Video Game / Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

I once thought I could save the world. Now look at it.

"There will come a time, when we will all have to choose a side."

— Viktor Marchenko

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, released in August 2016, is the direct sequel to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the fourth main installment in the Deus Ex Universe and the first to feature the same Player Character as the previous game. It was developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

At the end of Human Revolution, Cyborg private security officer Adam Jensen failed to prevent a shadowy organization from causing every Transhuman on the planet to go into a fight-or-flight response and attack anyone near them. This event led to the deaths of more than 50 million people and caused humanity to turn against those with augmentations, beginning a dark age for human technology and culture.

Two years later, in 2029, Jensen has joined forces with an Interpol-funded task force aiming to hunt down and capture augmented terrorists in a world that now hates and fears transhumans because of his mistakes.

A standalone DLC, System Rift was released in September 2016 in which Jensen works with Frank Pritchard of the previous game. A second standalone story DLC, A Criminal Past, was released on February 23rd, 2017, and is a prequel mission that follows Adam during one of his first missions for TF29. A third DLC mission, Desperate Measures, was initially released as a preorder bonus and later available as a free download. Unlike the other two DLC missions, it ties directly into the plot of the main game, with Jensen pursuing a new lead in the train station bombing investigation.

Two standalone titles related to Mankind Divided were released on January 24th, 2017 — a free-to-play version of the Breach multiplayer mode, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - The VR Experience, which allows players to visit four locations from the game if they have a VR headset.

A macOS and Linux port was also confirmed by developer Feral Interactive a mere week after the Windows launch. The Linux version was released on November 3rd, 2016, and the macOS port was released over a year later on December 12th, 2017.

Many things about Mankind Divided's plot overtly pointed towards the game being intended as the second entry in a trilogy, and many members of its development team had for a time listed working on a game project codenamed "MD2" on their various online work profiles. The vast majority of said developers have, however, since quit Eidos Montreal and moved on to other studios and projects, strongly indicating that the third installment has been Quietly Cancelled.

A potential sequel starring Adam Jensen once again, has since been tentatively put back on the table, with Square Enix selling the Deus Ex IP to the Swedish holding company, Embracer Group, in May 2022. Both Eidos Montreal and Embracer Group have both made vague statements about being open to the idea, but announced in January of 2024 that the in-production sequel had been cancelled (following a $2 billion investment partnership that fell through).

Previews: Announcement trailer, E3 2015 trailer, 101 Trailer, The Mechanical Apartheid live-action trailer.

Beware of unmarked Late Arrival Spoilers for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

