Hi – I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided is a game whose narrative faces a real identity crisis on almost every
level.
It's at once a game that pushes itself as fiercely political, yet on the surface seems
to have very little to actually say regarding the issues it so fervently co-opts.
It continues the Deus Ex tradition of taking real world issues to their perhaps logical,
perhaps illogical conclusions, but its methods to make this feel real paradoxically make
it feel less futuristic than the game that preceded it.
One could reasonably expect many things from a Deus Ex game, but I don't think anyone could
have expected something this... safe.
Mankind Divided seems to put many bold ideas out there but can't bring itself to actually
do anything bold with them.
At least, that’s the case for the game’s main story, anyway.
It’s a jagged mess of a narrative that starts off trying less to make any kind of point
about the real life issues and movements it is appropriating, and more just says “augs
might be bad or might be good, I dunno”, and then slowly gives way to a more expected
Deus Ex staple of Illuminati conspiracies and such.
The problem is that not only do the quite literal references to the Illuminati seem
more and more absurd the further away we get from The Matrix, but because by the time the
game clumsily drops the non-story it’s trying to tell about racism and tries to focus on
the bigger conspiracy, it has become too late to resolve either in any kind of satisfactory
way, or even to make any semblance of a point about either.
Especially towards the later parts of the game, Adam feels like he’s constantly trying
to catch up to events outwith his (and therefore the player’s) control and this is partly
due to the fact that Adam’s allegiances are never made particularly clear.
The player rarely feels like they can change anything in this game because they never really
stick with one group of people long enough to affect that change, and the ending’s
sequel-bait not-quite-cliffhanger nature only solidifies this.
It really is a mess, and reeks of the writers sensing the controversy surrounding the whole
“Augs Lives Matter” thing in the marketing and really backing off for fear of angering
any part of the community.
As a result, it can truly say nothing meaningful – perhaps worse, though, it doesn’t give
the player the chance to say anything meaningful either.
Cutscenes that would usually be rife with dialogue choices are now replaced with terrible
pre-rendered fare that looks so disjointed from the in-engine stuff (which, by the way,
looks far better), that it’s confusing on both a mechanical and aesthetic level that
they leaned so heavily on this completely static method of storytelling.
With all of this in mind though, it becomes particularly baffling that nearly every criticism
I have of the main story is nearly perfectly remedied in the side missions.
Whilst the main story feels like it’s treating the player like a baby incapable of making
their own decisions, the side missions truly respect the player’s intelligence and it’s
a welcome change.
These side missions are where I would argue the real game is.
The main story missions suffer from the problem I have with the way, for example, missions
in The Phantom Pain play out – there are multiple tools at your disposal, but every
mission essentially comes down to “you start in one place and you’ve got to get to the
other place, or get the thing from the other place.”
There are many ways in which you can get from one place to the other, for example, but that
core loop never really changes.
In the side missions for example, everything seems far more nuanced.
Whilst I felt the main missions had me stealthing about as a thief or trespasser and not much
else, the side missions often made me feel like more of a detective, for example.
Trying to find the source of Adam’s new augs, pretending to be someone else in order
to extract intelligence from a shady informant, collecting evidence from crime scenes and
deciding the fate of a suspect, these are just some examples of the more sleuth-esque
work Jensen does in these side missions.
They play into the more campy, noire-esque elements of the setting and narrative, and
as such the inherent absurdity of a gruff, blank slate of a man like Jensen waxing philosophical
becomes a lot easier to swallow.
They offer more variety in terms of gameplay for sure, but more importantly I feel, they
take advantage of the game’s world and setting in some really interesting ways.
What I mean by this is that whilst the main story feels so much bigger and messier than
the setting of Prague it predominantly takes place in, the side missions use their smaller
scale as a means to frame their stories against the backdrop of Prague and everything that’s
going on within it.
The main story shows the people affected by its larger, globe-spanning implications, but
that’s all it does – it shows them.
What the side missions allow the player to do is explore the lifestyles of the different
denizens of this world in more depth – getting interesting stories that might not resolve
to any world-altering event, but give the player a better idea of how this world works
for different groups of people.
You explore the inner workings of the different factions of mobsters who are continuing their
criminality despite the witch hunt for augmented people, see how businesses work in this police
state, and also, weirdly, explore more deeply the themes of racism and police militarization
the main story makes gestures towards but quickly drops without saying much of anything
about it.
Not only this, but by reducing the scale of a mission initially, the game can then make
a more significant point about the world more effectively later on – or, I should say,
allows the player to make that point themselves, which is far more effective.
The example of this I would point to is the side mission “The Harvester” (and I’ll
try not to go into too much spoilery detail here for those who haven’t played it) in
which a serial killer has been ripping augmented women apart in a particularly grisly fashion.
Here we see Jensen dealing with an individual witness, an individual so-called ‘scandalmonger’
and an individual police chief, jaded by years of bureaucracy and corruption.
The mission’s story not only goes into more depth about the way police are militarized
in the world, how augmented people are second class citizens and how Jensen’s experience
as a cop affects his relationship with the police, but also sees the player making a
very important choice.
This mission can just end with very little in the way of closure – in making the player
a participant in going down this route, it hammers home a wider point about the subversion
of merely telling the truth, in a world whose media aims to keep its public scared and loyal
to the agenda.
Again, I won’t go into spoilers here, but it takes that initially tacky “wake up sheeple
FOX News is biased!”
angle and turns it into a more meta point about how we crave closure in our narratives,
even if that means that we aren’t getting the whole story.
The world of Mankind Divided constantly assures its public that there’s always a suspect,
always a reason, always an agenda, always closure.
What this and a great deal of the other side missions do, is force the player to confront
the idea that when the truth is involved, these things are almost never a given.
For all the game’s allusions to the masses rising up against corrupt governments and
smashing the state, perhaps the most meaningful and subversive statements the game makes are
those that the player makes as an individual, to an individual.
It’s an old staple on this channel, I know, but as always, by trying to tell a story of
cataclysmic scale, you end up being able to say nothing of note at all due to a lack of
focus.
By reducing the scale of your narrative, by more carefully managing your start and end
point and only featuring the characters most necessary to make your point, you can end
up making a wider, more significant statement about the world those characters inhabit,
and indeed, perhaps, the real world.
I guess, at the end of the day, what I’m saying is, when you’re playing Mankind Divided,
don’t skip the side missions.
They’re where this game is really allowed to shine.
So there you have it, my thoughts on how the main story of Mankind Divided, in terms of
its narrative, absolutely pales in comparison to its side missions.
I might return to Mankind Divided at some point to focus more on nuts and bolts gameplay,
but I feel that the narrative comparison between main and side missions represents a philosophy
that carries over into the gameplay between the two.
Ultimately, enjoyable experience, but one which needed far more careful execution.
And with all of that said, I’d just like to sincerely thank my Patrons (whose names
should be on the screen now) who truly make this show possible and have helped me out
enormously both financially and personally.
If you would like to see your name at the end of a video or get the scripts and soundtracks
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you would consider pledging it would mean a lot to me.
As always, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.