Deus Ex: Human Revolution

"It's not the end of the world ... but you can see it from here."
"If you want to make enemies, try to change something."
—Woodrow Wilson (quoted by Adam Jensen)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (formerly Deus Ex 3) is a prequel to Deus Ex developed by Eidos Montreal, that was released on August 23, 2011.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place in the year 2027. Nanotechnological augmentation has yet to be developed, while biomechanical augmentation is state of the art. Human civilization seems to be in a golden age of innovation and advancement, but social tension bubbles under the surface. Corporations are steadily taking power from national governments, and the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. In the middle of all this is Adam Jensen, a private security officer for Sarif Industries, the leading name in human augmentation. Sarif Industries is attacked, leaving Adam severely injured and forced to undergo augmentation himself in order to recover. Adam goes on a mission to discover who it was that attacked Sarif Industries, and why.

In the usual Deus Ex style, Adam stumbles across a web of intrigue and conspiracy, as numerous forces clash for control of humanity's future. Adam's investigations take him from a poverty-stricken Detroit on the brink of collapse to the teeming, two-level Chinese metropolis of Hengsha and even to a cutting edge scientific facility in the Arctic Ocean. Will mankind embrace this technological evolution, as Adam's boss desperately wants to do, or will it retreat into the comforting limits of humanity, as many advocate?

Several members of the original game's writing staff consulted during the development of Human Revolution, but the game is decidedly more of a fast-paced shooter than the original. The age-old Pacifist Run and Stealth Run options are still possible (and players are given achievements for pulling them off), and the characteristic multiple choice quests from the original game return. A run-and-gun kind of player can dispatch a room full of guards with lethal force, a stealthy ninja type can sneak past them and a mechanical whiz can hack enemy turrets and robots and turn them against their masters.

It has a sequel that follows where it leaves off in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

Tropes used in Deus Ex: Human Revolution include:
  • Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: Adam's hands can spin freely. Enemies' heads cannot. Adam can use this to his advantage.
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: In Detroit and Hengsha. They also feature captions on the walls; even a few buildings (including civilian ones) are connected to them by doors.
  • Action Bomb: The Typhoon Explosive System is a cybernetic enhancement that causes you to shoot out bombs in a radius around you; curiously, even though the aug is just about to enter wide production when Adam returns from sick leave, he gets one installed during his Emergency Transformation. The fact that this weapon would be a suicide bomber's dream is commented upon several times in emails you find in the initial level. Since it gets stolen without anyone at Sarif the wiser, Namir's team and the Spec Ops Ogres have it. Not fun.
  • Air Vent Passageway: The videogame version of this trope is played just as straight as in the original. Every building in Detroit is riddled with crouching-Jensen-sized vents, very few of them appearing to do any ventilating. If the Sarif Industries factory is infiltrated via vent, Jensen tells Pritchard he'll be discussing them in his next security review.
    • In one instance, there is a vent that exists only to connect a toilet to an office area. Ew.
    • This is lampshaded at one point in a conversation that can be overheard between two guards: one suggests that maybe they should take steps to secure the airducts, to which the other sarcastically replies that only if they were expecting an attack by midgets or contortionists.
    • Further lampshaded by Pritchard in the first mission. When you go to his office to have your eye augmentations fixed, he asks "What took you so long? Get stuck in an air vent?".
  • AKA-47: The guns are fittingly futuristic, though some like the revolver and shotgun are more clearly based on real world firearms.
  • The Alcatraz: As can be read in the FEMA base, there is a list of known dissidents who will be whisked away at the first sign of trouble to a prison several hundred feet underground, where they will be marched through sterile metal corridors in laser shackles by guards with orders to shoot troublemakers, and crammed into holding pens watched by heavily armed robots. Bleak.
  • Alternate History: The Deus Ex series universe diverged subtly sometime in the second half of the last century, with research in prosthetics advancing much faster due to the work of a few key figures. The Sarif Industries website mentions augmentations being used by the US military in the current conflicts in the Middle East.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Actually a key plot element. There are repeated references in-universe to the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Interpretations of the myth are diametrically opposed.
    • Members of the Illuminati such as Hugh Darrow reference the common knowledge of the myth; the father feeling regret for his son's death due to pride. The Illuminati are thus justified in bringing the chaotic and proud under control for their own good.
    • Their critics believe that they Did Not Do the Research; "Daedalus was an arrogant bastard. The man built a maze of death, and killed his nephew when he thought he might be smarter than him." The Illuminati are simply justifying the murder of innocent people to maintain control of the world - it's hard to bully people stronger than you.
  • Always Night: Played straight in Detroit, played with in Hengsha: though it looks to be around sunset most of the time, it always looks dark in the lower city due to the upper level blocking out most of the light. Averted in Panchaea.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The Illuminati from the first game, when they were still in their prime.
    • Taggart in Panchaea reveals that the Illuminati are so-called at least partially because it's a great way of luring in financiers.
  • And I Must Scream: The Hyron Drones. They don't stop screaming for help; Darrow all but outright says that the horror of what the Hyron involves was why he did what he did. If you pay close attention to the passwords auto-generated by Hyron that you find on pocket secretaries. They're things like "forgotten", "missingme" and so on.
    • In The Missing Link DLC, you take a tour of the "factory floor" for Hyron Drone production. You can administer a lethal dose of morphine to one of the babbling Drones, who's been mentally broken by her transformation.
    • At least some of the crazed augs in Panchaea are still conscious enough to realize they're not in control, screaming at others to get away while they still can.
  • Arab-Israeli Conflict: One of the eBooks scattered in the world, mentiones the formation of a United Arab Front sometime before 2027, followed by a joint Pan-Arab invasion and occupation of Israel. The prequel novel implies that Jaron Namir, one of the enemies in the game, sustained injuries in said conflict and thus became augmented.
  • Arcade Sounds: NPCs will occasionally whip out a portable electronic device and distract themselves with a game on it. Inevitably it produces little beeps and boops. Given that the developer clearly knows how modern games sound, we can chalk this up to The Coconut Effect.
  • Arm Cannon: Barrett has a collapsible minigun built into one of his cyberarms, complete with requisite Ammunition Backpack (although amusingly, his character model lacks an ammo feed belt to connect the two, despite concept art of him depicting one).
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: The pistol has an armor-piercing mod. Somewhat realistically, it doesn't do much more damage against lightly-armoured mooks, but it makes headshots lethal even to heavily armored opponents.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:

Tong: You disappoint me, Jensen. I thought we were friends. But then my hacker goes missing, you break into my place of business, half my men end up dead, and you don't even have the manners to knock when you enter a room.