---

Mankind Divided contains examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: Besides the run of the mill ammo and its armor piercing counter part, some weapons can use specialized EMP ammo that will short out security measures and drones.
• Agent Provocateur: This is basically what Viktor Marchenko is. He's working for the Illuminati in order to goad the Augmented Rights Coalition into terrorist attacks. He believes, once they've killed a bunch of innocent people, the Illuminati will be able to pass their Human Restoration Act.
• The Alcatraz: The Penthouse, setting for the DLC "A Criminal Past". It's a brutal, seemingly inescapable prison located in the wastes of Arizona on top of a butte, reached only by automated VTOLs and featuring extensive anti-air defenses just on the very outside. Seeing as it's designed to contain heavily augmented prisoners, these measures may, in fact, be required - not to mention the fact that each one is infected with a smart "virus" upon arrival to disable most of their augs.
• All Crimes Are Equal:
  • The Prague police recognizes two types of criminal offenses: those meriting an instant execution, and those meriting a five second warning followed by an instant execution. Cut in line to a government office so that you're technically standing with one foot inside a "restricted area"? Better turn back fast, because every policemen in Prague is already reporting to their higher ups and reaching for their machine guns to perforate your terrorist ass with bullets.^note There's definitely a bit of Gameplay and Story Integration at play here, however, as it is repeatedly mentioned, and in fact used as a plot point in several points, that the Prague police has become insanely brutal and ruthless in the past few years and that the train station bombing has only made things worse. During the curfew following the Golem City uprisings, you will be sneaking through the streets seeing policemen actually giving other NPCs instant executions for going outside, just like they would've given the player. According to their Enemy Chatter, it's apparently legal to do this to augmenteds. The general population seems to share their sentiments: be seen by a random stranger hacking the keypad on somebody else' storage unit (which presumably doesn't look like anything more than Jensen standing nearby it and squinting)? Until the panic fades, every citizen in Prague is going to be crying for their lives or running around hysterically shouting for the police to come gunning you down with their exosuits.
  • Becomes a plot point in A Criminal Past. Because of laws passed in the aftermath of the Aug Incident, augmented prisoners are subject to summary execution orders should they step too far out of line. In theory, there is a list of specific crimes eligible for such punishment and at least some judicial oversight; in practice, the guards at the "Pent House" abuse loopholes in the law to execute any prisoner they want. Often to harvest their augmentations and sell them on the black market.
• All Elections Are Serious Business: Radko Perry's political campaign is filled with bombastic speeches and virulently anti-Aug rhetoric, local news outlets are holding polls, and he is subject to blackmail that, with the death of the investigative reporter who dug up the dirt on him, is threatening to erupt into a full blown scandal. The office he's running for? Head Secretary to the Office of the Regional Inspector of Municipal Affairs... essentially the chief inspector for the city's water and sewage systems.
• All for Nothing: In practice, this is what choosing to go after Allison Stanek instead of infiltrating the VersaLife vault amounts to in the endgame. Because the Orchid vaccine is unique and cannot be obtained elsewhere, Jensen will not be able to save Miller's life at the climax, and the bomb shut-off code is rendered moot anyway if the player manages to reach and beat the Final Boss in time, which is not a hard feat in the first place. All doing this manages to accomplish is denying you of the Golden Ending.
• All There in the Manual: Due to the Expanded Universe, many background events and major revelations are only covered in novels and comics seen in the Deus Ex Universe:
  • The game starts In Medias Res, with Jensen on a mission with Task Force 29 and glossing over the reason why he joined them in the first place. To understand what exactly happened, players will have to read Deus Ex: Black Light and the Deus Ex: Children's Crusade comic series, which details how Adam got involved with them and his first mission.
  • Alejandra Vega goes from flying Ben Saxon to Australia to take down the distributor behind poisonous Neuropozyne (in Deus Ex: The Fall) to Mankind Divided, where she's working directly alongside Adam on Janus' behalf, and their behavior indicating that they've been partners for some time. Their meeting is detailed in Deus Ex: Hard Line, a novella that's included with certain copies of the game.
  • In The Art of the Deus Ex Universe, it's revealed that Adam Jensen's new VTOL Pilot Elias Chikane is actually a double agent, working on behalf of the Illuminati to observe the comings and goings of Task Force 29 directer Jim Miller. However, most players wouldn't know that because that little piece of information is actually found in the artbook◊. The game itself strongly hints at this revelation, but never officially clarifies it.
• Ambiguous Clone Ending: Maybe. You can find a body container inside Versalife vault; the head and torso that can be seen with x-ray and through a small, frozen window bear a striking similarity to Jensen's own body and face, sans augs. There's a nearby pocket secretary that details the corpse's condition, and as it happens, it also has the same blood type as Adam. To add some more fire into the fire, this game establishes that memory-transfer microchips are currently being tested.
• Anti-Frustration Features: There's plenty of quality-of-life changes to gameplay mechanics from Human Revolution.
  • Adam no longer has a Sprint Meter, allowing for faster movement without having to take breaks.
  • Adam will now grab ledges when you reach them during a jump, making entering places (such as ceiling-mounted vents) easier.
  • Starting the Hacking Minigame while cloaked now keeps Adam invisible until he's done.
  • If you've already found a password in-game, the keyboard/numpad interface it belongs to allows you to autofill the code without having to enter it yourself, saving a lot of time in the process (especially on consoles). Additionally, entering a password now awards XP equivalent to hacking, meaning there is now a benefit to finding a password beyond access to terminals above your hacking level.
  • You can now craft equipment - such as healing items, power recharge items, mines and even multitools - from stuff you find lying around, which can make your life much easier.
  • Gas-filled areas generally have a shutoff valve located nearby, allowing players to minimize energy and/or health drain from simply exploring the area, and even making the rebreather an optional augmentation in instances where the valve can be reached quickly.
  • Jensen's firearms, if applicable, can actually "store" one magazine's worth of each ammunition type that's available to them, with certain exceptions like the Devastator shotgun, which can only load AP slugs. Making use of this can allow the player to feed unused ammo into their guns to free up valuable bag space, especially if said ammunition has considerable inventory footprint like the grenade launcher's 40mm rounds.
• Arc Number: While prior installments also featured the number, 451 (sometimes 0451) shows up a lot in Mankind Divided, perhaps more so than in any previous game:
  • 0451 is the combination for the first keypad encountered in the game - there is even an achievement for punching it in.
  • Flight 451 is the flight number of a crashed airliner that was blamed falsely on an augmented passenger.
  • Resolution 451 is the UN resolution that established Task Force 29, the Interpol unit for whom Adam works and the forerunner of UNATCO from the original Deus Ex.
  • Facility 451 is where Adam was taken for emergency treatment and installation of the new augmentations featured in the game after the Aug Incident and the destruction of Panchaea at the end of Human Revolution.
• Arc Words: #CantKillProgress, if the Alternate Reality Game stream and the official Twitter account for the game is anything to go by.invoked
• Arm Cannon:
  • Jensen has a P.E.P.S. from the previous game mounted in his arm as well as a Nanoblade Launcher and a TESLA aug that lets him launch homing electric discharges. The many heavy mooks and police units wearing Powered Armor also have machineguns mounted on their left hand, that they can use to hose Jensen down with.
  • Marchenko has a Frickin' Laser Cannon in his right arm. Even with fully-activated Rhino Dermal Armor, it's capable of tearing Jensen to shreds in less than three seconds. If you want a conventional final boss fight and not a game of hide and seek? Get the Titan Armor.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: A report found in the Palisade Blade lists hacking attempts by continent/region, generally ranging in the millions to hundred millions and even cracking the billions for satellite-based hacking attempts... plus 12 hacks originating from Antarctica.
• Artistic License – Law: In the second DLC, A Criminal Past, Adam infiltrates the Penley T. Housefather Correctional Facility aka "The Pent House", named for a fictional US Senator who successfully lobbied for the Terminal Violation Policy. Under this policy, the prison is permitted to deliver 24-hour execution orders without trial or appeal, if an inmate is judged to have committed an infraction falling under certain the "Terminal Violation" classification. Ostensibly a means of exerting greater control over augmented prisoners, it is a major plot element of the DLC, as prison officials are killing prisoners with valuable augments and re-selling them. Additionally, the game seems to vacillate on whether the Pent House is a federal or state prison - the prison itself as well as the riot response team that shows up late in the campaign are both said to belong to the state of Arizona, yet the inmates seem to have been sent there from all over the country. This is potentially justified by the facility being the only one of its kind, being designed specifically to house augmented prisoners.
• Art Shift:
  • While Jensen himself looks identical to his Human Revolution appearance, a number of returning characters from the previous game look significantly different than their previous portrayal. For example, Bob Page looks quite different from his Human Revolution appearance (now somewhat resembling Robert Patrick), while Alex Vega has gone from Spanish-looking to distinctly Afro-Latina (possibly to make her more distinct from Malik). Also, Morgan Everett from the original Deus Ex went from a chubby with short-cropped hair to slender with a white goatee (though that could be explained by aging 20 years in the interim time frame).
  • The game itself has less of the "gold/black" artstyle of Human Revolution, and instead uses a more gritty, realistic artstyle. Though that might just be Prague and the surrounding areas; London is completely black/gold like Detroit.
• Ascended Meme: The Harder Than Hard Final Death Mode, unlocked by completing the game once, is called "I Never Asked For This".
• The Atoner: Jensen is partly motivated in this game by his failure to prevent the world from falling into chaos at the end of Human Revolution.
  Designer: Jensen's story is different, because he made a choice, and he feels very much like he failed: "I tried to save the world and look what has happened to it". And now he needs redemption.
• Back-Alley Doctor:
  • Kohler, the man Jensen trusts with maintaining his augmentations, operates out of a secret chamber underneath a book shop - while it's well equipped, it's certainly no LIMB clinic. Additionally, though Jensen initially addresses him as "Doctor Kohler", it's unclear what sort of training, if any, he's had.
  • A Criminal Past has The Fixer, an inmate who helps out in the prison infirmary (and with the prison's secret augmentation harvesting ring) and also developed a pill to counteract the effects of the prison's augmentation suppression chip. Again, it's ambiguous at best whether he was actually a doctor before his incarceration, or whether he's simply delusional.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Not long after he arrives in Prague, Jensen is caught in a terrorist attack that ends up disabling some of the upgrades he got in the previous game and he is forced to earn them back all over again. It also reveals new, experimental augs that are almost as dangerous to Jensen as his foes.
  • All of the "Jensen's Stories" DLC missions have the player starting with no active augmentations^note though two of the three missions also have the player start with a handful of Praxis points to remedy this and a limited amount of basic equipment (or no equipment at all). While A Criminal Past explains this through Jensen being undercover as a prisoner, and thus purposefully stripped of his augs and gear, the other two missions are set in the middle of the main story, with no explanation why Jensen left his highly customized weapons at home and his augs have (once again) been reset.
• Bait-and-Switch Accusation: Just as Jensen finishes planting the Juggernaut Collective bug in TF29 headquarters, Miller angrily calls him into his office, asking questions like, "Do I need to worry about you?" and "Your augs aren't making you do things, are they?" It looks as though he's been caught red-handed, but it turns out to be standard anti-Aug paranoia; Miller seems totally unaware of the bug.
• Becoming the Mask:
  • Vince Black, subject of the "Fade to Black" sidequest, seems to be slipping into this, missing mandatory check-ins with TF29 and apparently starting to blur the lines between Agent Black of Interpol and Czarnobog, his Dvali alter ego. In the end, failing to keep his dual identities separate costs him his life.
  • Hector Guerrero, whom Jensen is sent to make contact with in A Criminal Past, seems to have all but abandoned his true identity by the time he's located. His reaction when Adam tries to use his real name is as much "That Man Is Dead" as it is a practical concern that someone might overhear, and it's ultimately revealed that he had as much of a hand in the shady dealings within the prison as anyone else. Including the murders of other inmates.
• The Big Board: One appears in the organized crime section of TF29 headquarters, complete with String Theory showing links between different characters and factions. Clicking on different items on the board will cause a nearby analyst to provide background info on a given character or faction.
