She sneaks into compounds where guards walk in perfectly straight, never-changing paths, always carry keycards in their back pockets, and can be knocked into deep, peaceful sleep with a blow to the back of the head. Neon Struct places you in the shoes of a spy named Jillian Cleary, who works for the kind of covert agency that puts a giant glowing eye in the lobby of its headquarters. Instead of trying to fix the limitations of late-’90s sneaking games, it embraces them, paring away everything except the genre’s most basic tropes.
I mention this because Neon Struct, a paranoia-inducing little stealth game, is the stripped-down Deus Ex I didn’t know I was waiting for. The more realistic it got, the more scripted it felt, like some kind of ludic uncanny valley effect. It’s since seen a sequel and multiple prequels, but the original game owes a lot to its crudeness.
Deus Ex somehow managed to feel both perfectly self-contained and open - each level was a living environment and a carefully designed map that could be traversed in any number of (usually stealthy) ways. If you’re a non-PC gamer who has expressed even vague interest in the medium, you’ve probably had a few dozen people beg you to play Deus Ex, the 2000 cyberpunk game in which all conspiracies are true and all rooms are connected by conveniently man-sized HVAC ducts.
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