  • Artificial Limbs: And lots of 'em!
  • Artificial Stupidity: If you're spotted inside an air vent by a guard who is friendly towards you - e.g. in the police station, if you talked your way upstairs - he'll become alarmed and walk over to peer in, weapon drawn. While he's investigating, you can jump out in plain view, rifle through his drawers, pocket any weapons, money or food laying around the room, attempt to start a conversation with him, then crouch and waddle right back in there. He'll announce that he must have been hearing things and return to work.
  • As the Good Book Says...: Ex-Belltower merc Michael Zelazny likes quoting the Bible. When Jensen questions him finding religion, he admits he just thinks it sounds profound.
  • Author Avatar: Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, Player Character Adam Jensen.
  • Awesome but Impractical:
    • The rocket launcher. It takes up half of an unaugmented Jensen's inventory and there's less than a dozen rockets in the game. You're better off getting explosive rounds for the revolver.
    • The Preorder Bonus Grenade Launcher also qualifies. It turns the fight against Namir into a joke, but you only have about 20 shots of it for the entirety of the game, and you only gain it as a reward for rescuing Tong's son, very late into the game. And if you're playing on The Director's Cut, then you'll have to slog through the entire DLC mission with it taking up 1/4th of your now-downgraded inventory space and being completely useless since you won't get any ammo for it until you reach the main game again.
    • The Burst Round System upgrade for the shotgun is reasonably effective against bosses, but other than that it doesn't do much for the player: Each of the bosses have a weakness that can bring them down with less effort, the weapon as a whole is only useful against unarmored enemies, and they'll almost always go down with just one shot within the weapon's effective range, so all you'll really be doing by using the upgrade is effectively cutting your ammo capacity in half. The upgrade can be turned on and off though.
    • The invisibility augment, even when upgraded, still eats batteries alive. Other than being able to deck an entire room of people, this augment is really the only reason one would upgrade to five batteries. On a stealth game play, you really only need one or two to slip Adam past guards unnoticed.
    • Lethal Takedowns. Too loud for stealth run, too lethal for pacifist run, rarely useful if you just shoot people and they take longer to perform. But damn they look cool.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: All kinds of stuff. For example, as mentioned above, the standard 10mm pistol, which you can get about two minutes into the intro mission, can be upgraded with a silencer, laser sight, and armor-piercing. Only bosses are immune to a instantly lethal headshot from it, and ammo is plentiful and cheap if you happen to run out.
    • A number of augments are only useful in specific circumstances, but if you combine the rapid self-recharging battery upgrade with a fully enhanced cloaking system, you can dodge between cover without ever being seen, and the most you'll have to wait to use it again is 20 seconds (a relatively short time, since patrols are predictable).
  • Axe Crazy: Most of the Tyrants qualify, but Quincy Durant from the comic series puts them all to shame.
  • Badass: Jensen seems to be a sort of distillation of every Badass trope out there. Badass Longcoat? Check. Cool Shades? Check. Badass Beard? Check. Deep, awesome voice? Yep! Cyborg? Check. Forearm blades? Better believe it!
  • Badass Israeli:
    • Jaron Namir, "The Snake", leader and most powerful of The Tyrants. The fight against him is practically impossible if you made the mistake of getting yourself an upgraded biochip, as you have to face an invisible, extremely powerful, agile and durable opponent while suffering from a massive Interface Screw and with none of augmentations working. Which in this game, makes you a slow, incredibly fragile, effectively blind cripple who can't aim and doesn't even have a HUD. Apparently, this is a rather common situation, as Israel has been destroyed and conquered by a conglomeration of Islamic nations (including Palestine). All surviving Israelis are extremely violent badass guerrilla veterans.
    • Netanya Meitner from The Missing Link DLC, who gets in a brief firefight and manages to take down half a squadron of trained soldiers and lives long enough to talk with Jensen for a while.
  • Badass Longcoat: Adam wears one whenever he's not decked out in combat gear—with a floral print on the back of the shoulders. According to one pedestrian, it's apparently even made of real leather (based on her tone of voice, it's implied that this is a significant luxury).
    • It's even fashionably functional: according to this post on the official Tumblr page, the holes on his longcoat magnetically attach themselves to the typhoon ports and blade slits, allowing him to stab adversaries to death stylishly or blow them up without having to worry about the condition of his suit.
    • The Coats Are Off: When he's on a serious mission, he takes off the jacket to reveal a sleeveless combat vest.
  • Ballistic Discount: Some NPC characters in the game will demand you pay them off or do something for an item or money (i.e. Brian Tindall or Anonymous X). You can, instead, just shoot them (or punch them out) and take what you want off their bodies. The trope is notably averted, however, with Chuanli, who (honestly) tells you he doesn't have the information regarding a captive prostitute's location on him. While it's possible to pay him, get the information, then punch him out and get the money back, story-wise if you punch him out without going through all of that nonsense you're done screwed.
  • Barrier-Busting Blow: Upgrading Adam's cyberarms in a certain way will allow him to punch through a wall to break a mook's neck. Two of the game's trailers featured shots of him doing exactly that.
  • Benevolent Architecture: To facilitate the game's stealth and combat, the environments feature a lot of waist high objects for cover and ventilation shafts for sneaking around. And for the occasional open area, you can grab and move the nearest heavy object to make your own cover, provided you've upgraded your strength enough.
  • Big Brother Is Watching:
    • Tai Yong Medical keeps extremely tight tabs on their employees. They even restrict the number of emails allowed in someone's inbox to four (including the notification email that your email inbox is getting full!) and require any user to submit a request to the database administrator to access archived emails, all to keep track of interoffice communications to catch dissent.
    • There are many security cameras in the game. A cutscene zooms at one, and it is labeled "Big Bro".
  • Big Damn Heroes: A group of Belltower soldiers hired by the pro-Western faction of the Australian Civil War attacks a pro-Chinese faction base and happen to rescue a missing pro-Western MP (part of the same people that hired those troops). They then haul him off alongside all the prisoners to Rifleman Bank Station. Belltower shows us how this trope is subverted.
  • Bilingual Bonus:
    • If you speak Mandarin Chinese, you can listen in on all the coincidental conversations in Hengsha (without having to turn subtitles on, anyway). If you can read Mandarin Chinese, the graffiti and posters and such can be entertaining, especially the ones that are incorrectly translated (note the characters used for "Hengsha Post"), as well.
    • In Montreal, there are e-mails to be found written entirely in French with no provided translation. They're about a man who wants to know who took his chair, movie night about a horribly dubbed French-Canadian film that the English-only speaks won't understand very well, and a man telling a co-worker his doubts about the role of Picus in manipulating the news. You can read another email in English, from the employee that he was confiding in reporting the conversation to their superior, making this a literal invocation of the trope.
    • Also, the Δ in the Lucky Charms Title? Not a triangle. It's a delta, symbol of the Greek inventor and architect Daedalus.
    • The structure that connects Lower and Upper Hensha is called The Pangu. Pangu was a figure in the Chinese creation myth who separated the heaven and the earth.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Arguably, if the Taggart and the Destroy Panchaea endings have any foundation with canon, these are it. Jensen hopes that the Illumanti will be able to lead humanity into a brighter future with the first ending, and in the second, he hopes that the destruction of Panchaea and keeping the truth of what happened there will allow humanity to make it's own decisions on matters in the world, and lead to a better future. Fast forward 25 years later... Also, by itself, the Destroy Panchaea ending has this too, as everyone on board the station dies.
  • Black Mesa Commute: The walk though Sarif Industries with Megan.
  • Blade Below the Shoulder: Adam's cyberarms sport a pair of retractable blades that can pop out of his wrists or the backs of his elbows, allowing him to stab enemies to death stylishly.
  • Bling Bling Bang: A weird variant: there are augmented gangbangers with artificial arms that are painted bright yellow, either to show off or as some kind of ultra-modern gang tattoo.
  • Body Horror: Mech augmentations are a lot less sophisticated and more alien than nano-augs. In most cases they're no more squickier than a prosthetic limb, but some of the more extreme examples (noteably Namir and the Hyron) are downright horror show. The game also implies the voluntary amputation of perfectly well-functioning limbs. To take this one step further, Sarif, using a convenient clause in Adam's employment contract, has Adam's legs and right arm removed without Adam's consent when it was completely unnecessary.
  • Booby Trap: Mines are frequently placed where mooks aren't. Including right under the dead body of one of your own security team, triggered by picking up the suspiciously convenient Praxis kit next to it.
  • Book Ends: The first interaction between the main character and the Spec Ops mercenaries is an unmodified Adam Jensen, head of security, being shoved through a pane of glass by the heavily augmented merc leader in the labs of Jensen's employer. The last is that same mercenary leader wearing a bodysuit looking like the natural human musculature being thrown through a glass pane by Jensen, now brimming with augmetics himself. This happens when Jensen assaults the Omega Ranch laboratories operated by the mercs' employers.
  • Booze-Based Buff: Downing enough alcohol and painkillers allows you to potentially double your maximum health, although anything above 100 will not be recovered by your Healing Factor. Drinking alcohol also disorients Adam's vision for a short time: the stronger the drink, the worse the disorientation, and the longer it lasts. Beer? He shrugs it off. Vodka? Hopefully you won't need to aim at anything until it wears off.
  • Boring Yet Practical: When properly upgraded, the Zenith 10mm Pistol makes as much noise as the tranquilizer rifle, holds nearly two dozen rounds, is armor piercing, has a laser sight that lets it function as a poor man's sniper rifle (as well as allowing for easy aiming when running/gunning), uses some of the most common/cheap ammo in the game, and can be loaded down with other generic mods. For a Jensen who's not afraid to pop heads off, it can and will easily carry you through any situation outside of heavy mechs.
  • Boss Banter: All the bosses have a multitude of stuff to say, except Fedorova, who doesn't speak at all. For her fight, though, there's another character providing commentary for the fight.
  • Boxing Lessons for Superman: In order to learn how to control his new cybernetic limbs, Adam learns how to make and repair clocks.
  • Brain-Computer Interface: In the first mission Adam encounters a so-called "Purist" hacker with some cerebral wetware plugged into the terminal.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: Gamestop and Impulse preorders give you the ability to purchase AUDs (Automatic Unlocking Devices) - disposable, one-use gadgets that allow you to crack any keypad or computer, regardless of the skill required to hack it. Bonus weapons (from most other retailers) that take the bigger part of your limited backpack during the first mission are less egregious, while everyone that preordered also gets 10k credits. Both sets of bonuses can also now be purchased from your DLC provider of choice (Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network).
  • Bring Me My Brown Pants: During a firefight in public, cowering civilians may mention how they need new shorts.
  • Brought Down To Factory Zero: In The Missing Link DLC, Adam's augmentations are reset to default, though you can collect Praxis points to reactivate a number of them. An extremely temporary (and much more disorienting) version occurs if Adam chooses to upgrade his biochip; his augmentations are completely unusable. Including his HUD.
  • Call Forward: Oh so very many. Just to name a few:
    • A street preacher in Detroit will mention bad things to come that are "grey and deadly", and a mention of 12 kings. The Grey Death was a pandemic in the original game, and the organization that was fought against was Majestic 12.
    • The game begins with a look at a statue, followed by Bob Page engaging in conspiratorial conversation.
    • An e-book in an apartment predicts the rise of nano-augmentation in roughly thirty years (HR is set in 2027, the original was set in 2052). In the convention center, advertisements can be seen regarding the development of nanoaugmentation.
    • An email from a paranoid woman saying how a certain Philip Mead is trying to get votes in a major election. Guess who's in the White House in the original game?
    • A secession group called the New Sons of Freedom, or the NSF.
      • In the original Deus Ex, NSF stood for National Secessionist Front.
        • It had already been through one name change and kept the initials.
    • It is possible for your pilot to die in the game.
    • There is a character in both the original and HR who will be under attack, and will tell you to save yourself. You can listen to them, and they'll end up dying, or you can stay behind to save their life.
    • An NPC will question your decision on wearing sunglasses out at night.
    • Joseph Manderley is responsible for covering up key evidence from the Sarif attack and the Milwaukee incident.
    • Versalife is a manufacturer of the drug neuropozyne. They're also stated to be working on nanotechnology for medicinal purposes.
    • Page Industries is mentioned.
    • One of the researchers at Omega Ranch says in an email that he's started naming the babies they're genetically modifying to accept nano-augmentation after the apostles... Paul?
    • Several emails written by people with cyberlimbs, including powerful, well-educated people, are riddled with typos (much like Gunther's similarly misspelled emails from the first game), the implication being a lack of feedback, or simple inexperience with augmented limbs, when it comes to finer tasks such as typing.
    • FEMA is being used for shady activities.
    • A random Pedestrian whistles the first few notes of the "Deus Ex Theme".
    • The radios in the game regularly play music from the original Deus Ex, including the UNATCO, Hell's Kitchen and Battery Park themes.
    • When Marik takes off from the Detroit factory the camera movement is identical to how Jock's helicopter takes off.
    • A tidbit of news seen on the TV will mention the sales of orange and lemon-lime soda.
    • A security guard at Tai Yong Medical will mention how another guard joked about getting the wrong soda from a vending machine.
    • A few notes from the Sarif Office theme in the prologue mission is from the UNATCO music. Example here (starts around 2:20).
    • There is mention of "Germans" working on a Skull-gun and gun enthusiasts' magazine carries an article titled "Skull Guns and Other Implanted Weaponry".
    • A newspaper article mentions plans to create a special UN branch to combat growing international terrorism.
    • The keycode for David Sarif's private elevator is 0451, which was also the keycode for the UNATCO storage shed, and continues the tradition it inherited from the System Shock duology of (0)451 being the first numerical keycode you have to enter in the game.
    • The area surrounding the hero's workplace starts out under attack, with hostages involved.
    • For the first real mission, the hero is asked which weapon he would prefer, each weapon supporting a different playstyle.
    • People are smuggling things out of the hero's workplace.
    • The first large area is a city in the USA with a very run-down slum that Adam has to go through, complete with big sewers and a lot of diseased bums. The enemies in this area put explosives at strategic points and have people on rooftops. There is a storage area that can be broken into, and a secret underground government base nearby.
      • And one of the gun smugglers you can find in the area is black and wearing a hoodie and sunglasses. The rescue of someone leads to him giving a discount.
    • The second large area is a city off the coast of China, where the protagonist must go to a nightclub and contact someone with ties to The Triads and the Tongs, as well as investigate a specific floor of a penthouse. The hero must also infiltrate a bio-corporation and comes into conflict with a Dragon Lady.
      • In this Chinese city, there is an optional conversation about the corruption of Western governments.
    • At some point, you will visit a major city where many people speak French. This French-speaking city is where the hero starts to really converse with AI.
    • A detective will greet you with a "in the flesh".
    • In Montreal, you visit a secret underground lair that contains both the Illuminati logo on a hallway as well as a statue of the MJ-12 logo.
    • Morgan Everett is the CEO of Picus TV and Elizabeth DuClare is a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization.
      • Lucius DeBeers is also apparently pestering Sarif to join the Illuminati to the point where Sarif has left explicit instructions for his secretary to ignore his calls, and he may also be one of the people Page talks to in the opening cinematic.
    • Two of the achievements are named "Cloak & Daggers" and "Smash the State", the first of which was a passphrase and the latter of which was an NSF password.
    • Tong's son is seen boarding a ship named "The Tracer", and his intention is to go to Hong Kong. It's Tracer Tong.
      • Adam also gives Tong Junior a bit of advice that he promises to remember. It's a paraphrase of a line in the first game.
    • The "Taggert's Message" ending shows Adam walking into an office with a man who looks a lot like Joseph Manderley, suggesting he becomes the first UNATCO agent.
    • The biochip is a clear precursor to the mech-aug killphrases and the nano-aug killswitches.
    • The basis of the conspiracy is to give people an affliction so that they will become dependent on a product which the conspiracy conveniently provides.
    • When Taggart and Sarif give their requests to Jensen on what to broadcast, just before leaving them, Jensen simply says, "I'll think about it", just like JC would 25 years later in Area 51.
    • A subtle one, there is an area in Hengsha that closely resembles the canal area in Wan Chai, even down to two police men standing off to one side, one warning the player that tourists better watch out away from the main areas, and the other not speaking English. Possibly not intended.
    • One of the items in the news ticker mentions a film named Invisible War shattering box office records.
    • The Missing Link features a young Gary Savage involved with the Hyron Project.
    • Near-miss: "That's a shame."
    • Scoring a hoop on a basketball court in a rough area of town earns the player some secret congratulations.
    • A Dr. Jankowski works in the LIMB clinic in Detroit.
    • An unseen worker on Panchea is named JC.
    • At the end of the game, talking to Taggart will have him mention that supporting him will eventually lead to a reorganized UN that would be able to combat issues such as terrorism. This could be a possible hint that Taggart's ending is the canon one.
  • Canada Eh: Picus' HQ is located in Montreal. Coincidentally, it's also the Illuminati's main hub of operations.
  • Cassandra Truth:
    • Lazarus is bombastic and abrasive, but completing the game will reveal that he had a lot of good points.
    • Invoked by Taggart in Panchaea, mentioning how no one would believe an 18th Century conspiracy theory like the Illuminati.
  • Chekhov's Armory: The Black Mesa Commute in the game's prologue. Almost everything mentioned and everyone met turns out to be important: the four scientists Megan speaks to are the other ones who are kidnapped (including Sevchenko's arm), the Typhoon is showcased to a military inspector, Pritchard is met and can be heard discussing the scientist's GPL implants, Jensen can read a little bit about Patient X, Malik does a flyby, Sarif mentions Hugh Darrow, not to mention getting glimpses of the three Must-Kill Bosses in the game. Not to mention the Typhoon prototype gets implanted in Jensen within hours, though it isn't switched on for at least six months.
  • Chekhov's News: News reports early on prominently mention Hugh Darrow's Panchaea project, which turns out to be The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. And additionally, the newsreader narrating those reports turns out to be a Chekhov's Gunman.
  • China Takes Over the World: With the game being a prequel, this trope isn't yet in full effect like it is in the original. However, China is considered to be the most powerful country in the world by a number of people, and openly defying the United Nations, in contrast to much of the world, though it's hinted that the Chinese are under direct control of the Illuminati but otherwise left to their own devices. It helps as well that the influential corporation Tai Yong Medical is buying out many other corporations all over the world with the assistance of Illuminati mercs blowing the hell out of anyone who doesn't sell.
  • Choke Holds: One of the non-lethal take downs.
  • City Noir: Detroit is quite noir, but it has nothing on Hengsha - a true urban planning nightmare that would make an oil rig look like the Taj Mahal by comparison.
  • Classical Mythology: Being a Deus Ex game taking influence from the Renaissance, many references to this are to be expected. Specifically, Adam Jensen as Icarus in the trailer, representing a humanity that has exceeded its reach.
    • Sarif can be seen as Daedalus: his company's logo contains a wing and he often calls Jensen (the Icarus analogue) "son".
      • As an extra joke, Sarif's main antagonist is Tai Yong Medical (taiyang is Mandarin for "sun").
    • An alternative explanation has been going around for the Icarus symbology: Icarus in the Greek legend grew too enamored of his wings, and attemped to reach Apollo's chariot; it was the reckless use of technology that killed Icarus, while his father Daedalus with the exact same wings made it to their destination by being careful. Thus, it's not so much "exceeding his grasp" but the 'reckless use of technology"; which has happened quite often in history.
      • Yet another alternative is proposed by supporters of augmentation technology - "Daedalus was an arrogant bastard. The man built a maze of death, and killed his nephew when he thought he might be smarter than him." - the possibility that Daedalus murdered his own son for attempting to surpass him, no different from any empire eliminating a threat to its authority.
    • In the battle with Zhao, she attaches herself to the Hyron Project quantum computer, and the interface cables resemble wings. She realizes she can't handle the Hyron's power, and when Adam shoots her she burns up like Icarus.
    • Sarif could also be a reference to a Seraph, the highest choir of angels in Christian theology and thus the closest to God. Seraphim are associated with a cleansing and illuminating fire borne of charity. This fire motif overlaps nicely with the role of fire in Greek myth of Prometheus. Sarif seeks to use the proverbial fire of the gods to create a golden age for humanity by making augmentation available to everyone. The wing on the Sarif Industries logo may be an angel wing made of six lines to denote the six wings of a Sariph.
    • Picus News is named after Picus, a Roman god of agriculture who discovered of the uses of manure. Basically, the company is named after the lord of bullshit.
  • The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Hugh Darrow, the inventor of neural augmentations, can't use them.
  • Color Wash: The art style is meant to evoke a Renaissance theme, extending from the neo-Baroque visual aesthetic, to the yellow-black colour palette (which in itself is symbolic- the yellow represents the rapid advancements and enthusiasm, a willingness to take humanity to new heights, the black representing the conspiracy and chaos of the time).
  • Combat Pragmatist:
  • Comic Book Adaptation: A promotional Prequel miniseries was released by DC Comics.
  • Coming in Hot:
    • Your heroic journey to Panchaea is hilariously waylaid by the only mundane equipment malfunction to occur in a game that's otherwise packed to the brim with amazing (and infallible) technology.
    • Also quoted word for word by Malik when your second trip to Hengsha is interrupted mid-flight by a Surface-to-Air EMP.
  • Concealment Equals Cover: It doesn't matter if your arm is sticking out around the edge of whatever you're hiding behind; unless you actively glance around the corner, you'll remain hidden.
  • The Conspiracy: Wouldn't be a Deus Ex game without one!
  • Continuity Porn: Oh, Lord, in spades. You'll see references to all of the major players in the original. One clever moment is Tong's son escaping on a boat called The Tracer. Subtle.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Barrett and Fedorova can counter your takedowns. Namir seems to be the same way at first unless you time it just right.
  • Cool Shades: Adam's retractable, skull-mounted sunglasses. Everyone makes fun of them, but they're actually industrial sapphire... part of his defensive augs. Honest!
  • Coolest Club Ever: The Hive.
  • Cores and Turrets Boss: The Hyron Core, although the "cores" are human women.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Sarif counts as the extremely downplayed version of this trope; he's not a bad guy, he just likes to cut corners on the moral circuit, so to speak. Zhao Yun Ru, on the other hand, plays this trope straight.
  • Cosmetically Advanced Prequel: Human Revolution compared to the original Deus Ex. The technology of Deus Ex looks much like the late 90's/early 00's with more advanced-looking computer terminals. Human Revolution is set 25 years before, and looks far more advanced. Eidos Montreal Handwaved this by saying that the game is set shortly before the nasty economic and social collapse seen in the original Deus Ex, which was responsible for a regression in technology.
    • When one of the devs happened to run into Warren Spector and mention this problem, the latter pointed out that most of the original game took place in slums and run down areas so it wouldn't be that implausible for all that tech to exist in the "background". Make of that what you will.
    • Additionally a lot of the tech in the original Deus Ex, in spite of being set in the future, already looks retro by today's standards.
    • It's not true of all the technology shown, though. For example, the GEP gun in Deus Ex is far more advanced than the bulky rocket launcher in Human Revolution. Also, Human Revolution doesn't have multitools to automatically hack cameras, electronic locks and alarm panels, you have to do it manually.
    • The more run-down and neglected sections of Detroit, however, also wouldn't look out of place in the original Deus Ex. Largely because they're already in a sense, a taste of things to come.
  • Cover Drop: If you choose to blow up the entire station at the end of the game, you don't actually see Adam exploding, but you do see triangular shards of glass floating in the water briefly, just like the ones on the cover. At this point you realize that the cover is showing the station blowing up.
  • Crapsack World: Mass rioting, political instability, corporate corruption; all the conditions that made martial law necessary in the original Deus Ex are shown here. And remember, this is a prequel, so it only gets worse from here...
  • Crate Expectations: Averted as the crates are have nothing in them, and quite unexpectedly considering how ridiculously straight the trope had been played in the original game. Crates, however, are still very important in that they can be used in... rather creative ways. See Violation of Common Sense below. Most crates have "Do Not Destroy" written on them.
  • Crazy Prepared: Subverted in the final boss fight. Zhao chides your attempts to destroy the Hyron core, claiming that "there are too many contingencies built into the system." Turns out there weren't enough.
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right:
    • Players may find an e-book called 'The Sleepwalking World' that has apparently been written by conspiracy theorists and lists several famous diseases together with rather outlandish theories (e.g. that SARS was meant to depopulate Hong Kong). The text ends with a prediction that in near future someone will try to vie for power using artificial worldwide epidemic. Cue Gray Death. Not to mention that many of the shady organizations "cited", including the Illuminati are one and the same.
    • In a similar vein, crazy prophet in your second visit in Detroit prophesizes that a "gray and deadly" plague will come on the backs of 12 kings... cue Majestic 12.
    • Lazarus may be a raving lunatic but some of his predictions eerily echo plot points of the original game...
  • Cursed with Awesome: Adam frequently insists that he didn't ask for his augmentation, even though he's able to turn invisible, punch through walls, contain two retractable swords from each arm and mentally deploy sunglasses from his face to name a few. However, it's also possible to play him as either very supportive of his augs or, while he still never asked for them, admitting that they're pretty effective.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: Whether or not the player knocked out a hundred guards while sneaking into the FEMA base without raising an alarm, Adam will still allow Barrett to loudly lumber up behind him and punch him in the face once he reaches the loading bay.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max: When your first boss blows himself up, Jensen is able to escape the explosion despite being only a few feet away. In the cutscene just before the final boss battle, Adam somehow manages to outrun turret fire. See for yourself.
  • Cutting the Knot:
    • During the sidequest regarding Brian Tindell's dealing of stolen Neuropozyne, you could do what he wants and take out the drug dealers. Or you could use a CASIE mod to talk him into giving you the footage. Or you can just punch him in the face and take the footage off of his unconscious body.
    • Punching people to get important things (Security footage, Club Membership cards, your money back, etc) becomes something of a theme.
  • Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: According to the prequel comic, one of the primary reasons for the opposition to augmentation is due to the potentially dangerous psychological disorders some augmented people develop (though this is more due to the nasty side effects of the anti-rejection drugs they have to take than the augs themselves). In-game literature that discusses augmentations and mental disorders concludes that augs would likely only destabilize already disturbed individuals (with an additional fairly amusing Take That at the idea that video games turn normal people into psychopaths). However, Adam himself seems to question his own humanity quite frequently after getting augmented.
    • Human purist Zeke Sanders was formerly augmented with a cybereye, but he removed it when he believed it was causing him to go crazy.
    • This theme extends to the character design, too - Barrett and Fedorova have both been heavily augmented to the point of looking inhuman, and they act accordingly, showing an obvious lust for violence. Of course, the prequel book solidifies their inhumanity is more personality based from before they were augmented.
    • Empathized by Namir, when you face him; he wears a rubber bodysuit over his augmentations - the pattern on the outside of the bodysuit is the human musculature. Even though augmented, he's a walking anatomy model.
    • Averted with Gunther in Icarus Effect: it's made quite clear that he was a psycho before his augumentations.
    • There are also more subtle notions of this trope. It is heavily implied that cybernetic implants can be controlled externally and they actually are meant to control the general public (paranoia-inducing in its own right), using biomechanic implants makes the user dependent on patented drug Neuropozyne and many augmented people consider themselves better form of evolution and look down upon 'purebloods' forming an artificial prejudice.
    • The game zig-zags this trope. During the conversation between Adam and Radford and after making 'humane' choices Adam points out that he has more metal than flesh, but it is his behaviour that determines his humanity. Also a woman speaking to a small crowd tells her story about purity fanatics and points out that 'humanity can be only a front'.
      • In the endings, Adam muses on whether or not augmentations are naturally detrimental to healthy human interaction. His conclusion is based both on the ending you choose, and the choices you've made. Kill a lot of people, and he essentially says that humanity is overrated. Run through as principally pacifist, and he muses that his humanity hasn't weakened despite the loss of his body. Do a mixture of both, and he'll paint himself as a moral question mark.
  • Cyberpunk: The Deus Ex series as a whole crosses between this and Post Cyber Punk, depending on the time period. Human Revolution leans towards "traditional" cyberpunk, with its noir-style story of corporate conspiracies and four endings that all eventually lead to the events of the original game one way or the other. There are some very heavily Post Cyber Punk themes in the game's plot, however. Traditional Cyberpunk portrays technological advancement and unregulated free markets as leading to the destruction of liberty. Human Revolution does precisely the opposite; the game portrays the anti-regulation advocate David Sarif as a sincere transhumanist who genuinely believes in making augmentation widely accessible, his company develops a way to make augmentation substantially cheaper through removing dependence on the expensive anti-rejection drug Neuropozyne, and the advocates of augmentation regulation are part of a worldwide conspiracy bent on global domination; technological advancement and unregulated markets are thus portrayed as a threat to those in power rather than as methods by which the powerful maintain their position.
  • Dawn of an Era: Deconstructed. The promise of a golden age is shown to be a facade for what really transpires as the next chapter of human history, ultimately culminating in the original Deus Ex.
  • Daylight Horror: Panchaea, in spades.
  • Deadpan Snarker:

O'Malley: Were you followed?
Jensen: Yeah, by a clown and a midget for a while. But they eventually met the bearded woman they were looking for near a coffee shop and we went our seperate ways.

  • Decade Dissonance: Detroit is this in spades. With the gleaming towers and futuristic infrastructure, both of which strongly tied to Sarif Industries' investments into the city, clashing with more run-down, grimy neighborhoods that still seem trapped in the 20th Century.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: The game strongly emphasizes a saturated golden monochrome, with accompanying reds and greens. It's an obvious visual nod the Film Noir genre, the "golden age" of the setting and Leonardo Da Vinci's sfumato style.
    • In what seems to be a subtle, but possibly unintentional Take That, the developers claim they intentionally tried to avoid using purple anywhere in the game. Purple is considered by series fans to be the signature color of Invisible War.
    • The game's designers seem to have deliberately lampeshaded this: all the cans of paint you see in this game are yellow.
  • Despair Event Horizon: This is what helped drive Hugh Darrow into ultimately setting off what happens in Panchaea.
  • Deus Angst Machina: If you thoroughly explore Adam's apartment you'll discover that he had a whole slew of bad news to cope with when he woke up after the attack: His love interest and most of his coworkers had been brutally murdered, he'd been turned into a walking murder machine without his consent, and -to put the icing on the cake- while he was out, someone had euthanized his dog when they thought he might never wake up from the surgery. His earlier life was no bed of roses, either. If you look to the right of the TV/stash, you'll find an old photograph of a young couple, ostensibly Mr. and Mrs. Jensen, and a newer photograph of a young man in military clothing who is not Adam. Underneath these photos is a small table holding two urns.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything:
    • "Oh, and by the way, Jensen? I know you've gone through a lot of physical changes of late, but you didn't become a woman. Stay out of the ladies restroom."
    • It is very difficult to unlock the CASIE social augmentation by the end of the first mission when you confront Zeke Sanders. You literally have to take down every single Purity First member and get both the Ghost and Smooth Operator bonuses, as well as hack every terminal. But if you go so far as to eke out every drop of XP and get the CASIE mod unlocked, Sanders has the usual persuasion responses that every other social "boss" encounter involves. Although he doesn't have the Alpha/Beta/Omega and pheromone option.
    • Some Sarif containers have barcodes on them. If you have a smartphone with a barcode reader and use it to scan them, you are linked to the Sarif Industries website.
    • If you pay off someone, or someone is carrying an item that you need but won't give it up unless you pay them, you can just punch/stab/shoot/Typhoon them and take the item/recover your money. You can completely bypass the entire tangents with Brian Tindell or Anonymous X by just popping them in the mouth and taking the quest-relevant item off their body. Of course, the dev team really did think of everything, as this approach doesn't work against Chuanli in the sidequest to find the kidnapped prostitute, as he isn't carrying her location (but will have the money you paid him). Also, Hugh Darrow won't have any codes on him if you whack him.
    • Tong won't berate you for killing his men if you didn't actually kill any of them.
    • Similarly, Keitner won't snap at Adam for knocking out and/or killing soldiers if he manages to get from his cell to the meeting room without assaulting anyone.
    • If you try to use the CASIE mod on Malik, she threatens to hit you, but fesses up anyway.
    • If you use the CASIE mod to intimidate Haas about his drug problem, he ends up losing his job and attacks you in the lobby of your apartment building on your return to Detroit.
  • Dialogue Tree: Used during conversations to obtain more info on certain subjects, or to try and persuade certain NPCs to help you out during missions and sidequests.
  • Diegetic Interface: Jensen doesn't have a HUD until he gets augmented. It's listed as one of his augmentations.
  • Digital Piracy Is Evil: While the developers likely weren't thrilled about the X-Box version being leaked a week early, this was pleasantly averted by the creators and publishers when an unfinished preview build containing the first area was leaked online. Even on the game's official forums, discussion of the leak was permitted. It likely would have been a different story had the reception not been broadly positive, mind you.
  • Dirty Cop:
    • Detective Chet Wagner was never a model policeman to begin with, hacking his office email suggests that he takes bribes, and his unreliability proves useful to the conspirators, as he is assigned to the Sarif Industries Attack Investigation and, predictably, botches it horribly.
    • Even worse is Detective Jack O'Malley, who is working to start a war between Detroit's two biggest street gangs on behalf of FEMA.
  • Dirty Harriet: Jenny Alexander, one of Adam's old work partners, is first seen working undercover in the oldest profession on the streets of Detroit.
  • Disc One Nuke:
    • Fully upgrading the Typhoon aug early in the game turns the battles against the three Tyrants into a cakewalk.
    • The armour-piercing upgrade for the pistol. It can be obtained very easily, very early in the game.
  • Divided States of America:
    • Not yet happened, but the country is pretty close to it. There are rumblings of secession in some states such as Utah, setting up the scene for the Northwest War.
    • If you listen to the conversation between two NPCs in the lobby at Sarif, you'll hear one of them mention the Texas Secession. More detail on that was given here. [dead link]
  • Does Not Know His Own Strength: The trailer shows Adam picking up a glass of whiskey that slowly cracks as he holds it.
  • The Dog Was the Mastermind: In The Missing Link, "Quinn" (not his real name) the game's only merchant and Keitner's informant turns out to be the supposed connection to Interpol responsible for Adam being set free.
  • Doomed by Canon: No matter how much Bob Page and Joseph Manderley feel like boss fights waiting to happen, continuity dictates that they'll make it to the credits.
    • Similarly in the prequel novel Barrett, Fedorova and Namir must survive to appear in the game, while Gunther must survive to make it to the original game.
  • Doomed Moral Victor: David Sarif sincerely believes in the possibilities offered by augmenting and enhancing mankind. Unfortunately, he and his company are paying the price.
  • Door to Before: After you defeat Barrett, there is an elevator which leads directly back to the helipad you arrived on. Possibly explained by the fact that the area you fought the boss in appears to be used for storage, so it's plausible that they would have a lift for cargo leading to that area so they could transport material directly to the storage bay.
  • Double Entendre: The description for the "Balls" achievement: "Seems you like playing with balls, eh?"
  • Dynamic Entry: Jensen can easily pull one off with the Icarus Landing System. It allows him to jump at any height and survive the fall cushioned by an electric yellow glow. Hitting the trigger button allows him to make a shockwave on landing, knocking down anyone in the immediate vicinity.
    • There are several areas of the game clearly designed with this in mind: the Belltower guards outside The Hive with a handy accessible rooftop above, the four Tai Yong Medical soldiers standing under the only part of the gallery with no handrail in the Alice Garden Pods and there are three workers standing at the bottom of a very deep, wide shaft in Panchaea. There's a ladder at the Belltower docks that leads up to the rooftop of the warehouse, which has nothing up there at all save a glass skylight that you can shoot out, allowing you to drop in on the middle of the mooks to re-enact Batman.
    • Busting through a wall can also have this effect, such as in an early Detroit sidequest, where doing so results in Adam following through by snapping the neck of the guy on guard.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: Bob Page appears in the first few minutes of the game, talking to The Omniscient Council of Vagueness - then vanishes, never to be seen again til a brief scene after the end credits. Bob is heard talking to Morgan (Everett) about how they can manage anything in time before ending the call and meeting Dr. Reed and talking with her about the development of a hybrid nanite-virus, most likely either the original Deus Ex' Gray Death plague or the project that developed the Dentons. Video of the post-credits stinger available here.
    • Page Industries supplies some of the best lab equipment used by Sarif Industries, apparently.
    • In The Missing Link DLC, one of the scientists on the Rifleman Base is a young Gary Savage. There are also emails and references to Bob Page scattered about.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Malik can easily die, but you can prevent it if you work your ass off.
    • Extra happiness points if you still maintain a Pacifist Run in the process.
  • Elaborate Underground Base:
    • The FEMA facility in Detroit.
    • The hidden sub-basement of Picus Communications in Montreal, which houses a large Illuminati facility.
  • Electronic Eyes: Adam has a pair, which he frequently hides behind retractable sunglasses built into his skull.
  • Eleventh-Hour Superpower: The plasma rifle, which is acquired just before the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Especially jarring because the moment you get it, you also stop fighting the mooks you were used to fighting and face enemies which behave much different instead.
  • Elite Mooks: The Spec-Ops teams controlled by FEMA. Averted however by the handful of actual FEMA personnel Adam encounters, as they're by and large non-augmented humans.
  • Emergency Transformation: Adam gets augmented by his employers because it was the only way to save his life after he was injured. Sarif used the opportunity to do some non-emergency transformations as well, such as replacing undamaged limbs with augmented versions.
  • Enemy Civil War: A minor one is shown to be simmering within Belltower between Burke and his Spec Ops forces on one side, and Keitner's camp in The Missing Link.
  • Enemy Mine: If you let Zeke Sanders escape from the Milwaukee plant, he later shows up and gives you the codes to the computers in the FEMA facility. Of course, there's nothing to stop you from gunning down Zeke and his goons the moment you get the codes. Considering that one of them will outright gloat that he set up the gas bomb that killed the captive workers, it's hard not to.
    • Not to mention that on the second visit to Detroit, he will attempt to kill you again.
    • A more minor example: listening in on coincidental conversations, it seems that both left-wingers and right-wingers have joined forces in opposition to augmentation. The Left is opposed to the fact that augmentations further widen the rift between rich and poor, while the Right believes that the human body should not be tampered with.
  • Enemy Scan: As featured in one of the CGI trailers, an augmentation allows Adam to scan nearby enemies for weaponry and vulnerabilities. Sadly, it didn't make it into the game proper.
    • The Smart Vision aug, fully upgraded, doesn't include the weapon scan part but DOES allow you to see (and mark, with the Mark&Track aug) track enemies through walls.
    • The "scan for weaponry" function is present in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's version of Smart Vision.
  • Engineered Public Confession: Malik does this to the man who murdered her friend, recording his conversation with Adam and then playing it over the Hive's loudspeakers.
  • Everybody Smokes: Alot of NPCs can be seen lighting up cigarettes. In the prologue video, the first thing we see Bob Page doing is lighting a cigarette. Jensen smokes as well.
  • Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: One of the dual-target melee takedown animations has both of Jensen's targets trying to punch or roundhouse-kick him before he takes them out. This gets very amusing if they happened to be, for example, street prostitutes, bums or civilian office workers.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: Fill up a car with enough bullets, and they explode, which makes them pretty lousy for cover if you get in a firefight on the streets.
  • Evil Brit: Belltower is at least nominally a British PMC that happens to be involved in a lot of shady activities, although it is mentioned that it used to be more honorable. Hugh Darrow as well, though it's clear that he takes no pleasure whatsoever, seeing his actions as a Necessary Evil.
  • Exact Words:
    • The Illuminati don't want to rule the world directly. They just want to ensure that society, law and order are such that they don't need to... even if it means everyone ultimately answers to them.
    • Hugh Darrow definitely promises something big with augmentations in Panchaea. He just doesn't mention the finer print about what that entails.
  • Experience Points: Used to collect Praxis points, which are used to activate augmentations.
  • Expospeak Gag: One email in the Omega Ranch discusses the practice of staff using expensive lab equipment as makeshift chairs:

Please consider the relative tensile strength of materials present in the object in comparison to your own mass volumetric density.
In other words, stop breaking things with your fat asses.
XOXOXO, The Management

  • Expy: Adam Jensen has a lot in common with original protagonist JC Denton (i.e. Badass Longcoat, Deadpan Snarker, Guttural Growler voice, Cool Shades, technological augmentation, etc). It's even been pointed out by certain fans that "Adam Jensen" sounds like a phonetic inversion of "JC Denton".
  • Face Heel Turn: If you don't skip the credits, the post credits scene reveals that Megan Reed is now working for Majestic 12.
  • Faceless Goons: All Belltower commandos and most regular soldiers wear either full-face helmets or balaclavas. Bonus points for helmets with opaque face covers that make this trope even more literal.
  • Face Palm of Doom: Adam's Neck Snap lethal takedown involves grabbing someone by the face.
  • Family Theme Naming: Isaiah and Ezekiel Sandoval, both named after Biblical prophets.
  • Fantastic Racism: Between augmented and un-augmented people.
  • Fantastic Slurs: "Hanzer" (enhanced human) or "cog" (cybernetic augmentation) for augmented people. You also have "robot", "chrome", and all sorts of others.
  • Fashions Never Change: Averted: it's only 20 years into the future and fashion has distinctly moved on. Clothing are much "busier", with lots of tailoring, extra decorations, and high collars, to complement the neo-baroque decor.
    • Played straight with men's suits, the few times anyone is wearing one they still seem to be following the style of the past 100 years.
    • Also played straight with the common citizens. The original intent of the game was to have pro-augs dress like Reniannsance, while anti-augs would dress more like the present day, but this was eventually toned down.
  • Femme Fatale: Fedorova, as well as Zhao Yun Ru, up until she merges with Hyron. And in some ways, Megan Reed, especially after what is heard in The Stinger.
  • Final Boss Preview: The opening stage shows you glimpses of the Tyrants in action (mostly through bulletproof glass windows, so they don't attack you). Barrett uses his Arm Cannon to blow away a few helpless scientists, Federova leaps into an air vent and cloaks herself to kill a facility worker, and Namir beats Jensen within an inch of his life.
  • Flechette Storm: Combat rifles can be upgraded into firing flechette rounds for greater damage.
  • Flushing Edge Interactivity: Played straight, setting the player up for a disappointment upon discovering that vending machines cannot be interacted with.
  • Foil:
    • Eliza Cassan and Lazarus are this to each other especially with regards to their approaches at media. Even more so in light of how Lazarus is actually human and is right about quite a few things, whereas Eliza is just an AI taking commands from her masters.
    • Tai Yong Medical is this to Sarif Industries, as it manages to be successful by relying on substandard augmentation practices, keeping a draconian leash on its own employees and aggressively gobbling up the competition. Thanks at least partially to Illuminati-backed mercs and Tai Yong Medical itself being an Illuminati front company.
  • Foregone Conclusion:
    • Since it's a prequel, you had to expect Human Revolution to end with a downer, or at least in a bittersweet way for its characters. Despite Jensen's efforts and sacrifices, none of his ending choices will change the fact that Deus Ex will happen. Majestic 12 will split from the weakened Illuminati, and the plan for world domination will change from biochip mind control to engineered global pandemic.
    • In fact, despite the multiple endings, facets of all of them canonically occur. UNATCO is formed in reaction to all of the terrorist violence that occurs and is mentioned throughout the game, aug related or not. Corporations become extremely deregulated, which is why Versalife is able to have such a sizable stranglehold on Ambrosia production in the first game, among other advantages, and due to the obvious vulnerabilities of aug killswitches as demonstrated by Darrow, the Illuminati uses the Gray Death as a replacement control scheme.
  • Foreshadowing: Not only is Megan last seen being knocked unconscious and carried off (rather than killed), but her advances in research make her more useful alive.
    • he Patient X file can be compared with information on Adam in the Detroit LIMB Clinic, and it even mentions that both were adopted at age 5. Additionally: part of the patient code is AJ; Megan is antsy if Jensen reads her reports and emails on the patient (during the intro); and during the second Detroit visit, Hugh Darrow's computer briefly shows a patient file with Jensen's photograph.
    • Hugh Darrow states his opinions on augmentation in a publicly-available ebook. He also states (if you win his 'boss battle' in Panchaea) how regardless of what happens, the future would be one that neither he nor Jensen wants.
    • Picus TV, normally a strongly anti-augmentation media brand, is supportive of Hugh Darrow's Panchaea. Additionally, a couple in Detroit discusses how Eliza Cassan is probably just a puppet. Finally, one of the notes you can find in the Picus offices shortly before meeting Eliza is from someone in marketing who's arranged for Eliza to wear clothes supplied by a sponsor on an upcoming broadcast, but is having trouble meeting her to get her measurements so the clothes can be properly fitted.
    • "Clinics" and "recall" are mentioned in the very first cutscene. In the Tai Yong Medical HQ, there are also several e-mails and conversation mentioning how odd their new biochip project is, and how third parties keep interfering with it.
    • Zhao Yun Ru has one of the suits the Hyron women wear on display in her penthouse.
    • In The Missing Link DLC, you may notice that almost all of the people Belltower kidnaps are women, and in their detention facility all but one of the prisoners are female. Additionally, Zhao Yun Ru has one of the suits the Hyron women wear on display in her penthouse showing how it is all connected.
    • If you're paying attention while first infiltrating Derelict Row, you may overhear two bangers talking about how some Irish guy is supplying them with enough weapons for a small army. Cue the sidequest about a crooked cop named O'Malley running guns to gangs at the direction of FEMA, to provoke incidents they can take advantage of.
    • There's an arrow on the side of the VTOL that says "RESCUE". When you talk to Malik you can see it in the background and it's pointing directly at her.
    • During the introductory cutscene, several unknown people discuss an augmentation chip being tested that connects to the nerve center, and that they plan on abusing. Unsurprisingly, getting a suspicious free upgrade during the second visit to Hengsha will prompt an InterfaceScrew during the next boss battle.
    • Megan gets somewhat antsy every time she has to bring up where she got her research. She doesn't like you looking through her emails, which include stuff about Patient X, and if you pick up her report on X, she's rather quick to say, "That's nothing! Could you put that down, please?" Especially when it's strongly implied that Adam is Patient X.
    • In the Detroit subway tunnel, listen to the man and woman talking near the exit closest to the police station. The woman will talk about Eliza being "just a puppet".
    • Malik mentions Megan saying that you would take well to the augs, since "it's in your genes".
  • Forgotten Fallen Friend: Aside from a small conversation with Pritchard, Malik is never mentioned again after she is killed. If she is killed.
  • Freudian Trio: Specifically, Beauty, Brains, and Brawn for the Tyrants (albeit Darker and Edgier due to their antagonist role):
  • Friends Rent Control: All over the place. Played straight with Adam's appartment, which has a huge amount of open space. Justified by an email explaining that his tenancy there was arranged for by Sarif Industries, with a year's worth of rent paid in advance. Other appartments around Detroit are smaller, but often still pretty spacious. Mostly averted in Heng Sha, where most appartments are slightly smaller than the ones in Detroit, and completely averted with the Alice Garden Pods, where tenants get a a single cubbyhole bed and communal washroom facilities.
  • Fun with Acronyms: One of the preorder bonuses is the Utility Remote Detonated Explosive Device, or UR-DED for short.
    • There's also the Longsword Extreme Range Sniper Rifle ("Eraser").
      • Liberty in Mind and Body, anyone?
  • Gaia's Lament: In progress. A few characters will mention how global warming is starting to tear the world apart, and how huge projects are currently being undergone to help with flooding. Said projects have a lot of demand for labor, fueling a job boom, but at the same time they are quite dangerous, so augmented individuals have a great deal of competetive advantage in getting them. This is part of what fuels some of the populist anti-augmentation sentiment.
    • One of the random NPCs in Detroit wonders why people are still talking about saving the environment, since they've been talking about it for decades, and it was apparently already too late back then.
  • Gambit Pileup: There is no consistent Big Bad; everything is the result of various powerful people thinking that they can somehow put their goals ahead of everyone else's as they pretend to cooperate with each other.
  • Game Breaking Bug: For those doing a Pacifist Run, using the Tranquilizer Rifle will still sometimes kill the target thanks to a rare bug.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: In a Hengsha sidequest, the quest giver emphasizes that whatever Adam does to the bad guy, it has to look like an accident. Adam has to knock out the bad guy, but the knocking out has to be hand-to-hand; a tranq dart will leave a mark. But when you actually use the non-lethal takedown, the cutscene could very well show Adam brutally breaking the guy's arms in several places. It's hard to spin that as an accident.
  • Gatling Good: The Heavy Rifle.
  • Giant Mook: The Spec-Ops Ogres encountered as key points of the game are, quite simply, massive brutes. Though they can be disposed of with the hand-to-hand takedowns, they are a head taller than Jensen, significantly wider, clad in armor plating, have their own Typhoon implants and invariably carry heavy machine guns that can put most SAWs to shame. And even if you manage to slip a tranquilizer between their armor, they take for-flipping-ever to go down.
  • Glass Cannon: The "Give Me Deus Ex" difficulty effectively turns Adam into one. While he's lethally proficient with any weapon and can effortlessly wipe out most enemies with takedowns and the Typhoon aug, he is unable to survive anything more than a few seconds of gunfire.
  • Global Currency: Credits, once again.
  • Gory Discretion Shot: The hacker's death and Isaias Sandoval's suicide, should you fail to prevent it.
  • Got the Whole World In My Hand: Revealed to be the symbol for the entire Illuminati before MJ-12 appropriated it.
  • Government Conspiracy: Naturally, in a Deus Ex game. Joseph Manderley is covering up specific details about the first attack against Sarif Industries.
  • Great Offscreen War: The Australian Civil War that's being covered in the press, involving various Australian factions being supported by Chinese and Western interests. It's also expounded further in The Missing Link DLC that the conflict in question largely revolves around resources in Antarctica.
  • Grey and Gray Morality: You can find hints of this literally within five steps of the game turning control of Adam over to you. As the game progresses, the decisions you have to make only get harder - by the end of it you are presented with three options that will profoundly influence the future of humanity (although it is revealed in the post-credit sequence that all of the endings will inevitably lead to the first game), all of them offered by people who have done highly questionable, if not outright evil things over the course of the story, and the hell of it is they all have a pretty good case for why you should side with them. And then there's the fourth option, which takes the decision out of everyone's hands.
  • Grid Inventory: An inventory system much like the original is used. Unlike the original though, weapons like the pistol and assault rifle take up more space, ammo is kept in the main inventory instead of hyperspace, and grenades aren't stackable.
  • Groin Attack: With arm blades. Ow.
  • The Guards Must Be Crazy: While guards tend to be paranoid about sound, they have fixed patrol routes and never break them, unless they spot or hear something strange. They usually spend more time investigating their knocked out or dead colleagues or holes in walls but will eventually conclude that you must have left the area. You can even get an upgrade that shows you exactly when this is going to happen. The strangest thing is that the guards only react to actions. They will never see anything wrong with a stack of boxes that randomly appears on their patrol route or a fridge standing in the middle of the room when it should be in the kitchen. They never notice when a camera, a turret, or a robot stop working, when you shut them down via a security terminal. And, of course, they fail to see anything weird about another guard disappearing from his post.
    • If you walk from a restricted area into an unrestricted one in front of a guard, and get out before they turn hostile, they will draw their weapon... and then walk right past you to go search the restricted area for that guy they saw creeping around. Easily visible in the Hive: there's a guard stationed in front of one of the basement exits who will do this every single time you walk out and never catch on. Just don't walk in that way!
    • A particularly suspension-of-disbelief-braking example of guards being ignorant of their surroundings is when a highly-touted and elaborate Laser Hallway guarding a particularly important location is turned offline by the player. The group of guards stationed explicitly to observe it and being able to see the whole thing clearly through a window... they just do absolutely nothing about it.
  • Guide Dang It:
    • How do you kill Barrett if you went the stealth/hack/pacifist route? Like this... and how in the world are people supposed to figure that out? To be fair, that's simply the fast way to do it. Using non-lethal weaponry of any kind will eventually take him down.
    • May include a bit of Foreshadowing, as when Jensen is first attacked by Namir in the introduction, Megan will throw a barrel filled with some caustic substance at him... one could assume that some of the barrels would have the same contents.
    • The second boss fight, though tough, still comes down to shooting your enemy until she dies. This fight involves elements that are never previously foreshadowed, and the aug that protects against electricity can alleviate most of the difficulty by itself. Good luck if you enter the fight without it or any spare Praxis points.
    • The secret achievement "Lucky Guess" requires you to unlock a keypad by inputting an unattainable code. The panel in question is the bomb in the "Smash The State" sidequest and the code is "0000".
  • Guile Hero: An available option in the game is to upgrade "Social" points for the option to gain information and etc. via talking to people. A few trailers even show Adam talking a man out of killing a civilian.
  • Guns in Church: Averted. Certain areas won't let you pull out your weapons or do a takedown, presumably to prevent you from killing plot important characters prematurely and to avoid having to do any of the jarring Story-Driven Invulnerability that the first game had. Other areas if you have a weapon out, some NPCs will out right refuse to talk to you, or will attack you.
  • Hacking Minigame: It's played as a sort of risk/reward system on a lattice; moving forward through nodes has a chance of you tripping an alarm and getting traced, but there's also storage cubes with money, experience points or hacking software on the side that you can access if you don't mind the extra risk. If you do trip an alarm flag, it becomes a race against time against the computer.
  • Hammerspace: In the cutscene before the Namir boss fight, Zhao pulls a remote out of thin air to use, just out of frame. It could not have fitted in her clothes and she does not carry a bag. She literally just drops her hand out of the frame and brings it back up with the remote.
  • Hand Cannon: The revolver becomes a more literal example when upgraded to fire exploding ammunition.
  • Heavily Armored Mook: Belltower Heavies and Spec-Ops Ogres.
  • Hellish Copter: On the return trip to Hengsha, Malik's bird is shot down by an EMP missile. Jensen jumps clear of the wreck while Mailk scrambles to repair the aircraft so she can escape the area. What happens next is up to the player.
  • The Hero Dies/Kill'Em All: In one of the possible endings.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: You can let Malik do this after her VTOL is shot down in Hengsha, to allow you to escape undetected. Or you can be a Big Damn Heroes and kill/incapacitate everyone attacking her, including an air-dropped box guard robot, allowing her to repair the engines and take off unharmed, picking up the scientists you rescue later on in Singapore.
  • "Hey You!" Haymaker: Adam will sometimes execute one of these as a non-lethal melee takedown, assuming that he engages an unaware target from behind.
  • Hollywood Hacking: Played straight with the hacking minigame, but it could be interpreted as just a visualization, with Adam's hacking aug is doing all the hard work for him.
  • Hollywood Silencer: Played Straight in this trailer. Sort of used in the game itself; the silenced pistol is noisier than most versions of this trope, but it's not loud enough to be heard in a nearby room.
  • Hologram: Used frequently by powerful people who don't want to bother with phone calls. Unusually for sci-fi, these holograms have very high quality, to the point where on their first encounter with one most players will say, "Hey, there's two people in Sarif's office, cool, OMG WHERE DID THE SECOND GUY GO?!"
    • Topping the list is Eliza Cassan, who is actually an AI; whenever anybody sees her, it's a hologram.
  • Holographic Terminal: Used by Bob Page in the introductory cutscene, complete with Hard Light keyboard. Also, most other computers seem to have holographic monitors.
    • A holographic globe can be seen in David Sarif's office early in the game and a large holographic moon can be found in the Picus Headquarters.
  • Human Resources/Super Human Trafficking: The Harvester gang likes to kidnap people with augmentations and cut them out to either sell or install in themselves. Not a very nice group of people, all things considered. Making their frequent friendly-sounding compliments on your augmentations quite creepy.
    • This is also what powers the Hyron project.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: Adam has enough space for multiple weapons and their ammo, or 290 energy bars.
    • You can upgrade your inventory by increasing your arm strength, though this still leaves the question of where you're storing everything.
  • Icarus Allusion: The game is fueled entirely by allusions to the Icarus myth and the colour yellow. Both Sarif and Darrow claim to be the Daedelus to Jensen's Icarus (Sarif in particular owns a company with a wing for a logo and often calls Jensen "son"), and the Tie-in Novel is named Deus Ex: The Icarus Effect, which contain more allusions. Also, there's an augment called the Icarus Landing System that prevents fall damage.
  • I Did What I Had to Do:
    • David Sarif sincerely thought he was doing Adam Jensen (and the rest of mankind) a tremendous favor by significantly augmenting him.
    • Hugh Darrow views his actions in triggering the Zombie Apocalypse from Panchaea as necessary, as much as he resents it.