• Bigot with a Badge: Most Prague police fall under this. Emails suggest that the worst are assigned to Golem City.
• Bittersweet Ending: Depending on how well you do in the final mission and whether or not you got the Orchid cure from the VersaLife vault, it's possible to end up with an ending anywhere from "mostly sweet with a touch of bitterness" to "the only victory we can claim is that we got the enemy leader". No matter what happens, you defeat Viktor Marchenko, but even if he is taken alive he is only an Elite Mook for the Illuminati and he is almost certainly going to be silenced before the heroes can get anything useful out of him. In addition, Talos Rucker's murder is successfully covered up and ARC is wrongfully designated a terrorist organization. Player-controlled outcomes include whether or not Nathaniel Brown and the delegates survive to stop the Human Restoration Act from effectively stripping the augmented of their human rights, whether or not an apartment complex full of civilians was blown up, and whether or not Samizdat escaped to Paris to help found Silhouette.
• Black-Tie Infiltration: Marchenko and his team gain access to the Safe Harbor Initiative gala by posing as Tarvos Security agents. Jensen likewise has the option to keep things discreet while in view of the guests; doing so is the easiest (if not only) way to get to the VIPs in time to save them.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: Jensen will now have the ability to effectively fire nano blades at enemies, without them flipping and just bouncing off a target. Justified as the blades are ejected in a straight line from his forearm at high velocity like a crossbow bolt instead of thrown, so the flipping is eliminated, though they still have a subtle arc to them.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Jensen's retractable nanoblades that pop out of his forearms return, but this time he can learn to fire them hard enough to leave enemies Pinned to the Wall, and even make them explode on impact.
• Bland-Name Product: The people of Prague seem to be extremely fond of the "Hefercrocken" brand of beer, which is a very thinly-veiled in-world counterpart of Heineken, nameplate font, banner, and everything.
• Blatant Lies: Tarvos is trying really hard to convince the public (and even its own low level employees) that it is not simply a rebranded Belltower. One email found in the Desperate Measures DLC is adamant that Tarvos and Belltower are Different. Companies.... despite the fact that the company rosters are largely the same and - said email's assurances to the contrary - Belltower's top executives simply switched titles and roles when forming Tarvos.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: A lot of the Czech signs in the Prague level were clearly translated by Google Translate. Notable examples would be: Do not enter [the restricted area] translated as Nezadávejte (Do not input), Soft drink as Jemný nápoj (Gentle drink) and Delivery storage room as Dodávka komora (Van pantry).
• Bookcase Passage:
  • The Time Machine bookstore has one, that leads to an underground augmentation clinic.
  • Elias Chikane's place has a secret room hidden behind some shelving.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The humble Tranquilizer Rifle, much as it was in previous installments of the series, is good enough to see the player through the entirety of the game, particularly when outfitted with weapon mods. While its reload cycle is not particularly great and it drops Adam's cloak while he's using it, it's given right at the beginning of the first mission, is capable of a one-hit knockout on any enemy with a headshot, and ammo for it is cheap and plentiful. The Elite Edition variant of the rifle is an even more pronounced version of this — it's slightly smaller (saving on inventory space), eliminates the problem of reloading cycles, has an integrated silencer and is able to hip-fire rounds quickly, with the only tradeoff being a slightly-lowered maximum effective range.
  • The basic Combat Rifle can accept a scope, silencer, and AP rounds, making it an extremely versatile lethal weapon that can get you through pretty much any combat situation. As for the boring part, it's the long range lethal option for the first weapon you get and it's one of the most common enemy armaments in the game.
• Bottle Episode: The three DLC missions take this form to varying degrees.
  • Except for the intro and ending cutscenes,^note the former also containing a brief conversation battle all of Desperate Measures takes place within the local Tarvos headquarters and attached metro station.
  • While the prison complex encompasses several buildings, some of which are fairly expansive, all of A Criminal Past takes place within an aug-only correctional facility.
  • System Rift does take place in a more open area than the other two DLC missions, being set in the area of Prague around the Palisade Blade, however it is still cut off from the sections of Prague that form the main story's hub.
• Brain Uploading:
  • This is the ultimate goal of the Church of the MachineGod to join the Singularity via the "Ascension." When Adam explores their compound, he can find a gigantic machine on the top floor dedicated to this purpose - stopping the cult from doing so is the objective of one story mission.
  • The explanation for how Daria became the Harvester involves this to some degree. Certain aspects of the original Harvester's personality were uploaded onto a chip which was then implanted in Daria's brain, with the goal of curing her social phobia. Unfortunately, it seems as though all of the Harvester's personality was uploaded to the chip...
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In the basement of Future-Past Antiky, there is a well-hidden copy of Human Revolution.
  • In-universe. Eliza Cassan may wink at Jensen from a TV when she says she's reporting "live" from Picus, since he's one of the few people who know she's an AI.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • The player can purchase Praxis kits and credits from the online store. In batches of ten and chits worth fifteen grand. In-game, Jensen rarely finds a chit with over two hundred credits on it, Praxis kits cost ten grand apiece - and no store sells more than two of them at a time.
  • The Tactical Pack is even better.
    • The loot isn't anything to write home about, but the Micro Assembler aug is amazing; it enables Jensen to break up enemy weapons and ammo for crafting material. Given how every enemy in the game obviously carries one of each, Jensen can forgo hand-held weapons entirely, breaking up everything he finds to make ammo for his Arm Cannon - with enough left over to craft more biocells and unlocking tools than he knows what to do with.
    • Its other high-value item is the Elite Tranquilizer Rifle, a semi-automatic version of the usual model that also has a smaller inventory footprint; while two grids might sound insignificant, their true worth lies during the opening segment of the game when bag upgrades haven't been purchased yet and you have more Inventory Management Puzzle to play with. Combined with the aforementioned Micro-Assembler augmentation, you can gain a bit of crafting parts very early on by dismantling the free rifle Miller gave you during the opening and just stick to the Elite model for the rest of the game. While it does have a slightly shorter maximum range (40 meters vs the base model's 55 meters), not a lot of engagements in the game occur at such extreme distances, and the few that do can be navigated around rather easily, making this a bit of a non-issue if you know your surroundings.
• Broken Bridge:
  • Prague's Red Light District (and the Dvali compound beyond) is off limits behind indestructible gates until Jensen returns from Golem City. The bartender at the Red Queen later explains that the district is only open during certain hours.
  • In A Criminal Past, Jensen is restricted to the cell blocks and exercise yard until after the riot starts. Heavy blast doors bar the main entrance to the prison command tower^note and beyond it, solitary confinement and the administration building while the secret Air-Vent Passageway inside is blocked by an indestructible grate and an industrial fan that can't be switched off. During the riot, the blast doors are lowered, the fan is disabled, and prisoners have broken through the vent.
• Bullet Time: Focus mode, which puts the game into a slow motion, allowing the player to more easily aim and assess a situation.
• The Bus Came Back: The "System Rift" DLC has Jensen once again working with Frank Pritchard.
• Cassandra Truth: Dr. Auzenne gives Jensen a vial of neuropozyne during their first meeting in her office, only for Jensen to tell her he doesn't need it - unlike virtually all other augmented people, his body doesn't reject augmentations. She of course doesn't believe him.
• Checkpoint Starvation: Playing on "I Never Asked For This" completely disables quick and autosaving, leaving you with one manual save slot that will be wiped when you die, so no Save Scumming for you! This is ramped up to eleven if you play on the console versions of the game, due to those specific builds having a limited number of save slots possible (11, though the PlayStation 4 version got a bump to 40 after Patch 1.04), and "I Never Asked For This" requires an empty slot to save in (i.e. no overwriting), so if you've already filled up every single one beforehand, you will flatly be unable to save, period.
• Chekhov's Gun: Subverted. Much like Panchaea from Human Revolution, Rabi'ah is an impressive megastructure project that is constantly hyped and referred to throughout the game. It's easy to guess that a latter point in the game will feature a visit to the place, or that it would at least play a significant role in the plot... It does, sort of - but by its nonexistence. Turns out that the concept of Rabi'ah was just a tiny little bit too ambitious for reality and that the arcology could never become the augmented paradise it's been sold as. The financial and political ramifications of the world finding out their dream solution to the aug problem is an impractical technological abortion is what drives much of the Illuminati's scheming.
• City of Adventure: Most of the game takes place in and around Prague, making brief mission forays to other locations.
• Color Motif: The gold-and-black color motif returns, but while Human Revolution placed a heavier emphasis on the gold, Mankind Divided uses a lot more black, contrasting the latter's Crapsack World with the former's augmentation golden age. Furthermore, a new faction heavily features blue-and-white, serving as a Call-Forward to the original game's color motif.
• Comically Missing the Point: In System Rift, Baba-Yaga 50 asks Jensen what his ripper handle is. Jensen, who is not a ripper, says it's classified. Baba-Yaga thinks 'Classified' is the handle, and compliments Jensen on having such a cool username.
• Concealing Canvas: Continuing the trend from Human Revolution, a number of safes and hidden stashes can be found behind paintings and other decorations. Most are accessed via computer command or hidden switch, though in at least one instance, a secret alcove can be found by either turning off a TV or simply looking behind it.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The first mission in Dubai is an operation to capture an ex-Belltower operative turned arms dealer who was last seen on Rifleman Bank Station.
  • The Palisade Bank Vaults, in addition to holding valuable loot and secret information, also have some throwbacks to Human Revolution; the Tarvos Security vault, for instance, has some old Belltower soldier and Spec-Op uniforms and a wanted poster for "Garvin Quinn" (indicating that Tarvos is just a re-branded Belltower), while the TYM vault contains a Hyron drone suit and one of the anatomy statues from Omega Ranch.
  • Jensen's undercover identity in A Criminal Past is Derrick Walthers, possibly as a nod to Michelle Walthers, the nurse who rescued him from White Helix Labs when he was a baby.
  • A number of references are made to Jensen's status as a medical marvel, as the only known person whose body doesn't reject augmentation implants. Most notably, Megan Reed's "Patient X" notes from Human Revolution are reproduced in full. More subtly, neuropozyne vials serve as Shop Fodder - or at best as items to be traded for info or favors - as Jensen has no need for them himself.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: This being Deus Ex, quite a few, but some stand out.
  • Masaaki Oshiro, CTO of Palisade Property Bank, has effectively murdered at least one employee for getting too close to corporate secrets. Both he and Ashani Talwar, his wife and CEO of the company, are also well aware of a number of corporate conspiracies, as their business is primarily based around safely storing corporate information, but do nothing about them because it would be bad for business. This includes things like Picus literally editing photos of augs being beaten by non-augs to show the opposite, or keeping data on contaminated drinking water quiet so it'd make a bigger story. In the System Rift DLC, Shadow Child says that Oshiro regularly hires assassins to kill rippers like her. Later on you can learn that a number of Tarvos security guards have been killed by the bank's automated security, allegedly due to suicidal action but more likely as further cover-ups. And on top of all of this murder and shady business dealings? They use their access to data on other companies to carry out massive-scale insider trading, to the point that the Illuminati took notice; Sardakis was killed because she was about to figure this out.
  • Nathaniel Brown, who seems to be part of the Illuminati's plan to relocate augmented people to the city his company is building. One of the biggest twists in the game is that he's actually just a corrupt corporate executive; Rabi'ah isn't part of the conspiracy at all, and would fail under the pressure of added population if the Illuminati's conspiracy actually worked. He's only been talking it up to lure investors, and has been secretly campaigning against the Human Restoration Act. If it were to actually pass his company would lose trillions, but if he publicly opposes it the investors might back out.
  • As mentioned above, Picus does its share of dirty reporting, to the point of making up events to report on, although that's mostly covered under their links to the Illuminati. By the end of the game, though, it's not clear whether any of what shows up on Picus is actually true.
