Like so many others, I was real dismayed when Aspyr lifted the veil on its upcoming official Deus Ex Remaster and revealed something alarmingly shiny and remarkably bulbous*. This dismay lasted about 10 seconds, at which point I remembered we PC people have access to Deus Ex: Revision (DX:R)—a fanmade and fan-maintained DX1 modernisation you can install with but a click on Steam.
The thing about Revision is it’s essentially a greatest hits of Deus Ex modding. Packed in with its reworked maps are beloved gameplay overhauls like Shifter, BioMod, and Human Renovation, along with new, more modern renderers. Even better: you can turn all the new stuff off and just play vanilla Deus Ex with full compatibility for modern systems and resolutions. You really don’t need anything else, at least in my experience.
Even better news: to mark its 10th anniversary (and with great timing, considering the DX remaster stuff), Revision just got its first update since 2023, giving the whole thing a spit-shine, fixing some lingering bugs, and adding some memory-assistance features which are increasingly relevant to the hoary age bracket still playing this game (me): you can now toggle on a saved passwords/keycode feature that will pop up and let you insta-input codes you’ve found in the world into the game’s many terminals.
Which is all well and good, but I actually want to talk about a different update. At the same time as DX:R got its update, The Nameless Mod (TNM) got a humungo-patch too. If you’re not familiar, TNM is a total-conversion mod that originally launched all the way back in 2009, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
I will now describe the plot to you. Be warned: this description will make it sound insufferable, but trust me when I tell you it’s actually incredibly good. TNM is a product of the now-defunct Planet Deus Ex forums—in essence, it’s a cyberpunk spy story immersive sim (you know, like Deus Ex) set in those actual forums themselves, with pretty much every character you meet representing (and often, played by) a forum regular. Your quest is to uncover what happened to one of the forum’s abducted moderators.
No, really, it’s genuinely good. The mod-makers absolutely nailed Deus Ex’s variability of approach, created two entirely distinct playthroughs, and it even manages to be pretty likeable even with some dated ‘sporks and llamas’ internet humour in there. In many ways, it’s a better sequel to DX1 than Invisible War, and I say this as an inveterate Invisible War defender.
The new update took three years to piece together and its list of changes is longer than my arm, but “brand new levels have been introduced for players to find, along with more secrets, new items, new modes, and more.” It incorporates changes—like the password manager function—from the DX:R update too.
If you fancy playing it, you can install TNM from the DX:R Steam Workshop, and if—like me—you played the mod all the way back in 2009 and feel nostalgic, you can now also install a mod that lets you toggle on its original ’09 maps at the start of a new game. Who needs remasters, eh?
*This is also the title of the sequel to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that I once pitched.
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