Hugh Darrow: "Forgive me."

  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty settings for Human Revolution are "Tell Me a Story" (Casual), "Give Me a Challenge" (Normal) and "Give Me Deus Ex" (Expert).
  • Idiot Ball:
    • When Jensen first encounters Zhao, he has plenty of intel telling him that she is a ruthless, powerful, amoral woman who has forged her world-spanning company by sheer grit. As such, when she pulls the damsel-in-distress routine, he simply stands there, apparently rebooting, while she maneuvers behind him and shoves him out of the panic room. Sarif very rightly gives you shit for it. There's a fan theory that Zhao was using a CASIE mod, which would make Adam's complete disregard of everything he knows about her (and his susceptibility to her incredibly transparent acting) a bit more understandable, as the CASIE is essentially a Stupidity-Inducing Attack.
    • n the first main mission of the game, Adam confronts a hacker in a server room. The hacker has his brain connected to the computer with a wire, and when he sees Adam he proceeds to shoot himself in the head with a trembling hand, clearly struggling and even asking Adam for help before the shot is fired. The thought never occurs to Adam that maybe the hacker was being forced to do this by someone controlling him.
    • In general, the scripted events in the game can put people off. Playing as a stealth-centric character still does not prevent Adam from busting down doors, firing guns, stabbing people or performing very un-stealthy actions in the cinematics.
  • I Got You Covered: Adam tells Faridah this after their plane is shot down by Belltower. She tells him to get moving; it's up to the player whether or not to stick around and save her life.
  • I Have Many Names: Sarif mentions that the Illuminati use many names and identities whenever it suits them.
  • I Have Your Wife: Belltower is holding Tong's son hostage to ensure he stays cooperative. There's a reason why he helps you when you go to the Belltower-held docks.
  • I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Averted in the sense that people will tell you to put away your weapon if you have it drawn if you want to speak to them. More touchy NPCs will attack you.
  • Improvised Weapon/Improbable Weapon User: Activate the strength augmentation, and you can pick up refrigerators and dumpsters and use them as thrown weapons, and are almost instant death on most enemies. These heavy items are also pretty sturdy and can be used as cover in a firefight. You can also break down doors by throwing fridges at them; the fridge is all-purpose!
    • Even better than throwing fridges? Throwing dead bodies. Because for some reason they are a guaranteed One-Hit Kill on most enemies.
  • Information Wants to Be Free: Hugh Darrow in Panchaea ultimately implores Adam to tell the truth about augmentations, the Illuminati, everything. His ending is tellingly the only one wherein this trope happens, given how both Taggart and Sarif suggest lying about what's been happening for various reasons.
  • Insecurity Camera: The viewing arc of every camera is visible to you. Then again, Adam's vision IS augmented... Also, they may have a limited viewing arc, but security cameras are still a pretty major hazard for you to avoid (you can't even leave a body in their view), and destroying them will also trigger an alarm.
    • Cameras can be TEMPORARILY knocked out of action by stun gun darts. Doing so allows you to bypass them easily, and does NOT trigger an alarm.
  • Instant Sedation: Downplayed more and more the higher you set the game's difficulty.
  • Insufferable Genius: Pritchard's defining character trait; he believes he's smarter than Adam and never hesitates to point it out.

Adam: Let me know if you find something.
Pritchard: You meant when.
Adam: Pretty sure I didn't.

  • Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Stop! worms and Nuke viruses, which you can pick up as physical objects in a pseudo-floppy disk form, work on any electronic system and are somehow used up when you use them.
  • Interface Screw: The first real mission begins with Adam's HUD malfunctioning. EMP grenades also garble your HUD without a protective augmentation. This is also a side effect of drinking booze for health points. A more serious, plot-related version will crop up before the fight with Jaron... if you got the new biochip after the old stuff in your head starts wigging out on it. If you pass, you don't have to fight a boss without your augmentations or the freaking HUD.
  • Interface Spoiler: A Justified Trope. All of Jensen's possible augmentations are actually already installed in his body, they just haven't been switched on yet (as a precautionary measure, since his brain is healing). Therefore, they all show up in the menu screen.
    • However, you can tell which characters will become important later, once you get the CASIE aug. It will only pop up when you're going to have a long conversation that will have permanent effects.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle: Averted. No longer does each path have resource costs associated with it, making the choice in path's less of a long term choice.
    • Also averted by the addition of an auto-sort option. Although it doesn't respect the OCD gamer's need to keep grenades, ammo and weapons in their own distinct sections.
  • Invisibility Cloak: Jensen has one, rendering him completely invisible for a short time, although alerted enemies can still hear him if he's sprinting around. The power drain is very high even when full upgraded (he gets at most 7 seconds for each of his 2-5 power cells), so the cloaking device is usually best used if you need to run right past a camera or guard's direct line of sight without alerting them, or slip through a laser grid (which aren't tripped while you're cloaked) without needing to stop and deactivate it. Some enemies also have this; they won't show up on your radar if it's activated, though the laser rifle can lock on to them through walls, and they can still be seen if you turn on Smart Vision.
  • Invulnerable Knuckles: They are when they're artificial! Jensen only has to worry about a minor power drain when he smashes through a wall, to say nothing of punching a guy in the jaw. His head was apparently reinforced too, since he can headbutt armored soldiers without sustaining major injuries.
  • I Own This Town: David Sarif certainly thinks he owns Detroit, as he claims to have control over the Police Department's pension fund. The rioters tend to give lie to the claim, however.
  • Ironic Echo: "Women never fail to underestimate men."
    • Also, after the fight with Namir, Adam knocks him through a glass panel like Namir did to him at the beginning.
  • It Has Been an Honor: Eliza to Adam, should he choose the Kill'Em All ending.
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: In the TYM headquarters, Jensen can find the corpse of a technician who was working with the Harvesters to help steal augs. Belltower apparently found him, interrogated him to death, and then dumped his corpse down a ventilation shaft.
    • A hapless small timer found in the Hive basement seems to have suffered a similar fate.
  • Japan Takes Over the World: Downplayed especially compared to China, but Japan is implied to be doing relatively well for itself. Not to mention how vehicle manufacturer Motokun is a prominent sight even in Detroit, America's Motor City.
  • Jerkass: Pritchard.
  • Just Before the End: "It's not the end of the world... but you can see it from here." It's clear during the game that society is on the brink of collapse.
  • Just Doing My Job: Adam claims this when Greg Thorpe thanks him for saving Josie; Greg is having none of it.
  • Justified Tutorial: The first part of the tutorial takes place during the attack on Sarif Industries and is designed to teach controls and basic combat. The next part of the Tutorial is set during the Milwaukee plant incident, and teaches more advanced concepts such as stealth, exploration and hacking. Of course, all the prompts are skip-able, and though the tutorial expects players to follow out what it suggests, it never forces players to do so.
  • Karma Houdini: The minor character van Bruggen. He knowingly helped Tai Yong carry out its bloody version of corporate espionage and forced a man to kill himself and you never have an opportunity to punish him for it. This can be somewhat averted when Belltower attacks if you refuse to give him a weapon.
  • Karma Meter: Of sorts. All of your behavior is reflected later in the game. For example, if you're a murderous agent, at one point, a hostage will be shot in front of you because they'll assume you won't be moved by a hostage. However, if you have a reputation of being merciful and talking your way through situations, you can get them to release the hostage without a shot being fired.
  • King Incognito: Tong Si Hung.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: You can loot a lot of stuff, even from right under people's noses. Unless you need to hack a lock to get to it, nobody seems to mind.
    • Some Lampshade Hanging occurs the second time you get to Detroit. As head of security, Jensen will probably receive an email from a co-worker who heard that people reported stuff missing from their offices, and gives you his doorcode to check on his office. Which you can then also loot, like you did with the others (unless you already did before).
  • Knockout Gas: Gas grenades are one of the weapons in the pacifist player's arsenal. It's a generally useful tool for knocking out multiple enemies where tranqs, stun guns, and takedowns are just inappropriate, and everything else is overly lethal.
  • Lady of War: Lady Katrina Sutherland from the comics. She even has the title to go with it!
  • Lampshade Hanging: The way boss battles were implimented in Human Revolution has been one of its biggest criticisms, favoring direct combat built characters with few options for a stealth or social character to evade or take out bosses by other means.[2] During The Missing Link DLC, Burke's comments highlight this forced approach:

Burke: "I'm surprised. I'd assumed the man who took out both Barrett and Fedorova would have favored a more... frontal-assault. You ARE a tough one to read, Jensen."