• Crapsack World: Transhumans have been segregated into ghettos and are heavily discriminated against. Transhuman terrorist groups have sprouted up in response, and regularly carry out attacks that kill many innocents. Unlike the world of Human Revolution, society as we know it is no longer on the cusp of a golden age, but seems to be drifting into the decline that leads into the original Deus Ex game.
• Crazy Cat Lady: One of Jensen's neighbors is completely obsessed with cats. She's a rare non-comedic version too, as she turns out to be a Serial Killer.
• Cult: A pair of cults make appearances in the game:
  • A disgraced magician uses a variant of social enhancer technology to bring disaffected people under his spell and form a community in the sewers, ostensibly out of a desire to shield them from the dangers of the world above. In an early side quest, Jensen is asked by an exiled cult member to break the spell and free his fellow cultists.
  • The Church of the MachineGod is made up of augmented people attempting to achieve technological immortality through the "Ascension", a form of Brain Uploading. Depending on which mission the player chooses towards the end of their second stint in Prague, they may be tasked with attempting to prevent the cult leader from carrying through with the Ascension.
• Cutting Off the Branches: While canonically Panchaea was destroyed, it's unclear if Jensen was the one responsible, so the Eliza ending isn't necessarily canon either, and the game notes that Panchaea would have been crushed by the pressure of the ocean once Hyron was deactivated, which happens in all endings. Further, three of the endings in Human Revolution' amounted to sending out stories about what caused the Aug Incident, while Mankind Divided mentions that there were many, many theories and rumors that sprang up surrounding that incident, which neatly subsumes all three of those endings. It's implied that Darrow and Taggart died in Panchaea's destruction, with Darrow's wish for mechanical augmentation being viewed as a threat to humanity being realized and the U.N. creating the Taggart Act, which severely regulated and restricted augmentation manufacturing. Sarif survived, but was severely injured and was hospital-bound for months. Almost every augmentation manufacturer has gone out of business due to the Taggart Act; with the exception of the Illuminati-backed Tai Yong Medical, who went on to release a "prevention" chip in 2028 and progressively bought the assets of all their rivals, including Sarif Industries. An Easter Egg obtained by examining Jensen's cereal in his apartment reveals that Malik canonically survived.
• Cyberpunk: More so than the previous installment. Technology has allowed humanity to move far beyond our biological limits, but people's distrust and lack of information have turned Earth into a Crapsack World where any using such technology are feared and hated.
• Cyberspace: Breach gameplay mode is played inside cyberspace.
• Data Drive MacGuffin: Eliza Cassan's personality and memories are stored on an old zip disk. One side quest sees Adam retrieve the disk and reconstitute the true, self-aware Eliza before agents from Picus destroy it.
• Deadly Dust Storm: The opening mission has the Task Force team racing against the clock on a mission before one hits Dubai.
• Deep Cover Agent:
  • Various emails found throughout the game world indicate that Elias Chikane was, or still is, a deep-cover operative for the Illuminati. Emails found in his apartment indicate that the group approached him because he was having financial troubles, and asked him to meet at a specific location. Additionally, the IP addresses from the emails are the same as those that come from other Illuminati sources in Hengsha. The Art of Deus Ex Universe book also states this about the character.
  • At the end of the game, Dr. Delara Auzenne is revealed to be this during The Stinger.
  • Arun Singh is Task Force 29's undercover agent inside the Jinn. Should Adam succeed in rescuing him during the prologue, he will pop up in TF29's headquarters just long enough to say he's going back in.
  • In A Criminal Past, Adam is tasked with making contact with Hector Guerrero, an agent stated to have been undercover in the Junkyard gang for 26 months.
• A Degree in Useless: Adam Jensen can talk to a homeless aug who claims that people think she's just a stupid bum, and tries to rebuff that opinion by saying that she has a degree in art history.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • It is possible to obtain the neuroplasticity calibrator from Otar Botkoveli's office even before you meet Koller for maintenance. In fact, doing so will net you an achievement.
  • You can find and take down Radich Nikoladze in his hideout at the Dvali territory during your second visit to Prague, even when the game never tells you to face the man at that stage. Doing so will result with his second-in-command, Otar, taking his place when Miller orders you to obtain information from the Dvali regarding Marchenko's plan. Furthermore, if you're on good terms with Otar (which can be achieved by completing all his side missions), he will welcome you with open arms during the latter.
  • Clearing the shady checkpoint in Prague before you can possibly have any idea about what's going on will trigger a different reaction from Milena when you finally confront her.
  • Should the player return to Ruzicka Station late in the game, despite having no reason to do so, they will find the police have left, the subway platform has been blocked off from the rest of the station,^note You can still explore the whole station via the vent shafts. and a makeshift memorial has been set up on the platform stairs. There's even a bottle of neuropozyne sitting on one of the steps.
• Didn't Think This Through: When Viktor injects Adam with the Orchid and leaves him to die at the GARM facility, it doesn't cross his mind to disarm Adam of all his weapons and gear. Or stab him in the head. Or shoot him. Or blow him up with a grenade. The result is that Adam still has all the tools he needs to fight his way out of the facility. To be fair, Viktor had no idea that Adam was immune to the Orchid, but he still could have impounded his gear for Illuminati use.
• Difficult, but Awesome: As in Human Revolution, sometimes attacking the Diagnostic node directly while hacking can really pay off, doubly so considering how many booby traps there are on a high-security board. The catch is that Diagnostic nodes retain their tendency to sit behind one-way paths, making it impossible to capture them, but on the rare occasions that they aren't, it's usually much safer to nab them directly instead, as this will secure all of the datastores on the board as well without having to claim them yourself and risk running out of time, due to the ramped up security rating of such nodes as soon as you're detected.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The treatment of transhumans in Mankind Divided heavily references the real world history of countries like South Africa, with their situation even being called "mechanical apartheid".
  • A civilian in Prague complains about the augmented population, many of whom immigrated there in the pre-Incident days to take advantage of the country's (then) aug-friendly incentives. The man blames the augmented population because the other countries "did not send their best", going on to claim that the transient workers brought crime, brought drugs, and were rapists.
  • An oppressed minority is forced to live in a ghetto in Prague. Said ghetto is named ''Golem city"
  • Any subtlety in the matter gets dropped completely after people start using phrases like 'anti-aug racist' and 'your people' (referring to Jensen).
  • In addition to Augs being deported to a ghetto, references are made to "The Aug Question" and the "Office of Augmented Affairs". There are even characters who suggest "shipping them off to some island," a possible reference to the Madagascar Plan.
• Doomed by Canon: Adam Jensen wants to stop the Illuminati and make the world a better place for augmented humans. But as we know from Deus Ex not only will the Illuminati not be stopped, but they will be supplanted by the even more evil and dangerous Majestic 12. And augmented humans will be at best made obsolete by nanotechnology.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Chang asks Jensen for help tracking down the Juggernaut Collective's mole in TF29, not realizing that Jensen is said mole. However, Chang does catch on if Jensen behaves like a Kleptomaniac Hero in TF29's headquarters.
  • At the end of the sidequest "Fade to Black", Delara laments that Black fell victim to Becoming the Mask, which she says is a common fate of those who live a double life. She doesn't realize that her statement also applies to Jensen, who unbeknownst to her is a spy for the Juggernaut Collective. Subverted as Delara is later revealed to be well aware of Jensen's divided loyalties, and The Stinger shows that Delara is herself a deep cover agent of the Illuminati.
• Drugs Are Bad: Played with to varying degrees with the game's Fantastic Drugs:
  • Neon is 100% fatal to Augs, is tied to both street gangs and Mafiya-level organized crime, and is sufficiently addictive that even its makers and distributors are getting hooked.
  • Deliberately invoked by anti-Aug bigots with regards to neuropozyne. It being a medical necessity for the Augmented has been twisted by their opponents into something akin to addiction, to the point that even one of the few (relatively) non-racist cops in the game refers to Augs having to "shoot up with that Nu-Poz."
  • In A Criminal Past, taking either the Fixer's pill or using the altered biocell is treated as at best a morally ambiguous choice, despite one or the other being the only way for Adam to regain access to his augmentations. In a nod to this trope, completing the DLC without using either - effectively a Factory Zero run - nets the player the "Winners Don't Use Drugs (or Biocells)" achievement.
• Dumped via Text Message: A couple examples appear in A Criminal Past. One email is from a man to his wife, an employee of the prison, stating he's filing for divorce after discovering her cheating. Another email thread name drops this trope, but otherwise subverts it - context makes it clear that that the email is merely the woman's latest attempt to get the message across.^note In the initial email in the thread, the woman goes so far as to threaten to file for a restraining order if her ex doesn't cease contacting her; while in another email on a different computer, she asks an HR rep for help dealing with her ex-boyfriend, elaborating that he's a fellow employee who's now harassing her.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • A staple of the series. You can go through the combat encounter with the heavily armed bad guys. Or you can spend a few minutes sneaking around them. Or you can find a convenient Air-Vent Passageway and bypass the entire room. Or turn yourself invisible with one of your augs and just walk through those guards and the Laser Hallway behind them. The game only presents challenges - how you overcome them is up to you.
  • Particularly noteworthy in the case of Ruzicka Station. The right combination of augmentations^note maxed out Icarus Dash, in particular, though the Rebreather helps as well can allow the player to reach the objective undetected in less than a minute, bypassing every guard and over 90% of the map.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Task Force 29's Prague office is built into some old, almost dungeon-like, store rooms and tunnels hidden beneath a front business. The modern high-tech employed within provides a sharp contrast to the Renaissance-era masonry it is layered over. The place has a crowded, busy, war room feel to it, with a leitmotif very similar to the UNATCO HQ theme.
• Elite Mooks: The Gold Masks aka Shadow Operatives, the combat-augmented personal operatives of the Illuminati. Also the power armored, arm cannon equipped members of the Prague police, they can even counter your takedowns unless you stun them first, whether with a stun-gun or EMP weapon.
• Entertainingly Wrong: A post-it note attached to Otar's picture on TF29's Big Board reads, "Augged?" He isn't, but Radich - head of the Dvalis and Otar's rival for power - is.
• Euphemism Buster: Several characters note how underwhelming a term "the Aug Incident" is for the events at the climax of Human Revolution. One of Lazarus's rants has him suggest several alternatives, including "Aug Massacre" and "Aug Armageddon".
• Everybody Lives: In the Golden Ending, Jim Miller, the U.N. Delegates, and the citizens of London all survive Marchenko's attack, even Marchenko himself if you've dispatched him non-lethally and didn't use his killswitch.
• Everything Is Online: You can now hack electronics from afar using the Remote Hacking experimental aug. No physical connection required.
• Explosive Overclocking: Overclock is a new mechanic implemented alongside experimental augmentations. Each of these, when initially obtained, will cause more taxing on Jensen's bodily systems, represented by a 50% bump in overclock, unless another augmentation is manually turned off to balance it out. As Overclock worsens by activating too many Experimental augmentations without balancing your system, audio-visual glitches will start cropping up with increasing intensity, and eventually random augs will start disabling themselves to forcefully lower it, or even in extreme cases, certain augs like the Nanoblade Launcher will malfunction with potentially fatal results when Jensen tries to use them. Eventually however, Jensen will manage to get his hands on a Neuroplasticity Capacitor that removes the restrictions entirely and re-enables the subsystems that were shut off, allowing you to use both categories of augmentations with absolute freedom.
• Extranormal Prison: A Criminal Past sees Jensen undercover in the the Penley T. Housefather Correctional Facility^note aka "The Pent House" a supermax prison built especially to hold augmented criminals.
• False Flag Operation: The Illuminati plan to frame ARC for terrorism by having the Illuminati's augmented Gold Mask operatives carry out a horrific terrorist attack while wearing ARC uniforms.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Neuropozyne is back from the first game, but with the augmented population reduced by the Incident and general anti-aug sentiment, the already-expensive drug has become even harder to come by, and shortages are an endemic problem among the remaining augmented.
  • Neon is a recreational drug on the streets of Prague, which is inhaled and causes the user to vividly hallucinate rich colors. Apparently it does not react well with neuropozyne though, and causes lethal seizures when the two drugs are combined in the same system.
