and criminal organizations. Jensen is a one man army, but across the open world battlefields of Mankind Divided, many more armies stand in his way.

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Jensen also learns that forces within Task Force 29, a global law enforcement group tasked with stopping terrorism, would be perfectly happy to blame the bombing on the Augmented Rights Coalition. Humanity is in the process of dividing into factions of hardline naturals or augs. Scant few peacemakers stay in the middle. Aug technology companies are also competing with each other, and they’re perfectly willing to engage in industrial espionage and private wars to get a competitive edge.

Jensen’s investigation is harder because Mankind Divided has an open world with multiple cities, such as the gritty oppression of Prague and the aug ghetto of Golem City. Jensen can wander about for many hours performing side missions. Some of these underscore ethical dilemmas, as Jensen has to decide who he can help and who he has to sacrifice in the name of his larger mission. I had to skip many of these side missions, but they told me a lot about the collateral damage among ordinary people as a result of the mechanical apartheid.

What emerges is a poignant picture that could really be us in the near future. Victims are everywhere on both sides. Military and police presence are everywhere, and their tactics breed resistance. Surveillance is the norm. Underground hacker communities form their own resistance. Extremists are born in the ghettos. And the rich profiteers create massive corporations and billions of dollars in wealth that they can use to build their own private armies.

At various points in the story Jensen (and you, the player) has to decide what to do. Should he take the non-lethal stealth path, or will he be an avenging angel? Should he do that side mission to reunite a man with his family, or will that cost him valuable time in pursuing the true enemy. Will you walk down that path that makes it easier for a high-level politician to blame terror on innocents? Or will you get to the real truth?

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The trailer for the game starts with a message voiced by Adam Jensen, the “aug” hero of the game. “If you try and rip the world apart, someone will always put it back together. You can kill dreams. You can kill innocents. You can kill freedom. But you can’t kill progress.” That’s an optimistic, perhaps sarcastic view of how the future could turn out. I sure hope we’ll be lucky enough in our real lives to avoid this oppressive nightmare future. If the world comes to its conflagration, we’ll need a lot of Adam Jensens to make things right.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided comes out on Tuesday August 23 on Windows, the PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One. I played it on the Xbox One. I’ll have a formal review of the game by the launch day. I think you should play it in spite of its flaws and bugs. It’s an important game with a message that all of us have to hear, whether we’re running for president or not.