  • Land Mine Goes Click: The LAM makes a return, helpfully flashing when set and beeping before exploding. This trope isn't played to its fullest extent, however: the time between beep and bang is nowhere near enough to allow the player to escape, serving more as a way of letting you know how you died.
  • Laser Hallway: In the Tai Yong Medical building.
  • Literal Genie: Before asking someone to "show the world what augmentation can do for humanity", double check what he actually thinks about it.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: The PC version was patched to speed up loading times, but if you keep screwing up, you'll probably still be reloading a lot of saves.
  • Loophole Abuse: This is how Eliza Cassan, who's actually an AI manages to help Jensen.
  • Lucky Charms Title: Hum Δn Revolution. Not a triangle.
  • M-Rated Opening: Adam's violent beatdown in the beginning is much bloodier and more brutal than the rest of the game, and the enemies in the Sarif Manufacturing Plant swear a lot more (especially with the F-bomb). After that, the violence and language get toned down.
  • Magikarp Power: Many weapons and augmentations only reach their full potential when fully upgraded or used in concert with each other:
    • The heavy rifle is horribly inaccurate and can only be fired from the hip because of its design, but attaching a laser sight and maxing the "recoil compensation" and "aim stabilizer" makes it as accurate as a pistol while maintaining it's power. Similar upgrades and a target-seeking system can turn the machine pistol or combat rifle into headshot machines.
    • When first unlocked cloaking is so ridiculously costly in energy that it's difficult to use at all. Once fully-upgraded it still won't let you fight whole battles invisible, but you can easily get from cover to cover undetected without using a single energy cell. With increased energy regeneration you can do this quite rapidly.
  • Make It Look Like an Accident:
    • One of your options for dealing with Diamond Chan in the "Rotten Business" sidequest.
    • Lee Hong tried to do this to cover up the murder of Evelyn Carmichael, but considering how he went about it, he would have been better off just hiding the body and hoping for the best.
  • Masquerade Maintenance: What the ending that involves self-destructing Panchaea amounts to. With Jensen's intent of taking the dark secrets and conspiracies he's uncovered with him to the grave, while allowing the rest of mankind to make their own decisions on the future. Unfortunately, even this serves Bob Page just fine.
  • Meaningful Name: This game is meant to show the origins of Deus Ex, and the protagonist's name is Adam. Hmm...
    • Eliza, an AI, shares her name with the first well known chatbot.
    • Vasili Sevchenko as in Russian Filmmaker Vladimir Sevchenko who documented Chernobyl and died of radiation poisoning.
    • David Sarif's name sounds a lot like Seraph. And he does bring Adam back to life...
      • Confirmed in the Director's Cut commentary: The name Sarif was derived from Seraphim.
      • In typography, 'serifs' are small lines added to letters which may make them more readable, and the logo for Sarif Industries uses these serifs.
    • Michael Zelazny is a Religious Bruiser Super Soldier whose names mean "Who is like God" and "Made of iron", respectively. Even if the surname is a reference to Roger Zelazny, it is likely that the choice of character to give it to was deliberate.
  • Mega Corp:
    • Sarif Industries is a rather benevolent one, albeit facing trouble from the likes of Taggart.
    • Picus Communications is shown to be one in the world of mass media, encompassing various newspapers, TV networks and blogs. This is all on purpose, being a front for the Illuminati.
  • Men Can't Keep House: Adam was supposed to fence in the yard, but he never got around to it, and so Megan ended up doing it instead. And his apartment is a mess, though that is implied to be a direct result of his depression after being augmented.
  • The Men in Black: A few of them show in the course of the game, especially in sidequests. Unlike the P-series from the original, these are more "traditional" human examples (G-Men types with common Anglo-Saxon names as aliases).
  • Metroidvania: In the sense that there can be a lot of backtracking, and that new abilities unlock new areas to explore (high-jump, heavy lifting, wall-punching, better hacking, etc). You go back to Detroit and Hengsha twice. However, unlike the usual sense of this trope, the main path's access is not determined by what abilities you do or do not have. It's theoretically possible to get through the game with nothing but your ability to shoot people.
  • More Than Mind Control: The Social Enhancer augmentation comes with a system that allows you to release pheremones to influence a person. However, just releasing scents isn't enough, you need to have paid attention to the kind of person you're dealing with and choose the right kind of verbal response to get the person to talk. "Alphas" have a high opinion of themselves and respond well to guys who play to that, "Betas" respond well to people acting friendly, and "Omegas" are guys with low self-esteem who need intimidation to crush their resistance and get them to fold. People who recognize that Jensen is using the aug can't be turned with it though.
    • Notably, attempting to use it on Malik when you encounter her in the Alice Garden Pods will result in her telling you she will punch you if you try to use it on her.
    • Amusingly, you can use it on your boss who had it installed in you to begin with. There is also a sidequest where you can talk-duel with a woman who has the same augmentation. It's left probably deliberately ambiguous which side is more in the right in that particular conflict.
  • Motor Mouth: Faridah Malik. Not as rapid as other examples, but there's no particular explanation for it. Maybe she's just nervous all the time?
  • Multiple Endings: Jensen uncovers the entire conspiracy, and must decide what he tells the world though each ending contains some element or another that would ultimately lead to Deus Ex:
    • A: telling the truth on Darrow's behalf, which will expose the Illuminati and villify augmentation technology, leading to a total ban. It would explain why no one seems to have augmentations in Deus Ex, save for the secret agents and a few well-off criminals, although this could also be explained by the fact that most of the common people you meet in the game are poor. Maybe also explains the absence of LIMB clinics and weaker state of the Illuminati.
    • B: lie on Taggart's behalf, which will villify corporations, leading to strict regulations. With Taggart's remarks about remodeling the UN, it would most likely lead to the formation of UNATCO.
    • C: lie on Sarif's behalf, which will villify special interest groups, totally deregulating augmentation possibly leading to the creation of the Grey Death as an alternate method of control. It could also possibly result in the development of nanotech augs in a short period of time and leading to the Dentons' creation.
    • D: destroy The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, along with himself and all three major conspirators, leaving the public to decide the fate of augmentation technology for itself. Even though everyone dies, this ending still manages to be somewhat optimistic, as Adam notes that humanity has made the right choices in the past in regards to advancement, and has the opportunity to do so again, without the machinations of the people in Panchaea messing things up.
    • All of the endings' monologues will vary depending on how you played. If you were a jackass in conversations and gunned down tons of enemies, Adam's monologue will be very critical of himself. A more neutral playthrough will have Adam painting himself as a moral question mark. A benign playthrough will have Adam pointing out how he tried to keep his humanity.
    • However, no matter which ending is chosen, Megan Reed will still end up working with Bob Page on the "hybrid-nanite" technology, implied to either be the Gray Death or the project that would create the Dentons.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Hugh Darrow has this moment if you use the Social Enhancer to uncover that he actually staged the mass insanity of augmented people because he, as the creator of the augmentation technology, is one of the few people genetically incompatible with it and grew jealous of others over time. It is also implied that he had a moment like this in the background when he created Hyron, as he pretty much outright says that Hyron is an example of what horrors human augmentation technology will inflict.
  • Mythology Gag: Plenty. A particularly notable one is that the radios in the game all play remixes of in-game music from the original Deus Ex.
  • Nintendo Hard: The fight with Jaron Namir when all you have is non-lethal armaments and stealth augmentations. Or if you count on your handy Typhoon, but fell prey to the Schmuck Bait described later.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Delivered to Adam at the beginning of the game by Jaron Namir. His injuries were so bad, he was forced to become augmented in order to survive.
  • Nobody Poops: Averted. Before you board the helicopter the first time, you can go into the female restroom (and Pritchard will chew you out for this), which has all the stalls occupied by gossiping staff members.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed: Paranoid conspiracy theorist radio host Lazarus sounds a lot like Alex Jones, in both voice and material.
  • No Hero Discount: A rather amusing example in the last level, where a LIMB clinic is open and operating during a quasi-Zombie Apocalypse on a station in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. The woman behind the counter is terrified, but either won't or can't give Adam any discount on items. If you go back to her twice, she expresses a measure of incredulity that you're still shopping.
  • Noodle Incident: The Mexicantown Massacre is apparently an important part of Jensen's past, but the exact details are never explained. What is known is that it involved a 15-year old augmented criminal who apparently was dangerous enough that SWAT was called in, and they were ordered to shoot to kill due to worries that his augments would protect him from nonlethal weapons and allow him to potentially kill several of the officers singlehandedly. Jensen refused, while Haas obeyed orders and killed the kid, resulting in a massive riot.
  • Not So Different: A subtle one, when Adam exclaims that Zhao has a Panic Room, David Sarif responds nonchalantly that so does he.
  • Nothing Is Scarier:
    • Panchaea. Instantly going from mild violence and lots of enemies to gore and silence is terrifying to say the least. The fact that there is almost nobody for the 10 minute lead-up to confronting Darrow only exacerbates this.
    • Earlier on, there's Picus HQ in Montreal. When Adam arrives there to find Eliza Cassan, he finds the whole building deserted as everyone was seemingly evacuated. While it changes quickly after he enters Room 404, the fact that only the sounds of TVs and unanswered phone calls can be heard is unnerving.
  • Notice This:
    • Interactive objects in Adam's field of vision, from ladders to weapons, are outlined in yellow. Following vocal complaints from some of the more combative segments of the Deus Ex fanbase, the developers quickly confirmed that it can be turned off if the player chooses. The hardest difficulty has it set to off by default, in fact.
    • When the game finally came out, however, people stopped griping immediately. It turns out there's enough detail in the environments to warrant you actually needing to see what stuff you can interact with and what you can't.
    • Even if you don't have the highlighting, object you can interact tend to flash briefly every now and then. It's subtle enough to miss it if you're not looking for it but means that you won't spend a huge chunk of time not able to find something.
  • Not the Fall That Kills You: Adam actually takes quite a bit of damage from falling. Falling one story can take off more than half his health, falling two or three is a sure death. However, he can activate the Icarus Landing System which envelops him in an electromagnetic sphere that slows his descent. It looks cool, and can be used to knock out enemies he lands upon from above.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Tong seems to be capable of this. After talking to him when he is disguised as a barkeeper he sends you to his office to meet him. Even when you use the most direct path to get there, he manages to already be there waiting for you.
  • Oireland: Garvin Quinn in The Missing Link DLC comes across as blatantly Irish. Though it's revealed to be a cover for his true identity as a Russian hacker working for the Juggernaut Collective.
  • One-Woman Wail: present through pretty much the entire soundtrack.
  • One Bullet Clips: The Tranquilizer Gun, Stun Gun, and Rocket Launcher have to be reloaded after each shot. Thank goodness for reload speed upgrades... except when you're using the Stun Gun a lot because that one can't be upgraded at all.
  • One Nation Under Copyright: America at the very least is gradually turning into this by 2027, especially with PMCs and corporations gaining more power.
  • OOC Is Serious Business: Pritchard is visibly concerned when he brings up the suspicious holes in Sarif Industries' security and later on is shocked to learn that Belltower's responsible for the attack at the beginning of the game.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Just about everyone that doesn't speak with their native accent (Hispanic and Asian characters) tend to have some problems maintaining their accents.
  • Pacifist Run: You're only forced to kill bosses (and that's because they're likely all going to be augmented-to-the-gills bad guys who will not stop until you or they are dead), and you'll get the Achievement for a non-lethal run if you avoid everyone else. The game encourages this approach by giving out more experience points for non-lethal takedowns. Though "Merciful Soul" is only worth 20 exp, and as the player earns a praxis point every 5000 exp, it means the player needs to take down over 250 enemies before non-lethal take-downs have any real impact. Odds are you will not encounter 250 enemies in the entire game. There are also extensive bonuses for sneaking around without being caught.
    • The game does a fair bit beyond that to support pacifist players, including the provision of a non-lethal takedown and both melee and ranged weapons (a stun gun and a very quiet tranquilizer-dart rifle) which render enemies unconscious instead of dead, and a variety of NPCs who will take notice of your unwillingness to kill and be more willing to help you out as a result. But it's not wholly a bed of roses; in particular, unconscious enemies can be revived, and doing so will be the first priority of anyone who notices his buddy out cold on the floor. This means you can't just start zapping people with impunity, but have to observe patrol behavior carefully and plan out in great detail how you're going to proceed; otherwise, you're liable to find all those guys you thought you'd put down back up and helping their buddies sweep the area for you. It's especially tricky if you don't have the radar upgrade that shows baddies you haven't yet actually seen; without that, it can be a matter of serious effort and tricky stealth just to be confident you know where everybody actually is. And there are several areas in the game which are jam-packed with enemies who can mostly all see each other, meaning that if you take any of them down by any means, odds are someone's going to spot the body and trigger an alarm before you have time to conceal it. While late-game augs like silent sprinting and the invisibility cloak make it easy to breeze past such areas without anyone knowing you were there, in the early game (and in Missing Link, where your all augs start out disabled), it's very easy to spend several minutes planning out how to get safely past a single large room. Few modern AAA games do anywhere near as much to satisfy those who enjoy this style of play.
    • And the mechanical difficulty isn't the only thing about this game that makes a Pacifist Run hard to pull off, and not because of increased difficulty. There are several points in the game (Belltower's civilian massacre during the raid on the Alice Garden Pods, Belltower executing Malik, or finding Malik's corpse inside the Harvester base) where many players just abandoned the notion of a pacifist run altogether and just started killing because those bastards deserved it. Especially bad in Hengsha because Belltower are the police, meaning that the Belltower troops who murder everyone in the Alice Garden Pods or kill Malik will get away scot-free unless you administer some on-site justice; Rifleman Bank is in some ways even worse because Pieter Burke, the local Belltower bigshot, isn't a scripted fight, making him unique among bosses in that no matter how much you feel he deserves to die, you can't actually kill him without breaking pacifist conduct.
  • Painting the Medium: When Jensen wakes up in the cryogenic pod that takes him to Singapore, the edges of the 'camera' are notably coated with frost.
  • Perky Goth: The lead female of Final Fantasy XXVII.
    • Also shown in this billboard in Heng Sha.
  • Point of No Return: Ranks as Merciful. The game tells you whenever you are about to leave an area for good and informs you that any side quests will be cancelled. This includes the Final Dungeon.
  • Post-Peak Oil: Mentioned in the Backstory. Led to an economic crisis that the United States probably hasn't recovered from (and by the looks of it in the original game, never will).
  • Power-Up Letdown: You start with 2 energy cells and can eventually upgrade to 5. However, there's almost no point in this, as the only way to restore fully-depleted cells besides your last one is to use expendable, limited-number items that restore a fixed number.
    • The reason to upgrade to five cells is to use the expendables in case you need to stealth for an extended amount of time (up to 35 seconds with the upgraded Cloak and five cells) or to make multiple melee takedowns in short succession. That said, there are usually better ways to spend your precious praxis kits, especially at the beginning. But it's not completely pointless.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Hyron Project's (and by extension, Panchaea's) entire network infrastructure and security system is operated by augmented women who are permanently linked into a quantum computing hub. And they don't stop screaming for release.
  • Pretty Little Headshots: Averted with the proxy hacker at the manufacturing plant, whose controller forces him to kill himself when he's discovered. A significant chunk of his head is missing afterwards.
    • Adam too looks to have lost a good chunk of his skull and what looks like a fair amount of jaw from the headshot at the beginning of the game, though you never see his injuries clearly.
  • "Previously On...": Loading up a saved game on startup gives you a screen that recaps most of the major plot points up to date, in case you can't keep track of what's going on.
    • Most likely added because Deus Ex's story was very hard to keep track of between sittings.
  • Prison Rape: In The Missing Link DLC, you can read a reprimand issued by Belltower to its guards regarding them raping female Unprivileged Detainees in their cells. Belltower is only concerned this will damage useful subjects before they can be processed for scientific experimentation.
  • Private Military Contractors: 8 PMCs are ubiquitous in the game's world and play a large role in the plot. Belltower Associates is the leading organization on the market and also connected to The Conspiracy. In-game literature also mentions a "Bluewater" company (an obvious reference to Blackwater/Xe) embroiled in a scandal. On a lighter note, a TV schedule mentions a show abut a heroic PMC group targeted by a "UN hit squad".
  • Product Placement: In-universe: all of Adam's augmentations are branded with the Sarif Industries logo, including his new chest cavity (as seen in the opening credits). His exterior is notably missing any such branding, but his head sports a logo showing the product line of his cranial augmentations.
    • The "MAO" logo can be clearly seen on the tranquilizer rifle and the shotgun, as well as on the shotgun ammo boxes.
    • Averted by the actual development team. The making-of documentary, the post-credits images of the team, and the stock photos in the endings blur logos and, indeed, everything recognizable, even the Pope's face.
    • Another subtle aversion into Product Displacement that most people will miss: look around Pritchard's office for a pair of red cards framed on the wall. Those are Gravis Ultrasound cards, highly sought after by retrocomputing enthusiasts, but with some editing done to the ASIC labels.
  • Properly Paranoid: The ramblings you hear from characters throughout the game about governments and corporations taking over and having some sort of secret plot? Anyone familiar with one of the basic concepts behind the series knows they aren't crazy...
    • During your second visit to Detroit, you can listen to a "mad prophet" who narrates most of Deus Ex's story.
  • Psycho for Hire:
    • Sometimes, enemies who are pinning you down with wild machine-gun fire laugh maniacally. They are having way too much fun doing this.
    • Also, if the player's actions result in Malik being executed at the construction site, the Belltower guy who shoots her lets loose a cackle worthy of Snidely Whiplash.
    • The novel reveals most of the Tyrants to be this as well, though Namir and Hardesty are far less Axe Crazy and more cold-blooded than the others.
  • Put Their Heads Together: One of the possible double-takedowns.
  • Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: The AP mod for the pistol involves quantum tunnelling.
  • Rage Against the Reflection:
    • When talking to the receptionist in Adam's apartment block, you will learn that he is waiting for a replacement mirror. If you head up to his apartment and enter the bathroom, you'll see that his previous mirror has been punched. Hard. If you read the sticky note attached, it says "Call Landlord. Replace Mirror Again." And if you read the emails on Adam's computer, you find message from the landlord, who is exasperated at the amount of times this has happened, and is wondering exactly why it's continuously broken. So this isn't the first time.
    • This also comes up in one of the dialogue trees when you confront Taggart in the Detroit Convention Center. Jensen openly admits to a crowd of people (and a live news feed, at that!) his reaction upon seeing himself post-surgery.
  • Rare Candy: Praxis Kits grant you a Praxis Point immediately as if you had leveled up; very handy, although occasionally boobytrapped.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic:
    • The condition of Detroit as of Deus Ex's version of 2027 is not that big of a stretch from the real life Detroit at the present-day, with all its troubles and notoriety.
    • Hengsha, in addition to being situated on an actual island off Shanghai (albeit without the Pengu in reality), is generally based on what Chinese cities like Hong Kong would be like after a few decades.
  • Regenerating Health: Adopted alongside a more traditional Hit Point system than Deus Ex's Subsystem Damage, but with a substantially longer regeneration time than most first-person shooters using the model, especially at higher difficulty levels. Handwaved as an augmentation that Adam receives during his operation. No word on how his health regenerates during the prologue mission though; chalk it up to tutorial mode mercy.
  • Required Secondary Powers: Adam's immune system is different to most people's, allowing his body to be extensively modified without rejecting the new parts. He doesn't need the neuropozyne that drives people insane. Turns out he's the "Patient X" Reed's breakthrough meant to be revealed was based on.
    • For a do-it-yourself demonstration of Required Secondary Powers, take the high-jump augmentation, and see how often you maim yourself without also having the Icarus Landing System to go with it.
  • Restart At Level One: Invoked in The Missing Link DLC.

Keitner: Your augs are just dead metal right now.