• Fantastic Ghetto: The situation for augmented humans has gotten so bad that, in Prague at least, Augs have to live in the crappiest part of town and go through police checkpoints to get anywhere. And they're the lucky ones, the unlucky ones get shipped off to Golem City.
• Fantastic Racism: Transhumans have become second class citizens, with the world described as a "mechanical apartheid". Interestingly, this works not so much as a metaphor for racism, but for religious intolerance: They came to our lands because they were invited there (Prague actively courted Aug workers by tax benefits), but due to a global event, public perception has shifted and they're now pariahs, blamed for making a choice that however tenuously associates them with the actions of relatively few extremists proclaiming to act for all of them, with justifiable watchfulness turning into paranoia and hatred.
• Fantastic Slurs: "Hanzer" from the first game returns, but has entered much more common use. Several other slurs for augmented people take on even more dehumanizing connotations, like "clank" and "wrench". Among the augmented themselves "shiny" is a derisive term for those with new or well-maintained augmentations, carrying an implication of naivete, being too pampered, or an unwillingness to get their hands dirty.
• Fantastic Underclass: Mechanically-augmented humans have become second-class citizens viewed by non-augmented humans with fear and hatred. In Prague, where the game is set, "augs" have to live in the crappiest part of town and go through police checkpoints to get anywhere.
• Final Death Mode: After beating the game on the hardest difficulty, the player will unlock "I Never Asked For This" mode, which has only one life. Death will result in the save getting deleted^note Exact Words being in play here, as an "I Never Asked For This" save will only be deleted if Jensen dies and you let the death animation plays out and the Game Over menu pops up. If the game is forcefully exited before this happens, nothing will be affected except for the loss of progress between the point of your death and your latest save.
• Flawed Prototype:
  • The intended purpose of Orchid is to induce the same mutations that make Adam Jensen inherently aug-tolerant through a nano-viral hybrid. However, it is not quite perfected, and its flaws in its current state of development are fatally toxic; instead, it causes violent rejection of augmentations. Bob Page, amoral monster that he is, has decided to use it as an assassination poison.
  • Jensen's new augmentations are expressly described as "experimental test augs" and as having been haphazardly spliced into his previously existing systems. The result is sufficiently unstable enough that activating too many of them at once results in increasingly dangerous malfunctions.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: Jensen is now capable of this through the new Icarus Dash aug. By directing the augmentation's artificial electro-magnetic field behind him rather than below, and releasing it in a burst, he can propel himself forward to slam into an enemy with enough force to send them flying.
• Fog of War: The hacking minigame has this. Certain systems no longer show whole system at once; it has to be explored piece by piece.
• Foreshadowing:
  • At the end of the sidequest "Fade to Black", Delara laments that Black fell victim to Becoming the Mask, which is a common fate of those who live double lives. The Stinger reveals that Delara is aware that Jensen is a spy for the Juggernaut Collective and that Delara herself is an Illuminati spy living a double life.
  • If you bring up Manderley and his rapid promotion to Director of Task Force 29 while talking to Delara, she suggests that if he had help then it was from people who shared his vision. It's revealed in a post-game cutscene that she's a fellow member of the Illuminati and would know exactly how he got the job.
  • While most of the computers in Task Force 29 have security ratings of 1 or 2, Delara (the psychiatrist of all people) has a security rating of 5. Appropriate given that she's actually an Illuminati mole who would be valued with much better security than the likes of Chang or MacReady.
• Fun with Acronyms: A brief shot in the trailer shows a patch on Jensen's collar reading "ACRNM" complete with Backwards N (although this is the styled logo of real life clothing brand Acronym).
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • A minor example occurs with the security computers. Should the player access a terminal using a found password, they will still not have control of turrets or bots without the relevant hacking aug, despite the fact the computer shouldn't be able to distinguish them from a fully authorized user.
  • Another computer related example is the upgrades for the hacking aug. Higher levels of terminal are stated to have more and more security features, with the level 5 terminals featuring biometric security that the hacking aug needs extra power to fool. In gameplay, however, Adam only needs the correct code to unlock high level terminals, even though the hacking aug may not have the processing power to trick the other security mechanisms supposedly in the terminal.
  • This is actually acknowledged in the Criminal Past DLC. If you choose to restore your augmentations, the game asks you if you want to respect the continuity (the DLC takes place before Mankind Divided) or if you want to include the experimental augs in the skill tree, despite Adam not knowing about them yet.
  • Since A Criminal Past is framed by Adam explaining his experiences to Delara in the present day, if you die during the mission she tells you to focus and try to remember again.
  • From the Fixer's narration of how the Choke works in A Criminal Past, it sounds as though even the augmentation responsible for Jensen's regenerating health should be offline, or at least subject to some form of damage penalty. This is instead the only aug unaffected by the choke. Possibly justified, as the Fixer is shown to be an unreliable narrator; additionally, it would make sense for medically necessary augmentations to be an exception.
• God Guise: When talking to Allison Stanek, a member of the church of the Machine God, Jensen is mistaken for a divine messenger due to a mixture of religious fervor, her own delusions and Jensen's cutting edge implants. He doesn't play up the role, but he doesn't exactly deny it either since he needs every shred of credibility he can get to stop her from performing the Ascension ritual that would result either in Brain Uploading or a permanent interface like Human Revolution's Hyron drones, when he needs her intel to stop the bombings.
• Golden Ending: It is possible to save Jim Miller, the U.N. Delegates and stop Marchenko from detonating the bombs he placed around London. All it requires is the Orchid cure and for you to be quick.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns: Played with, given Deus Ex's penchant for blurring the lines as far as who the good and bad guys are, but at least in terms of law enforcement versus criminal/terrorist elements, certain weapons like the Machine Pistol are never seen in the hands of law enforcement. (Except for Jensen himself, should the player choose to use one.)
• Gun Accessories: As with the previous game, most weapons can mount accessories such as laser sights, scopes, and silcencers, in addition to the ability to modify their stats with generic crafting parts. New to this game, silencers can be removed for increased damage, weapons that mount multiple scope types can swap between them, and laser sights can be switched on and off. Additionally, a number of weapons with accessories already attached can now be found both in the environment and carried by NPCs - some of the DLC missions are particularly notable for this.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: The classic revolver is stated to do more damage than its modern counterpart thanks to having a larger bore. This is despite both weapons using the same caliber ammo.
• Hacking Minigame: Returns from Human Revolution with a number of changes, including both a wider variety of software aids and improved system defenses such as a Fog of War mechanic. A new Remote Hacking augmentation is also added, with mechanics analogous to a Rhythm Game.
• The Heavy: The Illuminati and their leader Lucius DeBeers are behind everything, but it's Aug terrorist Viktor Marchenko that Jensen actually spends the game battling against.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: If you stop Brown from being poisoned The Stinger reveals that Jensen is a Manchurian Agent for DeBeers to find Janus. But he severely messed up the Illuminati's plans by saving Brown. Delara even tells him, "It's your own fault."
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: The promising future of mechanical augmentation which was a major win in the previous game is reduced to this due to the fallout of the Aug Incident. Sarif Industries, the pioneer of human augmentation with a multi-billion dollar empire across the globe and on the verge of a major breakthrough, collapses and is bought out by Tai Yong Medical, a company of the Illuminati within weeks of the Aug Incident, with a similar fall of Sarif, its CEO. Cities boasting massive Aug-friendly locales are either destroyed (Dubai) or segregated (Prague), and these are implied to be the tip of the iceberg. And those players who have played the first game know it's going to get worse.
• Icarus Allusion: Jensen continues to be associated with wings of light and fire, in reference to the Icarus myth that is used as a metaphor for Jensen being on the cutting edge of transhumanism. The winged logo of the ARC also invokes this.
• I Know You Know I Know: At the end of the "A Criminal Past" DLC Adam and Delara Auzenne have a discussion about what they would do if a dangerous agent was standing right in front of them. It's not outright stated, but it's basically them acknowledging that they know the other one has a secret agenda.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The blades return from the last game, and by the looks of the first trailer, can be launched from Jensen's arms to stick enemies to the wall.
• Industrial Ghetto: Doubles as a Wretched Hive. One of the locations Jensen is set to travel to is Utulek Station in Prague, which has been repurposed as a segregated ghetto for transhumans and is also a safe haven for one of the augmented terrorist groups that have begun to surface in response to the "mechanical apartheid." It is known as the "Golem City."
• The Infiltration: In A Criminal Past, Jensen is tasked with going undercover inside a special prison for augmented inmates, initially with the goal of making contact with a TF29 Deep Cover Agent.
• Inhuman Resources:
  • Tarvos Security apparently goes so far as to monitor every single word their employees say while on the job, with write ups, fines, and other disciplinary action taken for as little as 30 seconds of non-work-related conversation. Additionally, the company sees nothing wrong with informing its employees of the death of a colleague via mass email, the tone of which can be best summed up by the line, "You are receiving this email because you worked with the following casualty(ies):..."
  • The Palisade Blade's HR department appears to have at least some employees under 24 hour surveillance, on or off the job.
• Innocuously Important Episode: One random sidequest chain has you help an underground news outlet called Samizdat expose corruption in Picus and then escape Prague during martial law. Completing this sidequest chain reveals in the epilogue that they are actually precursors to Silhouette, the La Résistance faction in Paris that will help out JC Denton 23 years in the future.
• Insistent Terminology: Adam asking the receptionist at the Palisade Property Bank whether the business is a "data haven" prompts a discussion full of these, beginning with the receptionist stating, "We don't use that term here, but yes." The subsequent conversation sees a distinctive split in their word choices, with the receptionist saying their clients "disagree with their local governments over 'corporate rights'," and referring to said governments as "anti-capitalist bureaucracies," while Adam suggests the bank's clients "take advantage" of the Czech Republic's "more pro-business legislation."
• Instant Armor:
  • Jensen can now generate Nanoshield armor around his body using the same Nanomachine tech that manufactures nanoblades and repairs his body on the fly.
  • Reading the augmentation descriptions reveals that the process is actually slightly different: Jensen's skin is covered in microscopic nozzles and overlays an array of tiny electromagnets. When TITAN is activated, the nozzles spray out ferrous liquid which is then immediately shaped by the magnetic field generated through the electromagnets into a semisolid iron shell.
• Interface Screw:
  • A side quest in the sewers has Jensen come face-to-face with a cult run by a man who uses some combination of mass hypnosis and a souped-up social augmentation to put everyone there under his spell. Attempting to reason with him causes Jensen's conversations to be interrupted, and even the CASIE aug is fooled. Richard blips for all three personality types at once and the descriptions list him as a benevolent deity.
  • After Adam is injured in the train station bombing at the beginning of the game, his HUD glitches to the point of being effectively unusable until he can visit Kohler for repairs.
  • Up to around 300% overclock, the side effects of Jensen activating more and more experimental augs consist mainly of increasingly frequent glitches in his HUD.
  • As in previous games, drinking alcohol or being exposed to flashbang or EMP effects^*without the appropriate countermeasure augmentations will temporarily mess with Jensen's vision.
  • The "Choke" in A Criminal Past causes Jensen's displays to be completely useless - even the augmentation screen is unreadable. Counteracting the Choke by taking the Fixer's pill will cause Jensen to experience slightly blurry vision at random times.
• Invisibility Cloak: Jensen's ability to temporarily cloak himself with optical camouflage returns.
• Interpol Special Agent: These have become a thing in the future, since UN has founded Interpol unit Task Force 29 to tackle international terrorism.
• Ironic Echo: Miller's first line in the entire game is to ask Jensen "Am I going to have a problem with you?" If you save his life using the Orchid cure in the final mission, despite his order to leave him, he will weakly respond "I thought you said you weren't going to be a problem."
