This is high praise indeed, especially coming from the very same people who so often bemoan the shoddy storytelling in today's games, where the best that players can usually hope for is that the cut-scenes won't induce actual groans. Like most readers of these breathless reviews, I was eager to pop Human Revolution into my console and experience this lauded story. After finishing the game, I have one important quibble with the avalanche of praise for Deus Ex's fiction, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining why video games typically have such unsatisfying narratives. That objection is this:
The sequence of events that takes place in Deus Ex: Human Revolution does not constitute a story. What it has is a plot, and the difference between those two, as a nerdy Mark Twain might say, is the difference between a lightning spell and the lightning bug.