It is a truth universally acknowledged that every time you mention Deus Ex：Human Revolution, someone somewhere re-installs it. Trite, but often uncomfortably accurate.

My own curiosity-killed-the-cat moment happened over Christmas last year. Going back to Scotland meant waving a tearful farewell to desktop PC and consoles behind, and the need to work on the train meant lugging a woefully underpowered laptop around. Still, a little retro gaming inspired by a trip to Reddit would soothe my soul, right?

Well, almost. Look at this:

And that’s actually one of the better looking screenshots I could find.

While you get over the sight of all that terrible head trauma poor Gunther seems to have suffered, I’ll give you a little background.

Deus Ex was a real rough diamond of a game, coming around as it did at a time when game developers were really stretching themselves, breaking the stale genre boundaries that had come to characterise 90′s gaming, and pushing the technology of the consoles of the time to its limit. PC gaming was at one of its periodic high points, with Counter Strike and The Sims proving that there was life in the old dog yet.

So it’s really no surprise that Ion Storm’s first person RPG found an audience. What was surprising, and gained the game such critical praise and enduring player popularity, was the way that it blended astonishing narrative complexity and deeply satisfying gameplay, with a real sense of making choices that defined your journey through the game. Sure, you were always going to end up at the same place, but the way you got there defined how your character related to the people, plots and secret agencies around him.

And that ridiculously dystopian plot! From relatively humble beginnings as a nano-enhanced UN agent investigating and thwarting terrorist attacks, the narrative twists and turns like a labyrinth, taking in secret government conspiracies, organised crime and the Illuminati. It’s difficult to imagine anyone managing to play through Deus Ex without developing a deep and abiding distrust of anyone in authority claiming to represent their best interests