• Item Crafting: A new mechanic in this game, which allows you to create Biocells, Mine Templates, Multitools and ammo for experimental augs. You can also spend crafting parts for weapon performance upgrades.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Exo-Suit wearing enemies will present a "Take Down" prompt when the player is close enough and has enough energy. It won't work, unless you hit them with a Static Stun Gun or EMP attack first.
• Last-Second Chance: If Jensen uses the killswitch on Marchenko, he first offers to give Marchenko the killswitch on the condition that Marchenko surrender to the authorities. Marchenko refuses, because the Illuminati will just find another way to kill him.
• Live-Action Cutscene: Mankind Divided had a live-action ad about the "Mechanical Apartheid" affecting those with augments.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • One that you the player can take advantage of to complete a side quest without voiding a Pacifist Run. If a quest requires the death of somebody and you're not feeling pacifistic enough to leave that person alone, it's completely fair game to avert Police Are Useless by either provoking the target into attacking you first, or in one early side mission by ratting them out to an officer around the corner, in which case every single cop nearby will happily gun them down so long as you don't intervene. This is particularly exploitable during the Golem City segment, where Jensen is requested by Otar Botkoveli to (lethally!) get rid of a merchant named Louis Gallois. While the quest itself demands that Gallois die to achieve the best outcome, it doesn't specify by whom, meaning that a crafty player can provoke him via dialogue, cloak up, and then slink out of his shop so that the nearby police officers will gun him down in their stead.
  • On a more technical level, you can prevent the save file wipe from dying on "I Never Asked For This" by forcefully quitting the game before Jensen has finished his death animation. Until the sequence properly finishes, the game does not consider Jensen to be dead, meaning the most you'll have to manage afterwards is being set back a bit of progress instead of having to run the entire game all over again up to that point.
• Magic Floppy Disk: The side-mission 01011000 has you recovering a floppy drive and a reader, which the descriptions and emails state it's actually quite of a retro technology that has grown in popularity since their advantage of secrecy due to the rarity of working drive readers. The end of the side mission reveals the floppy drive has the memory of Eliza Cassan.
• Meaningful Background Event: The game has quite a few of these, several of which happen in the second level.
  • Adam's journey into Prague is ripe with blink-and-you-miss-it appearances by several key characters. The woman resting her head on Adam's shoulder on the train going into the city? That's The Mole, Dr. Delara Auzenne. The Ruzicka Station bomber, Ivan Berk, can be seen walking past Adam and Alexandra Vega for a few moments while ducking his head down and covering his face. The Harvester/Daria Myska can be seen staring at Adam from the window of a shop, while Madame Photographe (The Dragon to Illuminati council member Elizabeth DuClare) can be seen standing in the middle of the station square staring at Adam.
  • Madame Photographe appears again later during one of the final missions of the game, just after Adam has returned to Prague while it's under martial law. As Adam talks with Vega inside the abandoned LIMB clinic, the perspective of Adam changes slightly at one point to show the character peering at both speakers from an entryway, before she turns around and walks off.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Appears in both the main storyline and in the "Jensen's Stories" DLC:
  • Main Story: Ambush of black market deal by heavily augmented mercenaries + suicide bombing by disgruntled Aug → Illuminati plot to wipe out their opposition and impose harsh sanctions on augmented people.
  • Desperate Measures: Security footage from the train station bombing has been tampered with by someone inside Tarvos → Subversion. The Tarvos lieutenant who corrupted the footage did so on his own, to protect his sister.
  • System Rift: A Palisade employee is killed by automated security → Palisade's vaunted security is not nearly as impenetrable as they claim, and the company's highest level executives are mining their clients' secrets for their own uses.
  • A Criminal Past: A prisoner is killed by a malfunctioning security bot → a Harvester-esque ring is operating within the prison, setting inmates up for execution and selling their augmentations on the black market.
• The Mistress: Possibly in A Criminal Past. One of the prison employees has a bunch of emails on his computer wishing him a happy birthday. The top email is from his wife, promising a romantic evening when he gets home. The next email is from the prison receptionist, alluding to him being "busy" that night and asking how they are going to celebrate.
• Modular Epilogue: Like in Human Revolution, the exact details of the ending change based not only on your final decisions, but also the outcomes of certain side-missions, if they were completed at all.
• The Mole: Jensen doesn't altogether trust the INTERPOL-funded group he works with to hunt down augmented terrorists, and is still on the trail of the Illuminati (who doubtlessly had a hand in their creation, as they have their fingers in everything). So, he feeds intel to a covert hacker group called, "The Juggernaut Collective," who have appeared in both The Icarus Effect novel tie-in, The Fall mobile game spinoff and The Missing Link DLC. Not only that, in the after-credits scene, it is revealed that Jensen is an unwitting Illuminati Mole, whose goal is to get in contact with Janus, the leader of the Juggernaut Collective!
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Unlike Human Revolution, Mankind Divided focuses on conversation-type confrontations with major characters, rather than straight video game boss fights. Augmented major characters will use their augmentations in combat if attacked or provoked, but are no tougher than regular Augmented enemies like A.R.C. insurgents or the Gold Masks. There is one powerful Tyrant-like opponent that serves as a final boss, but unlike the Tyrants he can be taken out non-lethally (without even needing to deplete a health/stamina bar), and can even be skipped entirely if the player has their killswitch, or taken out in a matter of seconds if the player uses a tranquilliser gun to shoot them in the head, which opens them up to being knocked out or killed by a takedown.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Once again, the first keypad in the game can be unlocked by entering 0451. The catch is that this time the player isn't told this code in-game, so it's up to the players to figure it out. You even get an achievement/trophy for doing so.
  • The achievement "Laputan Machine" is very much a shoutout to the first one in that it's someone's killswitch.
  • As a part of one of the series' oldest Running Gag, shooting a basketball through a hoop will grant you an achievement. This time, it's dubbed, "Ballsy," mirroring the "Balls" achievement from Human Revolution. A similar achievement also appears in the Criminal Past DLC.
  • Apparently, Jensen spent some time at a place called 'Facility 451' between games.
  • As with Pritchard in Human Revolution, one of Jensen's TF29 colleagues is writing a Self-Insert Fic. This one actually seems to have been published!
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • The big fight against Marchenko shown near the end of the teaser trailer is completely absent from the game. The one and only time he's ever fought at all is during the climax, which conspicuously does not take place in a theater, nor will Marchenko use a Linebacker grenade launcher against you, even though he does have one that Jensen can abscond with during his trek through the GARM base. As the cherry on top, the grenade round fired in the trailer also uncharacteristically airbursts into a cloud of pellets akin to a huge shotgun blast, which the Linebacker conspicuously does not have as an available ammo type in-game.
  • The trailer shows Jensen saving an augmented youth from police brutality (who then goes on to blow up a bus near Jensen) and him confronting Marchenko in the Prague Theater. Marchenko is nowhere near there, and while Jensen does survive a bombing, it is at the start of the game and the kid in the trailer only has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo besides having a house in Golem the player can break into (although it's implied he is behind the bombing). The trailer also seems to portray Marchenko as a charismatic figurehead rather than the enforcer/behind-the-scenes worker that he is in the actual game.
• New Game Plus: The game allows players to carry their weapons and items into a new playthrough after finishing their first run.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Turns out Jensen's military-grade enhancements were hiding a full set of cutting-edge experimental augs - more than his body can handle. Thus, he has an entirely new set of powers to activate over the course of the game. That said, all of his new stuff was put into him after the Panchaea event while he was in a coma, and it's implied that Lucius DeBeers was the one who ordered it done.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The announcement trailer shows that one of the transhumans Jensen rescues from being abused by police is later responsible for a terrorist bombing.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Lucius DeBeers really shot himself in the foot by rescuing Adam from Panchaea. Not only does Adam single-handedly thwart the assassination of the UN Delegates and prevent Marchenko's terrorist plot from succeeding but also lays the groundwork to put the screws to other Illuminati operations. Adam's work, for example, leads directly to the creation of Silhouette, the organization that prevents Majestic-12 from consolidating their control over France and helps JC Denton make contact with the Illuminati who want to screw over Bob Page.
• No Delays for the Wicked: This trope has been a running theme in all Deus Ex games. However, it is especially strong in this installment with regards to the Illuminati who are clearly struggling to keep their goals on track. Tellingly, their master plan here is not some brilliant plot to control the world but simply boils down to preventing the world from finding out that their lauded solution to the aug crisis is a total bust. Presumably, this downward trend will continue until the group becomes a shadow of itself by 2050.
• No-Gear Level: A Criminal Past functions as this, with Jensen undercover as a prisoner and consequently both stripped of his augs and having to acquire new weapons and gear from within the prison.
• No New Fashions in the Future: Subverted, as in the previous game. Fashion in the Deus Ex universe is as rapidly changing as in ours. The neo-Renaissance style that seemed to be all the rage around 2027 is starting to fade out, with clothing taking on a more businesslike, postmodern cut. Judging by what youngsters like Milena and Alison are wearing, clothes with segments made from flexible, translucent plastic seem to be becoming a thing.
• Non-Combat EXP: As in Human Revolution, XP is awarded for a wide variety of tasks. New for this game, entering passwords to unlock computers is now worth as much XP as hacking them and sometimes significantly more. "Points of Interest" have also been added, generally worth 350 XP for investigating a particular area, often awarded on top of an exploration bonus for the same location.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Dvali Crime Family is no longer controlled by the Dvali family.
• Not the Intended Use: In-universe example of the Orchid. It was designed by VersaLife to be a treatment for augmentation rejection, but in the state it's in by the time of this game, Orchid is a Flawed Prototype, and as a result actually does the opposite to a gruesome degree when ingested by an augmented individual. This makes it an excellent poison to assassinate an augmented opponent, as demonstrated on Talos Rucker, since it also happens to be colorless and odorless.
• Pacifist Run: Unlike Human Revolution, the developers promise a true "no-kill" run, in which now bosses can even be defeated via dialog. Even more interestingly, new non-lethal weapons have been added so a Pacifist Run can be just as direct and aggressive as a Genocide Run, without having to resort to stealth at all. That said, while it is possible to finish the entire game without killing anyone, finishing it completely requires that at least 2 people die by your inaction: choose to save Allison Stanek's life, and you will not be able to get to the VersaLife vault in time to recover the Orchid cure you'll later need to save Miller (meaning it's one or the other). Choose to make a deal with Otar Botkoveli and ignore them, and Otar will kill Koller in revenge. Or warn Gallois (who then flees), help Masa Kadlek at Otar's request, and knock out Radich during your second visit to Prague. This leads to Koller being spared and Brian Rourke in Organized Crime reporting that Radich turned up dead in a field outside of town. (You still indirectly get someone killed, but at least it's a ruthless crime lord and not your kooky doctor friend.)
• Painting the Medium:
  • The in-game interface is justified as being the OS interface of Jensen's visual augmentations. At certain points in the game, Adam turns his augmentations off/on by whispering "HUD off/on". These interface elements also glitch out to go along with certain in-story justifications, such as the train station bombing damaging the augs, enabling experimental augs causing the system to be overclocked and becoming unstable, or the aug-disabling "choke" chip in A Criminal Past (which can be bypassed by taking the Fixer's pill, with the side effect of vision blur). The game basically goes out of its way to express that what the player is seeing is what Adam is actually seeing, even referring to the in-game menus as the augmentations' "OS menu".
  • Navigating the hub world of Prague via the Metro leads to a special loading cutscene showing Jensen riding the train. Previous games had train rides as well, but while earlier installments only showed the generic loading screen, Mankind Divided uses it as a storytelling element:
    • Riding the augs section of the train will show a cutscene of Jensen riding together with other augmented folks just standing/sitting around, otherwise acting like normal people riding the train.