  • Revolvers Are Just Better: Even unmodified it takes out most enemies in three shots, is very accurate and doesn't take much space. It gets even better if you add an extended magazine (up to 7 rounds), explosive rounds (that can take down even heavy robots in few shots), and a laser sight (higher accuracy). There's also the fact that ammunition can be found on every level in high quantities, and can be stacked up to 50 rounds (not counting those in the weapon). And pay attention to the reload animation before and after. Averted by the fact that the revolver seems to lack a real ironsight, only the front sight being present.
  • Ridiculous Future Sequelisation: There is a poster for a Final Fantasy XXVII, a nod to Eidos' then-recent acquisition by Square Enix.
    • In the FEMA base, you can find an email in which one worker asks another about seeing "Episode 9" later that evening.
  • Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The Purity First are this in spades, and the NSF are mentioned several times throughout the game.
  • Rule of Cool: Invoked in-universe by some Picus workers who hold this opinion about Illuminati's Got the Whole World In My Hand statue.
  • Running Both Sides: Foreshadowing the other Deus Ex games. Tai Yong Medical (under Zhao) and Humanity Front (under Taggart), both ostensibly representing opposite sides of the augmentation question are both fronts for the Illuminati. This control isn't exactly perfect, given outliers like Sarif Industries and Hugh Darrow's Spanner in the Works.
  • Running Gag: Everyone seems to know Adam's communication frequency.
    • Everyone gets Nigerian e-mail spam. It gets ridiculous when you keep finding them in the ultra-top-secret Omega Ranch, prompting one person to angrily wonder how the spam gets past their filters.
  • Russian Guy Suffers Most: Dr. Vasili Sevchenko is one of Megan's team scientists, and you meet him the beginning of the tutorial. After you find them in their captivity, you're told he is the one who made up crazy escape plans and confronted the guards all the time. Guess who doesn't make it out alive. Doubles as a Heroic Sacrifice, as his virus is the only thing that allows you to free the scientists in the first place.
    • Vasili's fate is revealed slightly earlier than the trip to Omega Ranch, when the trip to find his GPL signal results in an encounter with Tong Si Hung, who, thanks to the Harvesters he oversees, is now wearing Vasili's cyberarm.
  • Sadistic Choice: Toward the end of The Missing Link DLC, Adam is presented with a choice of letting either hundreds of innocent prisoners die in a gas attack, versus one lone scientist who could potentially expose Belltower's misdeeds to the world and bring them down. However, here is a way to save everyone, even if it's not obvious at first.
  • Scenery Porn: The game is running on a modified Crystal Dynamics engine, with a visual style heavily influenced by Blade Runner. Of course, this trope will be in effect.
  • Schmuck Bait: The biochip upgrade.
    • Trying to use takedowns on bosses. Only one boss (Namir) is vulnerable, and only during a very specific window of opportunity. Otherwise, they smack you for 50 damage.
    • I'm in Sandoval's apartment, the entire place is guarded by Purity First, there is a corpse of a Sarif Industries security guard lying on the floor, and a Praxis kit is lying next to him. This seems legit! Of course, most of these can be averted: the biochip upgrade will be seen as fishy to anyone with a hint of being Genre Savvy. This is doubled by Pritchard voicing concerns and wanting to check himself. And the booby-trapped Praxis Kit won't do anything if you invested in EMP-shielding.
  • Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right: No matter which ending you pick, Adam states this, more or less. In the "Kill everyone on the base" ending, he subverts it by saying that he chooses to destroy the base because even he doesn't have the right to choose for humanity.
    • In the backstory, Jensen refusal to fire on a augmented child despite being ordered caused him to quit SWAT and joining Sarif Industries.
  • See You in Hell: Lawrence Barrett.

Barrett: TELL 'EM BARRETT SENT YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL!

