The secret stand-out of Sony’s State of Play was the bizarre resurrection of Deus Ex’s PS2 version

Alright, alright. I know this website is called PC Gamer. I am aware, dimly, that the PlayStation 5 is not a PC. A thing that is even less a PC? The PS2. And yet here I am, writing about a PS2 game arriving on PS5.

In my defence, that game is literally Deus Ex, the most PC game to ever PC game, and I can’t help but find its arrival on Sony’s iconically yonic console via PS+ (its not-quite-Game-Pass service) alternately mystifying and thrilling. In the year 2025, Sony has resurrected one of the most curious artefacts of the early 2000s—the version of Deus Ex that Ion Storm ginned up for the PS2 back in 2002.

It’s a strange beast: in many ways, an anticipation of (the unfairly maligned) Deus Ex: Invisible War on Xbox. Hemmed in by console memory limits, its familiar levels were strange, stunted versions of themselves. They’d been chopped down and split apart by loading screens to fit into the PS2’s cramped brain. Codes auto-inputted themselves in keypads and computers, location-based damage was swapped out for a uniform health bar (no more blowing your legs off with a LAM), and there was no quick-inventory along the bottom of your screen.

It was a worse version of Deus Ex, in other words. Though to be fair, some parts of the game were upgraded—depending on your point of view—in the transition. The main theme got a fully orchestral rendition. So orchestral, in fact, that you can hear the conductor give some sort of faint bark right at the track’s cut-off. Character models also got a tweak, giving JC Denton the gift of an actual human neck.

Oh, and the PC version’s cutscenes, which on our platform consist of two UE1 models shuffling facial polygons at each other, were remixed into full-on CG cutscenes. At one point Walton Simons’ mouth curls into a smile, a thing it is congenitally unable to do in-engine.

I’m not sure anyone should actually play it unless they have literally no other option. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as anybody’s first introduction to Deus Ex. And yet, I am glad to see Sony yank it incomprehensibly from the dustbin of history. It’s worth preserving for archival purposes, if nothing else.

But also, I can’t help but nurse that faint ember of hope that says maybe the Embracer Group—a pox upon its house—might be emerging from its post-‘Saudi Arabia (reportedly) decided not to give us billions of dollars’ hangover and actually doing something with the vast trove of intellectual property it amassed over the course of its acquisitive binge. You know, things like reaching back in the archives for all its series’ weird offshoots and making them available on modern systems—the kind of thing a recently chastened company might do with a vault full of property rights it’s skittish about making big bets on.

If that’s the case, then all to the good. Do I trust Embracer to do anything interesting with a new Deus Ex? No. But I would like to see, for instance, its estranged PS2 half-brother arrive on our shores, or a version of Invisible War that’s actually playable. It’s better than letting them rot in the past.