    • Riding the naturals-only section of the train will show Jensen riding with "naturals" exchanging anxious looks at each other and giving Adam wary side glances. When the next area loads, he is then immediately stopped by a police officer who scolds him for riding in the naturals-only carriage and asks him for his papers. This is especially notable because while the stations and platforms are very obviously segregated with obvious signs and barbed wire fences, the game never tells the player explicitly which carriage to ride and does not prevent you from boarding on whichever section. A new player may not even notice the difference at first, especially as lower difficulties enable objective waypoint markers by default and they always lead you to the augs-only section.
    • If the destination is a station that is currently closed to the public, such as the bombed-out Ruzicka station at the beginning of the game or the locked-down Terminal station to visit the Tarvos Security office in the Desperate Measures DLC, he rides an empty train.
    • Near the end of the game, Prague goes under martial law and Adam is moving around illegally during curfew hours. Traveling via the metro shows Adam walking along the tunnel alone, as there are no trains running.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Gold Mask soldiers posing as Tarvos security guards in London leave a lot of evidence lying around (including one of their signature gold masks). Most of the disguised Gold Masks are fine at acting the part by virtue of only really having to pace around with a gun out and occasionally say military-sounding phrases, but the one Jensen talks to in the front office really drops the ball. First, he doesn't know about Jensen coming to meet the head of security, Liam Slater. Second, he pretends like Slater is busy even though the person hosting the event arranged the meeting. After that, Jensen can even say he's there to meet Liam Stephen and the guard doesn't notice. On top of all of this, there's a giant bloodstain on the wall behind him he apparently forgot to clean up. No matter how the conversation goes, Jensen will always realize that the guards have been replaced.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The prison staff in A Criminal Past seem to have serious issues with password security:
  • The code to shut off the facility's transport tracking system - as well as the password to every laptop in the admin building - is 2027, the year of the Aug Incident.
  • The same code is used for every door leading to the security rooms in the cell blocks. Lampshaded by the pocket secretary on which the code is found.
• Person as Verb: Smiley suggest you 'Jensen' your way into the train station. What that means it up to the player.
• Permadeath: One of the gimmicks of the "I Never Asked For This" difficulty is that you only get to die once - autosaves are disabled and you are entitled to one save slot, which gets deleted when you kick the bucket.
• Persuasion Minigame: Social battles - along with a streamlined CASIE interface - return from Human Revolution. Additionally, certain computers now have a text messaging mechanic, with Adam trying to coax information out of the party on the other end. Unlike face-to-face conversations, CASIE is useless in navigating text conversations.
• Pinned to the Wall: The nanoblades Jensen fires can do this to human targets.
• Plasma Cannon: Jensen's left arm can now transform into a PEPS (short-ranged, nonlethal plasma weapon).
• Power at a Price:
  • Jensen's new experimental augmentations are truly awesome, but they destabilize his internals, so every one he unlocks requires him to permanently disable one of his other augmentations unless the player opts to undertake a sidequest to get a calibrator that resolves this issue, or opts to keep all of their augs running despite the warnings, which has side effects ranging from mild to severe Interface Screw, to augs occasionally malfunctioning with deadly results, to eventually forcing a random aug to deactivate for you (and too bad if it was something important).
  • In order for Jensen to bypass the effects of the suppression chip implanted in him at the start of A Criminal Past and restore access to his augmentations, he must either take one of the Fixer's pills or use a specially modified biocell on himself. Both methods come with side effects - using the biocell alone leaves Jensen vulnerable to the "Choke" - causing damage to his health every time he uses an aug - while the pill nullifies the Choke's effects, but causes blurred vision in its place.
• Power Limiter: Tai Yong Medical has developed a new biochip that limits the effectiveness of augmentations to the level of the average human body. The Human Restoration Act would make installation of this biochip mandatory. A variation of this chip is actually implanted in the prisoners of the Pent House - including Jensen himself - in A Criminal Past. This version not only disables all augmentations, but also induces a painful "choke" if a person tries to access them.
• Prison Episode: The events of A Criminal Past take place entirely within the Penley T. Housefather Correctional Facility.
• Prison Riot: In the Criminal Past DLC, Jensen goes undercover as an inmate in a high-security prison for augmented people to contact a fellow undercover agent. However, it quickly becomes obvious that some shady business is going on inside the facility, something that the prisoners themselves have had enough of. Not long after Jensen's arrival, the situation escalates into a full-blown prison riot.
• Punch Catch: In the trailer, Jensen attacks Marchenko with his trusty Blade Below the Shoulder only for Marchenko to catch it (deliberately impaling his more human-like hand in the process) and punch Jensen across the room with his other, much more over-built, augmented arm.
• Previously on…: An optional 12-minute recap of the plot of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is available at the start of the game.
• Product Placement: Jensen's new Badass Longcoat is a custom-designed jacket made by ACRONYM, a very popular clothing manufacturer among the cyberpunk fandom community that specializes in military-grade outfits/apparel. The ACRNM label is very prominent on it's collar.
• Publicly Discussing the Secret:
  • Adam is secretly working for the Juggernaut Collective, which is considered a terrorist organisation. When he meets Alex at the train station, they loudly argue about it in front of multiple random people and police officers. Lucklily, no one of them pays any attention to their dialogue.
  • Lampshaded in A Criminal Past. If Jensen manages to talk Guerrero out of killing the Fixer by reminding him of who he really is, Guerrero will note that if the Fixer didn't know they were undercover before, he surely does now.
• Rabid Cop: An email found in the Prague Police HQ once the city goes under lockdown mentions that cops with a history of brutality have been specifically called up for duty enforcing the curfew.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The opening level takes place in a Dubai resort that was abandoned while under construction. While the booze and bullets might have been left there by the thugs currently occupying the place, the dead employees still have functioning pocket secretaries. With battery life. And a wi-fi signal. After two years exposed to the rain, sand, and wind. One wonders if Otterbox has presumably gone out of business.^note The real reason is that they use the same interface elements as every other PS in the game, which all have wi-fi and the some amount of charge.
• Recursive Ammo: Jensen is on the receiving end of this at the end of the trailer, confronted with a grenade launcher, only for it to airburst into dozens of pellets on their way to his face. Its manner of dispersal echos that of the TES (Typhoon Explosive System) augmentation from the previous game.
• Regenerating Health: Justified as one of Jensen's augmentations.
• Remember the New Guy?: Jensen meets Alex Vega shortly after the game begins, and she receives no introduction of note, yet it is clear that Jensen is supposed to know her well as a fellow member of the Juggernaut Collective, and she regularly calls into Jensen's intro-link from there on. While Vega was a character in some side materials such as novels, many players will have no idea who she is.
• Resurrected Murderer: Played with during the Harvester quest chain, in which Adam is asked to investigate a near perfect copycat murder to those committed by the epnoymous serial killer. The original killer hasn't come back to life, but Daria has been implanted with his memories and personality, in a case of a medical trial gone horribly off the rails.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Revolvers seem to be a favored weapon among named (potential) enemies. Otar is particularly notable in having both a highly customized revolver and a standard revolver on him when you knock him out or kill him.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • The sidequest "Golden Ticket" ends with Jensen only being able to successfully forge identification for one of the two Augs he is trying to help. The Aug he helps can remain in Prague with minimal police harassment. The Aug he fails to help gets sent to Golem City. However, if Jensen completes the Samizdat quest chain, he has the chance to help both Augs escape for the less oppressive city of Paris.
  • About halfway through the game, Jensen has to choose between tracking down the maker of the bomb that was used to blow up the train station at the start of the game or stealing information on the Orchid bioweapon from a VersaLife vault. If Jensen goes after the bombmaker, VersaLife moves the contents of the vault (including a cure for the Orchid) to a more secure location that Jensen cannot breach. If Jensen goes after the vault, the bombmaker dies and her intel dies with her. There is no way to do both.
  • During the endgame, Jensen has to choose between saving Brown's life or stopping Marchenko from blowing up a building full of hundreds of innocent people. However, if Jensen is quick enough, he can accomplish both goals.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • As in Human Revolution, hacking computers or smashing walls within sight of enemies will provoke a hostile response even if the player is not in a restricted area.
  • Some arms dealers leave credit chips laying out in the open. Picking them up will cause their guards to turn hostile.
  • After hacking alarm panels, the player is presented with the options "Activate" and "Deactivate". Choosing "Activate" will set off the alarm.
  • Exo-Suit equipped enemies will present the same takedown prompt as any standard human foes, however attempting it without first immobilizing said Exo-Suit via stun or EMP attack will result in Jensen being the one getting beaten up.
• Secondary Fire: A major feature of the game's weapons:
  • Most weapons have at least two types of ammo. Conventional guns are able to fire standard rounds as well as either armor piercing or EMP ammo, depending on the weapon. The grenade launcher is the king of this, being able to fire every type of grenade found in the game.
  • Silencers are detachable, allowing the player to choose between stealth and increased damage.
  • The pistol, machine pistol, shotgun and combat rifle can be upgraded to select fire, adding the option for full auto to the pistol and machine pistol, burst fire to the shotgun, and single shot to the combat rifle.
  • Improved sights can be attached to many weapons, most notably the combat rifle, which can simultaneously mount a scope and holographic sight and swap between them.
• Self-Harm–Induced Superpower: The "Choke" encountered in A Criminal Past causes damage if Jensen attempts to use his augmentations, even when they're disabled. Should Jensen use the altered biocell on himself but refuse the Fixers' pill, he will lose health whenever he activates an aug.
• Self-Insert Fic: Smiley is writing fictionalized accounts of TF29 cases, with himself as the hero and other task force members as the supporting cast - he doesn't even bother to change any names! Surprisingly, given some of the ebooks scattered around Prague, he appears to have actually found a publisher.
• Sequel Hook: At the end of the game, the Illuminati are still at large and Jensen and Alex are still set on bringing them down. Jensen also declares that he is going to find out just who Janus is, exactly as Lucius DeBeers intends. While never mentioned in-game, the player can also find (a clone of?) Adam himself stored in one of the containers stored in the Versalife vault.
• Sequence Breaking: You can even get an achievement for fetching Koller the neuroplasticity calibrator before being asked for it!
• Serial Killer: A sidequest chain involves hunting after a serial killer who targets Augs.
• Shoot the Bullet: Jensen can shoot grenades out of the air.
• Shop Fodder: There are items that can be collected into inventory that have no practical purpose to the player, but can be sold to vendors for a modest profit. A few, like vials of neuroprozyne, have further function as minor Plot Coupons for some quests or NPC exchanges.
• Shout-Out:
  • Beating the entire game without triggering a single alarm awards the achievement "Foxiest of the Hounds".
  • If you manage to save Jim Miller's life in the climax, you'll earn yourself the "He's [Not] Dead, Jim!" achievement, a cheeky little reference to Star Trek.
  • Pulling off a landing strike with the Icarus augmentation and topping it off with a (lethal) Typhoon blast nets the "Express Elevator to Hell, Going Down" achievement.
  • "Murder He Wrote" is unlocked for gathering every piece of evidence on the Saridakis murder while playing through the System Rift side story.
  • The woman in the poster for The Robot Within bears more than a passing resemblance to the Major from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
  • The achievement for getting the data for Miller's conference call in the NSN without activating any alarms is called "The Net is Vast and Infinite".
  • A companion cube can be found in the basement of Future-Past Antiký.
  • Sobchak Security shares its name with Walter's shop in The Big Lebowski and is similarly run by a veteran suffering from PTSD.
  • In the A Criminal Past DLC, Jensen can find a list of prisoners housed in B Block. Among them are Nicholas Goodspeed, Denzel Carter and Ruben Washington^note Washington played Rubin "The Hurricane" Carter in the eponymous biopic, and Bob "Klink" Hogan^note Bob doubling as a reference to Bob Crane, the actor who played Hogan, all references to the protagonist of a film or television series at least partially set in a prison. Additionally, one cell houses a pair of inmates with the first names Wayne and Mario.