  • Sequence Breaking:
    • There are a couple of instances where you can complete main objectives ahead of time - such as in Detroit when you can take out the intercom in Derelict Row before you go to the police morgue. And true to the series, the development team already anticipated your actions.
    • The player can also sequence break by sneaking into the Hive before visiting the Hengsha Court Gardens the first time they arrive in China. Doing so triggers a cutscene showing Tong talking to a Belltower operative about Van Bruggen.
  • Series Continuity Error: In the Picus TV HQ, you can find an email that reveals that Nicolette DuClare works there. Nicolette was in her 20s in Deus Ex meaning she probably wouldn't even be born yet. That could simply be an aversion of the One Steve Limit: after all, the odds are pretty good that someone would have the same name.
  • Shaggy Dog Story: The Tie-in Novel, Deus Ex: The Icarus Effect by James Swallow. It just barely avoids shooting the Shaggy Dog at that. The protagonists survive by the skin of their teeth, but never make the slightest difference in the Illuminati's plans.
    • And the game itself, for that matter. Yes, you have four different endings to choose from which may or may not make a short term difference to the current situation, but it's not only a given that the world is gonna go to hell in the 25 years that follow before Deus Ex, but also Adam's quest to find and reunite with Megan (which he explains to her was his sole motivation behind everything he did) is completely pointless. Even after he rescues her, she doesn't get back together with him, and willingly returns to Bob Page to continue the work she was doing. Not only that, but no matter which of the Multiple Endings Adam chooses, the events of Deus Ex still come to pass.
  • Shock and Awe: One possible way to kill Fedorova: blowing Eliza's generators will electrify the coolant, stunning her and wounding you. Except you can regenerate or become immune to electricity with an aug.
  • Shockwave Stomp: The Icarus landing augmentation allows the user to jump from a rooftop and land unharmed, with the option of bowling over anyone within a small radius. Slightly buggy, as it's supposed to be non-lethal but often kills those it bowls over.
  • Shoplift and Die: Armed guards and police will respond with lethal force to any and all shenanigans.
  • Shout-Out: Boatloads.
  • Shown Their Work: The buildup of glial cell tissue is a real problem, and the real reason why we don't already have cyborg limbs in widespread use. The unfortunate side-effects of medications used to prevent this are also present in real life.
    • Batteries that can generate electricity from the sugar in human blood have also been developed in Real Life and it's expected that they could be used to power cybernetic microchips. Jensen eating candy bars to power himself up isn't so implausible as some might think!
      • Strangely, the energy bars are explicitly stated to be sugar-free.
  • The Singularity: Harvesters occasionally allude to it as their ultimate goal.
    • David Sarif also believes in it, and in Sarif ending Adam expresses the same. Hugh Darrow wanted it, but changed his mind and tried to reverse it with his signal.
    • The Illuminati and Bob Page especially also aim for this, the key difference being that they want to control how the Singularity plays out and the ensuing results.
  • Slobs Versus Snobs: The DRB live in a very run-down area, rely on sheer numbers, and get their weapons from various shady sources. The MCB live in a costly apartment, have gold-plated augmentations, give themselves fancy nicknames, and get their weapons from guys who own computers and fancy storage lockers with sophisticated security systems.
    • Tai Yong Medical cranks out cheap, mass-market augmentations built with substandard materials, and routinely engages in corporate espionage and hostile takeovers. Sarif Industries makes expensive, high-quality augs, and are forced to fight dirty to stay afloat in a volatile market.
  • Soft Glass: Averted in the post-tutorial cutscene, when Adam gets flung through a large glass computer screen he gets cut to shreds, with shards visibly sticking out of his hand, and was simultaneously disemboweled.
    • It is hinted that the glass shredded his left arm so badly that replacing it with a bionic limb was completely necessary. Also, during the surgery/augmentation cutscene, a doctor can be overheard exclaiming "How thick was that glass?!" in reference to Adam's injuries.
    • Even after being augmented with arms that can punch down walls, Adam has a hard time breaking down a reinforced glass window.
  • Sour Grapes Tropes: A lot of these regarding augmentation. Half of the Fantastic Racism against cyborgs is because people hate the Body Horror; the other half though is pure jealousy that not everyone will be able to shoot laser beams from their fingertips. The rich aren't just getting richer, they're getting superhuman because only they can afford to be.
    • Especially jarring in the perspective of the first game of the series. People go to great lengths to augment their body with biomechanical implants only to learn that twenty years later they are considered obsolete. Of course, common people in 2027 could not predict that nanotechnology will be the next big thing so quickly (besides exactly one random person you can talk to).
  • Spanner in the Works: Hugh Darrow threw a significant one in the Illuminati's plans with the Zombie Apocalypse he triggered. Ultimately, however, it's defied given how neither Darrow nor Jensen's meddling put a large dent on Bob Page's schemes whatsoever.
  • Spell My Name with an "S": It's Panchaea, not 'Panchea'.
  • Spy Speak: Played straight, averted or hilariously subverted with Anonymous X, depending on your response.
  • Stealth Pun: When looking for Eliza, the first place you look is Room 404. And indeed, File Not Found. The mainframe location? Ditto 802.11: the Wi-FI standard.
  • Stealth Run:
    • Another possible way to play through the game, just like Pacifist Run. The two will probably go hand-in-hand; avoiding people like the plague makes it easier to avoid killing them. One incentive for a stealth run is the "Ghost" bonus for moving through an area without any enemies becoming aware of you at all; it's hefty and more than makes up for the points you might have gotten by defeating the enemies in the area.
    • There are two kinds of this. One, Ghost usually gives you 500 points and is given if nothing sees you. Two, Smooth Operator (usually 250) is given if no alarms are set off in the mission. You can get both of these in mission, but it's possible to set of the alarm without being seen (leave a body where a camera or other guard can see it, or make too much noise). You can also be seen without setting off an alarm.
  • The Stinger: Megan Reed goes to Bob Page with Jensen's cell samples, leading to the creation of the Denton brothers, and the original Deus Ex. This happens no matter which of the Multiple Endings Jensen decides. Foregone Conclusion.
  • Stock Scream: Can be heard during the second visit to Hengsha, during the first augmentation glitch you experience there. A man standing by the stairs falls over the railing with a distorted-sounding scream that's either Wilhelm directly or modeled to sound like it.
  • Story-Driven Invulnerability: Generally avoided by adding areas that you are not allowed to use your weapons in. However, later in the game, important NPCs appear outside of these areas. If you shoot them, they don't even flinch.
  • Strawman News Media: Picus Communications is a nigh monopolistic combination of various Mainstream and New Media outlets, influencing public and international opinion even while manipulating the facts. Eventually, Picus tries spinning anti-augmentation sentiment against firms like Sarif Industries to coincide with Taggart's speech in Detroit. And it's all according to the Illuminati's plans.
  • Stylistic Suck: "Hearts of Steel", a hilariously bad romance novel with an augmentation slant to it. Think Twilight, but Edward's a hanzer.
  • Super Soldier: Adam, the Tyrants, and most augmented soldiers.
  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Even though ammo is extremely scarce, it's played straight in every boss battle.
    • Less than perfectly generous, though, as these supplies are usually located inside the boss room. The player is forced to collect and equip while under fire.
    • There is a storage room directly before the second boss (Fedorova) that contains a Heavy Rifle with literally hundreds of rounds of ammunition. That is a probably the single best hint the game gives you that something really bad is through the next door.
  • Sword Drag: Done by Adam in one of his lethal takedown animations.
  • Take a Third Option: The hostage situation with Zeke Sanders at the beginning of the game. Do you save Josie Thorpe and let Zeke go, or do you try to take him down and let the hostage die? Or, if you're a good enough shot, you can opt to fight Zeke and then kill him or leave him drooling on the floor before he can manage to shoot her.
    • Or, if you milked all of the possible XP out the tutorial stage, you can take the Double Takedowns augmentation, sprint up to Zeke, and use a takedown on him and Josie. If the takedown scene starts before Josie's death animation finishes, the game will overwrite her "dead" status with a "knocked out" status.
    • After dispatching the final boss, Jensen can broadcast the message of either Hugh Darrow, Bill Taggart or David Sarif, or he can Take a Third Option by activating Panchaea's self destruct sequence.
    • The Missing Link DLC forces Jensen to choose between diverting gas to one of two locations, saving either hundreds of innocents or a single scientist needed to bring down Belltower. However, an alternate route (which can only be reached with the high-jump and lifting aug, or creative use of exploding barrels and cardboard boxes) lets you destroy the gas dispersal machine itself, saving both.
  • Take Cover: A first for the series, and something of a necessity (especially at the higher difficulties), though the switch from first to third-person perspective has elicited its share of negative fan responses. Besides the advantages a third-person camera gives, however, it's no better or worse than just crouching behind the same object.
    • On stealth playthroughs, the cover system is just as useful for remaining unseen, especially since you have to crouch to walk silently and the low angle makes it hard to see around.
  • Take That: Quinn notes that the term Invisible War has been frequently misused.
  • Take Your Time: Mostly played straight, although the first mission averts this. If you dick around in the Sarif Offices when you are supposed to be rescuing hostages, you'll arrive only to find them all dead. In addition, during conversations, especially the "social combat" sequences, you'll get yelled at by the other person if you take too long picking a response.
  • Talking the Monster to Death: You can solve some problems through diplomacy, and there's even an augmentation you can dump points into that lets you read the opponent's probable reaction or provide more dialogue options. This is important: saying the right thing at the wrong time can ruin the other person's mood, and you can't get through a conversation very well by staying in the same stance throughout it. The actual conversations vary slightly every time you play the game, so you can't just go with the same responses every time.
    • You also get achievements for "defeating" the various major faction leaders in philisophical debates.
    • Averted horribly with some bosses, like Barrett... and God help you if you went the stealth/hacking route.
    • There's also the "pheremones" system which also unlocks with the basic function of the social augmentation. A little meter with pips under "Alpha/Beta/Omega" appears during some conversations. As the person speaks, parts of it will light up, indicating what forms of persuasion a person may be susceptible to, and eventually you may get the prompt to activate the pheremone system (appeasing them, talking like they're your best friend, or intimidating them, essentially). When used on quest-givers, you can coax extra information out of them. You can also use it during the "social boss battles", as a "shortcut" for winning the debate. Using this shortcut, though, may have consequences later.
      • Not to mention using the shortcut doesn't always yield you the best option. Just enough to get things done.
  • Tall Poppy Syndrome: A.K.A. The Icarus Effect. It is proposed that this is a biological as well as a social phenomenon - if a small number out of a large group attains some distinct advantage, those lacking that advantage will attack the abberants until that advantage is gone.
  • Tap on the Head: Punching an enemy's lights out leaves them out permanently unless one of their buddies can wake them up. You can lollygag for hours and find KO'd people where you left them, alledgedly alive when they should by all rights be dead from concussions and skull fractures.
    • If you start dragging a body that's been sleeping for a really long time, the "Sleeping" icon may switch to a "Dead" icon. This is believed to be a bug, however, because it does not count against the Pacifist Run achievement.
  • A Taste of Power: In the prologue, Jensen has a highly upgraded combat rifle with infinite ammo.
  • Tech Marches On: A possible in-universe case: Boxguard robots look similar to the Big Dog robot. Since Reality Subtext was always part of the game, it is possible that the developers intended the boxguards as fully functional successors to the Big Dog.
  • Technical Pacifist: Many of Adam's non-lethal takedowns are fairly wince inducing. Of course, he has to make sure they don't get up.
  • Tech Points: Praxis Points, which are granted to you after you gain an Experience Level, or when you buy/find Praxis Kits. They act as a fusion of the augs from the first Deus Ex and that game's skill system.
  • Television Geography: Averted with the Milwaukee plant, which isn't actually in the city of Milwaukee (nowhere near close enough to Detroit for such a short flight), but in Milwaukee Junction, an industrial area within Detroit's city limits.
  • Tempting Fate: An internal memo at the police department describes a young officer with friends in high places, who is to be kept in a safe position within the station until he has enough experience to be promoted. The memo mentions he's to be in charge of the armory.
    • And then there's the bodyguard in the "Rotten Business" sidequest. If you refuse to pay him for info on Ning's whereabouts, He will say something like "And don't try knocking me out or anything. It's not like I have the info conveniently on me..." As it turns out, he doesn't, but he's begging to be knocked out nonetheless; with the CASIE mod you can convince him to give you the location and then wallop him.
    • And who could forget the guard at TYM who jokes about the indignity of "death by vending machine", with throwable vending machines within spitting distance!
  • Theme Tune Cameo: There's a bum in Detroit who whistles the opening theme to the first game.
  • Time Bomb: There's a gas bomb in the factory in a room full of hostages. The player can defuse it by punching in the keycode, hacking the keypad or shooting a key component.
  • Title Drop: At the end of Adam's reconstruction sequence.
  • Too Awesome to Use: The Preorder Bonus Grenade Launcher. You get an weapon second only to the rocket launcher in terms of sheer power, that turns Jaron Namir into a joke, but you only have ten rounds of ammunition for it.
  • Trailers Always Lie: The "House Of Revenge" Trailer portrays Zhao Yun Ru as a helpless pawn in the hands of the conspirators, showing her begging for help from Adam. Of course, this trailer cut out the next few seconds of that event where she seals herself in a panic room and continues to play a major part in The Conspiracy of her own free will, eventually merging with the Hyron Project and becoming the game's final boss.
    • The same trailer seems to imply that David Sarif is actually a Corrupt Corporate Executive that you will have to confront. In reality though, while he is no saint, he has the general interest of Sarif Industries and augmentation at heart. While you do confront Sarif at one point of the game, (and even have the option of killing him at the end either directly or indirectly) it isn't as serious as the trailer makes it out to be.
    • There's quite a bit of cutscene footage from trailers that does not appear in game, and is often in conflict with it. Fedorova gunning down protesters to make the riots escalate for instance. In game, she's dead before the riots begin.
    • Several key plot moments were also altered in trailers for plot reasons: for example, the E3 2010 trailer has Jensen watching Megan getting dragged away and Barret turning up mid-rooftop fight, strangling Jensen and screaming "I'll take you to hell!". In the final game, Megan's survival is made less obvious and Barret turns up as a boss in a warehouse, rather than in the climactic showdown shown.
  • Tranquillizer Dart: Adam Jensen continues, or rather, sets the precedent for JC to follow, and has access to a tranquillizer rifle.
  • Transhuman: Well, duh.
  • Transhuman Treachery: Fears and concerns over this are partially what's driving anti-augmentation sentiment as well as terrorists like Purity First.
  • Translation Convention: Possibly. You can understand the Chinese spoken in Hengsha just fine, although Adam never seems to speak it. It seems possible that the text display in the HUD, just like everything else, is literally there and is providing him a realtime translation.
  • Trauma Conga Line: Adam, poor Adam. First, he gets involved in an incident involving shooting and killing an out-of-control augmented kid. Then he quits from his job as a S.W.A.T. officer over his superior's reaction to said incident, leading to them claiming they fired him and doing everything in their power to make him look like an unstable Jerkass entirely responsible for said incident. Then the game starts. Not too long into his new job, his workplace gets attacked, a lot of people get killed, including his girlfriend who actually survived, became lead researcher on a project that requires a constant flow of innocent abductees to be killed in order to function, and might be romantically involved with the man who shot Adam in the head and kidnapped her, and he gets severely wounded from a) being thrown through a thick glass display, b) having the crap beat out of him by an augmented supersoldier, c) shot, d) being trapped in a burning building and e) having a load-bearing wall collapse on top of him, which ironically ends up saving his life. Then he's augmented beyond the pale without his consent, although he really wasn't in any state to give any. During this process, his neighbor, unsure of whether or not he's going to survive, has his beloved dog put to sleep. Then the game really gets going, and it would take an entire page on its own to describe the shit he goes through there. About the only upsides to his life is that he's now a much more difficult target for the many people who want to kill him, and due to biological quirks he has no need for neuropozyne, which causes such crippling addictions in everyone else.
  • The Triads and the Tongs: Tong Si Hung runs the Harvesters, Hengsha's local triad gang.
  • Trick Bullet: Weapon upgrades can grant the ability to shoot bullets around corners.
  • Tuckerization: It appears that Kevin Mitnick is well and works for a large Chinese corporation as a senior network administrator.
    • Australian ex-Prime Minister John Howard is writing angry emails to Picus about the depiction of his country in the news.
  • Twenty Minutes Into the Future: It's set in 2027.
  • Twofer Token Minority: Arie van Bruggen is black, a foreigner (i.e. neither American or Canadian) and has a name that indicates he has Dutch ancestry.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: The final level of the game has been compared to Left 4 Dead.
  • Ungrateful Bastards: SWAT. If Adam gets through the Sarif Manufacturing plant with absolutely zero casualities, along with defusing a bomb and successfully conducting a hostage negotiation to convince a cornered, desperate terrorist to release an innocent woman unharmed, all they do is bitch at him because the terrorist leader escaped. If Adam manages to take Sanders down alive, they'll complain that Sanders will be able to keep spreading his hate speech.
    • Not everyone in Detroit is content with how their city is faring. And no matter what Sarif Industries does to help bring the city back up on its feet, someone's still bound to blame the likes of that company for what's wrong with it.
  • United Nations Is a Super Power: Not so much as in the original game, but from what has been seen so far, it is apparently more powerful than today, since many NPCs talk about a UN resolution and give it the same weight of importance one would give legislature in a national, state, or city government.
    • At the end, Taggart mentions reorganizing and strengthing the UN and giving it the ability to fight problems like terrorism. This may be a subtle hint that the Taggart ending was eventually the canon one, considering the state of things in the original game.
  • Unusual Euphemism: "Hanzer" for mech-augs, a slang version of "enhancer", for someone who enhances themselves, along with "Natch" for "naturals", or non-augs.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: A lot of NPCs don't blink an eye at Jensen's antics, even if logically they should have motivation to. Say you climb a fence to get into the back area of the police station, in full view of a patrolling police officer. What would you expect him to do? And, given the trope we're discussing, what do you think he actually does?
  • Up to Eleven: Using health recovery items when you're already topped off causes you to get more hit points past 100, though your automatic health regeneration won't go past 100.
  • Urban Segregation: Hengsha is the epitome of this. The rich living on the top in spacious houses and gardens. While Lower Hengsha features cramped living spaces and no view to the sky as the other city is literally built on-top of it. This even follows over into industry where manufacturing plants are in the lower city while offices and research labs are above. There a numerous numbers of people wishing to move up in the world or lamenting their current lower station in life.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: Sarif seems very upbeat about using augmentations to enhance the human race, but this trailer has him saying how some will be left behind, and that it is just "evolution".
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Panchaea, Hugh Darrow's Elaborate Underground Base where you get to decide the future course of humanity. Sort of.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • When Jensen is talking to an old colleague from his SWAT days, the player can choose to absolve him of blame for shooting a child during a raid they were part of. However, this leads to the colleague getting fired for breaking protocol - but then Jensen can arrange for him to get hired at Sarif Industries as a security guard. Of course, given the endings, this might not be such a good thing...
    • Choosing to rescue Faridah.
    • Doing a Pacifist Run even after you've gotten the achievement. It's all well and good to kill the Tyrants, who force your hand, but most of the soldiers/mercs are just doing their job, and probably have families. One e-mail in Omega Ranch has a soldier talking about his kids; if he's one of the soldiers you kill, they're getting phone calling saying that daddy's never coming home. Of course, you have a lot of options to deal with mooks that don't end in death.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: With the exception of a few certain areas, where any form of fighting is disabled, any NPC can be killed in the most graphic ways possible. Random passerby snubbing you for being augmented? No one will ever denounce you again to your face when you impale them with your arm-blades. Are those some prostitutes? Well get your slapaho on. Hobo begging you for money? A robo-fist to the face will solve that problem. Adam can solve many problems...
    • One of the first things you can do once you get a modicum of freedom is talk to Cassandra Reed, Megan's mother, tell her that her daughter died in agony burnt to a crisp and then murder her with a lethal takedown.
    • That receptionist at your apartment building? You can knock her out, take her up to your apartment, stuff her in your secret stash, and fly away to China for a few days. That'll show her to keep your shiny new mirror in the warehouse.
    • Even if you play the game "properly" this still counts. Unsuspecting guard on a smoke break? Slam your blade into their legs, and finish them off by slashing their throat open!
      • Or, hide in an air vent and use your sniper rifle to pick off members of a squad one by one, as they freak out and desperately search for you. Even the non-lethal weapons have a lot of potential: it's possible to taser/tranq somebody in the crotch.
      • It's also possible to mine corpses.
    • There's also a lot of potential during conversation, especially when talking to your ex-colleague from SWAT. Crush > Crush > Crush.
      • Even worse - you can lead him down the Absolve path, and have him plead "I need to hear you say it wasn't my fault." And then choose Crush at the tail end.
      • If you have the CASIE, you can also threaten to report him for the pills in his trash-can, in which case he comes back to kill you later meaning you can kill him without consequence.
    • Just watch the video.
    • You can pretty much murder anyone you see.
    • And then Adam Jensen walked into a bar...
    • Most-telling is that achievements relating to takedowns explicitly state that civilians don't count, as a reaction to these kinds of videos.
    • Given what Belltower mercs and Illuminati-aligned enemies in general do, it becomes significantly harder to do a full Pacifist Run when killing them is more justly satisfying.
  • Villain Ball: Barrett. He tells you the exact address of his co-conspirators seconds before trying to kill Jensen by Taking You with Me. Had he said anything else or nothing at all, Jensen would have no leads and the villains' plan would have gone off perfectly.
  • Villain with Good Publicity: We already know Bob Page is one from the first game, but Human Revolution expands heavily on that - in his e-mails, he is personable, isn't shy of using emoticons, and insists that people call him "Bob" instead of "Robert" or "Mr. Page". To give an idea how good he is, Gary Savage believes that Page will put an end to the human experimentation in Rifleman Bank Station when he hears it, not knowing that he is indirectly behind the whole project. Really, every member of the conspiracy is this with the exception of Eliza and that's only because she's an A.I. that isn't doing this willingly.
    • One of the ebooks you find mentions that Belltower was created to be a more moral PMC. Turns out that they're heavily involved in kidnapping, murder, corporate espionage and apparently torture.
  • Violation of Common Sense: The game not only allows, but expects you to create some truly insane jumping puzzles if you don't have the right augmentations to bypass an obstacle. Why invest points in hacking when you can go past a gate, or a laser grid, by creating a stairway out of cardboard boxes?
    • You can also use crates to block the lines of sight for cameras and even guards.
    • Using a fridge as mobile cover and weapon. Arguable if the fridge was intended to be used like this.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: Jensen and Pritchard snark at each other more than anything else: the fact they haven't strangled each other probably speaks volumes about how much they're willing to tolerate from each other (or at the very least, their insurance policies).
  • The Voiceless: Fedorova. Aside from a few grunts and shrieks during her fight she never speaks. In the novel it's revealed that even her fellow mercenaries can't remember the last time they heard her speak.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection: Several, including Sarif, Pritchard and Malik.
  • Waistcoat of Style: David Sarif, looking dapper (and rather geometrical).
  • "Wake-Up Call" Boss: Barrett is the first of the infamous bosses you'll face in the game, and the first sign that you should really consider investing in some combat-related augmentations.
  • The Watchmaker: An eBook on Jensen's coffee table and scattered gears suggest he's taken up clockwork as a hobby, likely to build dexterity in his new hands... not to mention patience.
  • We Can Rebuild Him: Adam Jensen.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Almost everyone, actually, leading to the Gray and Grey Morality. There are some definitely evil people who don't care about anything but killing you and anyone else in their way, but the big players fall under this trope.
    • Michael Zelazny falls under this completely. He only wants to end corruption in some of the major governments, even at the cost of human lives. He will openly admit to Adam that he knows full well that he is committing murder, and that he expects nothing more but punishment in the afterlife, but his actions are all but necessary.
    • David Sarif is a comparatively downplayed example. But while he expresses concern and occasional uneasiness regarding his actions, he's not above doing shady dealings or augmenting Adam Jensen despite his wishes after his near-death in the opening if it means protecting his company and working for the greater good. Not to mention that some of his actions have been done to keep himself and his employees safe from the Illuminati. In Panchaea he even goes so far as to suggest framing Humanity Front for the Zombie Apocalypse in order to keep augmentation progress open.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: If you waste too much time in Sarif Industries before the first mission, then the hostages will be dead by the time you get there. Expect the police force to give you an earful.
    • The SWAT officers will give you hell no matter what you do in the factory after the mission is over. Use lethal force on Sanders? You killed someone who could have been questioned, you bastard! [3] Use lethal force on the armed, hostile criminals with hostages (and who killed at least one hostage before you arrive)? You're a goddamn murderer, to quote one of the SWAT officers. Take Sanders down alive? Good job, Jensen, now he's going to be able to keep spreading his hate speech! You can't win with these guys; the best you can hope for is to save all the hostages and take down everyone alive, which will minimize the bitching-out the SWAT team gives you. It gets worse if you clear out all the attackers but don't disarm the bomb, as SWAT will blame you for the deaths of the hostages when they completely screw up the one part of the job you left to them.
  • What the Hell, Player?: If you go into the woman's bathroom before talking to Pritchard in Detroit at the start of the game, he'll sarcastically inform you that even if your new augments have you confused, they didn't turn you into a woman.
  • What You Are in the Dark: The Missing Link DLC, which involves Jensen finding himself in a Belltower blacksite base is ultimately this.
  • Woman in White: Megan Reed (even the room at the Omega Ranch she lives in is entirely white), and the three women who power Hyron.
  • Won't Work On Me: Jensen can nonchalantly avoid Zhao's trump card in Omega Ranch by not having his biochip replaced in Hengsha.
  • Wreaking Havok: The arm strength augmentation effectively weaponises the scenery. A thrown corpse can lure a group of guards into the open, where a vending machine can take them all out without wasting ammo.
  • Wretched Hive: Detroit, which is still a mess in 2027 despite Sarif Industries trying hard to revive it. The lower portions of Hengsha aren't much better either.
  • You All Look Familiar: Several faces are repeated, the arms dealer has the same face as a Sarif employee, a Detroit citizen, a body guard, a police officer and a tourist in Hengsha.
  • You Bastard: Should you take O'Malley's bribe and allow him to skip town in a Detroit sidequest, the description for the achievment you get for this calls you a greedy bastard. Yes, those words exactly.
    • Adam will yell this verbatim if Malik is executed.
  • Younger Than They Look: David Sarif is actually in his late 50s. In fact, he's three years older than Hugh Darrow. Probably, Sarif's hair and face are augmented. Still, it's not as if Sarif can't pass for someone who could be in his late '50s. It may simply just be an issue of Sarif aging well and Darrow aging poorly (Darrow has an unspecified genetic condition that crippled him). Take away Darrow's white hair and grandpa-like beard, they may not look too far apart.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie-like Apocalypse Caused By Malfunctioning Augmentations.

It's not the end of the page... but you can see it from here.

  1. ↑ Though the Pyro and the Engineer don't wear the shades per se: rather, the lenses on the Pyro's gasmask and the Engineer's goggles become golden.
  2. ↑ Coincidentally, this was one of the issues addressed in the Director's Cut Updated Rerelease, providing more options to tackle boss battles.
  3. ↑ The fact that you did so to save a hostage is irrelevant.
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