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What would you say to the following pitch: a Deus Ex fan mod, in the works for seven years, set in a Deus Ex forum whose moderator has been abducted. The factions consist of people like goat worshippers and llama devotees, some enemies use sporks, and people use phrases like "What the radish?" without cringing. Oh, and almost all the voice actors come from the (real-life) forum in which the game is set, play themselves, and use their incredibly mid-2000s-quality microphones to do it?

Oh, that doesn't sound like a videogame you'd like to play? Well guess again, bucko, because I have just condensed the essence of 2009's The Nameless Mod (TNM) into a single, white-hot paragraph, and I'm here to tell you not only is it a very good videogame, but it's at least arm-wrestling Mankind Divided for the crown of Deus Ex's best sequel.

I'm put in mind of The Nameless Mod because of the first time PC Gamer wrote about The Nameless Mod. All the way back in June 2010, in PC Gamer mag #201, Tom Francis spotlighted the then-recent fan project and praised its "Deus Ex sense of adventure." I'd already played it, multiple times, back around release, but I felt compelled to revisit it, not least because it's had a big 2.0 overhaul in the time since I first played. Does it hold up in the big '26?

Forum wars

I will admit it: there are many facets of the TNM elevator pitch which are discouraging in the big '26. If the whole thing sounds like one massive in-joke for one small forum, that's because it is. If you worry that you might be bombarded with what passed for humour among teenagers on the internet in 2005? Well, there's an extent to which that is unavoidable too.

But here's the thing that was clear to me back when I played it (and replayed it, and replayed it) around release and that remains clear to me as I revisit it today: TNM gets Deus Ex. It might get Deus Ex better than any game that ever came out with 'Deus Ex' on its box after the year 2000.

Forum City bristles with curiosities. You can't turn down an alleyway or crack open a door without encountering some sort of event—loot to procure or emails to read or secrets to uncover. This is a project made by people who stumbled across Jock's apartment in Hong Kong in the actual Deus Ex and wanted to make that into the entire game.

This aspect has, I think, only been improved by TNM's 2.0 overhaul. The original game's hub areas were vast. In fact, they were weirdly vast—like the Mongolian steppe as a city street. Perhaps it was a thumb in the eye of Invisible War's notoriously cramped levels, but it made them a chore to traverse at the game's default walking speeds. 2.0 grabs the mod's laces and yanks hard, corseting the original levels into a series of snaking alleys that feel more cluttered and vertical. In 1.0, TNM's myriad secrets were so spaced out as to feel like oases in a desert. Now, they feel like needles in a needlestack.

That's not to slander TNM's pre-2.0 version. It was great on its own terms, and especially given the fact it was a game made by volunteers who had no real bosses and, maybe, no real conception of their own limits or the limits of the engine they were working in. The philosophy seemed to be: got an idea? Chuck it in.

Thus you end up with a version of Deus Ex that has dual wielding, two completely divergent paths for its main quest which then branch themselves, a sprawling central city hub—much like Mankind Divided's Prague, seven years ahead of schedule—and cutscenes a thousand times more cinematic and ambitious than anything Ion Storm attempted in the original game. Arctic level? Yes. Space level? Absolutely. It is a miracle this thing ever came out at all, let alone that it all works.

But it's not just a hodgepodge of mad modder ideas. It's smart, too. TNM is a game filled with stupid jokes made by clever people. Yes, yes, the sporks and foons were played-out at the time of release and are positively jurassic now, but they're a minor part of the overall game, which does somehow manage to wring an intriguing, conspiracy-heavy story out of the nonsense premise of 'someone has abducted our forum mod.'

When you find yourself—maybe on a mission, more likely on a whim—breaking into the enormous underground labs at sinister WorldCorp HQ, you will find yourself caring about the dark secrets you uncover there, much as you couldn't help but hack every desktop in the VersaLife building when the original Deus Ex sent you there. It's just that VersaLife was run by Majestic 12 founder and former Illuminatus Bob Page and WorldCorp is run by a man who is inexplicably yellow and keeps calling you 'Trescock'.

The Nameless Mod is the Gallant to Invisible War's Goofus (nb: I still love Invisible War's Goofus). Where Ion Storm's official follow-up to Deus Ex stripped back, reduced, and boiled down everything that made the first game great in order to stuff it all into a thing called the Xbox, the sage minds behind TNM grab all of Deus Ex's edges and pull, stretching them out into something wider and wilder. In our ongoing drought of all things Deus Ex, you could do much worse than to make an account in Forum City in 2026.

If you fancy checking out The Nameless Mod, you can find it on ModDB or (the easier way) by subscribing to it in the Steam Workshop for Deus Ex: Revision.