  • Another from A Criminal Past. Jensen is recognized by someone he arrested when he was a Detroit cop, but the inmate can't remember his name. In the scene when said inmate ultimately confronts Adam, one of the last names he throws out before finally getting it right is Jetson.
  • Also in A Criminal Past, a murder takes place in the prison at the beginning of the story. Scattered across the prison are various pieces of evidence pointing to the culprit, whom you get to confront later. If you manage to collect all pieces of evidence, dialog options unlock during the social boss battle that when correctly answered allows Adam to get him to back down and confess without having to use the CASIE aug's Persuasion mechanic. Doing this successfully gives you the "Objection!" achievement.
  • The play Irenka Bauer has memorized - and in which her alternate personality Helena is a character - is a real play dating back to the early 1920s called R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum's Universal Robots). It is notable for coining the term "robot", though in a parallel to the world of Deus Ex, the robots of R.U.R. are a subrace of humans created specifically to fulfill certain (undesirable) roles in society, and who ultimately come into conflict with regular humans.
• Skippable Boss: You can avoid the final boss fight if you found Marchenko's kill switch and use it. However, this voids a pacifist run, since the kill switch kills Marchenko.
• Spell My Name With An S: The game plays very fast and loose with its pronunciation and spelling of Czech names and words. Most diacritical marks are either ignored in dialogues, or omitted entirely even in the subtitles, leading to examples of people mispronouncing their own names (e.g. Václav Koller pronounces his first name with a soft "c", instead of the proper Czech "ts", and the "š" in "Daria Myška" is supposed to sound like "sh"). Weirdly enough, these pronunciation errors only apply when said characters are conversing in English, but are non-existent in Czech, as exemplified by the Czech-speaking police officers around the map.
• Split Personality: Several characters.
  • Irenka Bauer switches back and forth between her own personality and that of Helena, a character in a play she has memorized. This is perhaps the most classic example, as context indicates she developed the Helena personality due to the traumatic events of the Aug Incident and its aftermath, and switches to it as a means of shielding herself from additional trauma.
  • Vince Black at first appears to be a standard case of an undercover agent Becoming the Mask, but the more Jensen follows his trail, the greater the indications of Sanity Slippage. This culminates in a pocket secretary found in Black's apartment, containing an email exchange between his criminal and cop identities.
  • Daria is ultimately revealed to have been implanted with a personality chip, ostensibly to cure her of severe social anxiety. Unfortunately, the donor personality used to create the chip began to dominate her own... and was taken from a convicted serial killer!
• "Spread Wings" Frame Shot: Continuing with the Icarus motif from the previous game, promotional shots feature Adam Jensen standing in front of a rack of yellow lights posed to look like wings.
• Stalker Shrine: A number of apartments and storage lockers in Prague have photos, maps, and various other String Theory items on one or more walls... all focused on none other than Adam himself.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The opening mission focuses on an illegal weapons buy. The weapons are cyborg arms. It's an arms deal. The game even distracts players immediately after the crate is opened, so you don't have time to think about it.
  • A couple of NPCs in Prague can be overheard discussing the Church of the MachineGod, with one explaining that its members worship an actual machine god, not "god from the machine," a phrase more widely known in its Latin form: Deus Ex Machina.
• The Stinger: Once again, players are advised to not exit out of the credits immediately. Halfway through the credits, the scene shifts to an Illuminati meeting, where the council discusses the fallout of Jensen's actions. After most of the council leaves, DeBeers stays behind to talk with Delara, revealing that they are using Jensen to track down Janus.
• Story Branch Favoritism: Midway through the game, you have to choose between rescuing a bomb-maker and breaking into the villains' bank vault. Choosing the bank gets you a unique eBook needed for the Tablet Collector achievement and an Orchid cure that is the only way to save Jim Miller's life in the final mission (and if you so choose, you can also use it on Nathaniel Brown if you aren't quick enough to stop him from ingesting the Orchid). Choosing the bomb-maker gets you a Signal Jammer that buys you time to stop Marchenko before he detonates his bombs, but you don't need it if you're quick enough.
• String Theory: These decorate the walls of a number of areas in Prague. Special mention goes to The Big Board in TF29 HQ and a board compiling various conspiracy theories in Samizdat's hideout.
• Static Stun Gun: Jensen now has a Taser-like weapon built into his arms, launching diodes on short lines from his knuckles to incapacitate at longer range than his old melee knockout used to, and can even disable electronics as well. The traditional version from the previous game is still there, although it can no longer disable security cameras and lasers (with EMP ammo taking that role).
• Suspiciously Clean Criminal Record: Financial records, to be exact. An email from an outside auditor found in A Criminal Past describes the prison's financial records as "squeaky clean" and "almost Too Good to Be True". Internal emails, however, reveal that the Pent House is deeply in the red, with layoffs likely within the year. This while the prison infirmary is severely understaffed almost certainly to hide the aug harvesting ring operating out of it.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: Jensen's arms now include a taser, an Arm Cannon, Blades Below The Shoulder, and the ability to fire said blades as projectiles.
• Symbolic Wings: Continuing the Icarus motif from the previous game... Jensen has gotten better at using the Icarus Landing System, using his hands to adjust the electro-magnetic field to guide his landing, like a parachute operator pulling on the cords. The visual effect shows the crackling field splitting on either side of him, resembling electrical wings as he descends.
• Talking the Monster to Death: This is actually the only game in the series that plays this trope completely straight. Many critics were disappointed that Human Revolution had many boss fights, yet Jensen couldn’t talk his way out of any of them. In this game however, talking seems to be the main way to deal with pretty much all enemies.
• A Taste of Power: In the prologue mission, you play Jensen with several of the upgrades from the first game. Somewhat downplayed, however, as Jensen's augmentations are still largely useable in the time between the train station bombing and his visit to Kohler, and even when Kohler resets his augs to factory zero, the player is immediately given enough Praxis points to restore much of what they've lost... along with access to an entirely new set of augs, many of them cooler than anything they got to play with in the prologue.
• Technicolor Toxin: Harmful gases from gas grenades or environmental hazards are all a noxious green color. Whether this is the gas's actual color or merely a projection of Jensen's HUD alerting him to the hazard is never stated.
• That Man Is Dead: Invoked in the climax of A Criminal Past in at least one branch of Oscar Mejia's dialogue tree. When Jensen addresses him as Agent Hector Guerrero, he, having been undercover as Mejia for over two years and arguably having long ago gotten lost in said criminal identity, retorts, "That man is fucking dead!"
• Three-Point Landing: Whether a plain landing or a strike landing, Adam lands like this when using the Icarus Landing System.
• Timed Mission: Certain missions have time limits. The opening mission the player can complete before the sandstorm hits, and other missions will be impacted in other ways if the player dawdles on the way there. The final mission gives you ten minutes after Marchenko challenges Jensen to a showdown to reach Marchenko before he detonates his bombs.
• Too Awesome to Use: The fate of all too many players' neuropozyne vials. The game helpfully informs you early on that you may want to keep those close, since some merchants will only take payment in neuropozyne, implying you'll have to make some tough decisions with your limited supply in the future. In practice, 7 vials is all you'll pay anyone for a moderately tangible benefit (6 on information about places you can reach yourself by simply exploring, 1 to gain easy access to a basement you also can), with maybe 2-3 more you can give the needy to feel good about yourself. Of course, not knowing this, players are left with the feeling that "any moment now" they're going to need to hand someone over a crate of neuropozyne, resulting in some lugging tens of thousands worth of credits of what might as well be vendor trash in their inventories and never making any good on it. Of course, given that there's so very little to do with money in the game, besides buying Praxis Kits which are extremely limited in supply anyway, this doesn't matter much beyond the wasted inventory space.
• Too Good to Be True: An email from an outside auditor in A Criminal Past describes the prison's financial records as "almost too good to be true."
• Transhuman: A returning theme from Human Revolution. The events of that game have caused anyone with augmentations to be targeted by governments and the general populace as potential threats.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • The NSN sections of System Rift do not include any enemies or traps, nor is it possible to die in them. Instead, the player is forced to think outside the box in order to solve a series of platforming puzzles. The platforming is very easy, but understanding where and how to jump requires one to make unintuitive deductions about the nature of the NSN's virtual reality. Taken to its conclusion when you first try to leave the simulation: you end up back in the real world, but none of your augmentations work, you can't contact anyone, and exiting the room leaves you in an infinite spacetime loop where every door leads to the same place. You are still inside the simulation: the only way out is passing through what appears to be a solid wall.
  • The same DLC also brings us the inner sections of the Blade, where the cameras are joined by heat sensors. The top of the line sensors can't be taken cover from and won't even by fooled by cloaking, as they detect only changes in temperature. If only you were inside a giant server farm filled with red-hot radiator plates...
  • The NSN section of the main game presents its own platformer-style gameplay, with the player having to manipulate the environment in order to reach a series of datastores while avoiding detection by cameras and lasers... all without the use of any of the augments they have come to depend on.^note They do have access to a toned down form of remote hacking, but it serves only as a means of extending or retracting different environmental objects. Lampshaded by Jensen quipping, "Well, this is different..." upon entering the server.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: If you hack into your co-workers' computers you're eventually confronted by Peter Chang, head of the cybercrimes division. It's pretty easy to get him to keep quiet about it but it's impossible to convince him that you're not spying on your colleagues since, well, you've been reading all their emails.
• The Unfought: Depending on the player's choices as well as their views of "social boss battles" and the use of Marchenko's killswitch, potentially any of the characters players may expect to fight can become this. A more classic example can also be found in the Criminal Past DLC with Stenger, killed offscreen by another NPC.
• Unreliable Narrator: The framing device of A Criminal Past has Jensen recounting the events to Delara at a later date. In the ending dialogue, Jensen has the option to lie about what happened to Guerrero, saying he lived after the player killed him and vice versa. Additionally, the player being killed in game is treated as Jensen misremembering what happened, since he is obviously still alive to tell the tale.
• Upgrade Artifact: The Neuroplasticity Calibrator will allow Koller to upgrade Jensen so that his experimental augs will no longer destabilize him.
• Urban Segregation: What's essentially happened the world over, as the result of the stigmatization of augmented transhumans following the Panchaea disaster. The augmented population is segregated into ghettos, cut off from the general populace and under 24/7 watch by law enforcement through both physical displays of force and security drones monitor them for hostile activity.
• Western Terrorists: The Shadow Operatives, a Illuminati group posing as a extremist splinter faction of the Czech Augmented Rights Coalition, lead by Ukrainian war veteran Viktor Marchenko. They are being used to frame the ARC for terrorism and get the Human Restoration Act passed so that all augmented people are forced to move to Rabi'ah in Oman, which doesn't have the resources to handle that many people and will most likely get them all killed.
• Wham Shot: "Facing the Enigma" has an interesting example, as most players will likely miss the "Wham" if they haven't read about it beforehand; if you choose to infiltrate the Versalife vault, one of the containers there has the body of (what appears to be) Adam Jensen stored inside it. ^note  The lighting and the frozen window in the container make it extremely difficult to see through without lighting the area up with an EMP grenade.
• Whole Episode Flashback: The story of A Criminal Past is set up through the Framing Device of Jensen recounting the mission to Dr. Auzenne. Voiceovers of dialogue between the two will pop up at key points in the story, and should the player be killed, Delara can be heard saying "That's not what happened," and asking Adam to tell her what really took place as the post-death menu appears.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: While a good number of choices exist in terms of dealing with mission areas and situations, as per Deus Ex standard, the main hub of Prague is a massive, interconnected set of areas with numerous sidequests, lots of secrets, countless goodies, and plenty of routes.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Without aquiring the Icarus Landing System, Adam is incapable of softening his landing and will take fall damage from the safest falls possible.

---