Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Vidididididooorrrororo. Rewind time. Jensen is back at the front of the police station, before any of this has happened. He goes inside, but instead of going on a bloody rampage he talks to the desk sergeant. It turns out it's an old colleague of his who rather hates his guts.

Wayne Haas has been living under a cloud for two years, ever since Jensen - then a cop, by the sound of it - rejected an order to shoot an augmented child. Haas was next in line and pulled the trigger. He tells Jensen that nobody gets into the morgue. Fair enough, says Jensen, you're only following orders. You were always good at that.

Zing! This does not go down well with Haas, and Jensen's in danger of losing any chance he had of getting into the morgue. But he rescues the situation. The player can choose between three contextual conversation options - in this case crush, absolve and plead - based on the tenor of the discussion. He mounts a convincing and eloquent defence, partly releasing Haas from his guilt and empathising with him as they talk about their past.

In the space of just a few seconds, Jensen has broken through Haas' bitterness and absolved him, and Haas, whose demeanour has visibly graduated to something approaching relief, begins to agree to put it behind them. He lets Jensen into the main part of the police station.

It's been an interesting conversation, but their mutual past was nicely articulated by the exchange, and Jensen's directness - letting Haas know that he is capable of moving past their history, but that right now he cannot afford to stop and go into it in detail - makes it work. The developers tell us that you will be able to buy cybernetic augmentations that help you in these situations, allowing you to monitor pupil dilation, sweating and heartbeat to help decide on a course of action.

Jensen now has the run of the station. He can talk to cops, eavesdrop on their conversations with one another and with people reporting crimes, and even rifle around and steal things or read email. As long as no one spots him doing anything dodgy, he should be alright.

He heads down to the morgue, where the coroner helpfully mistakes him for an official he's been told to expect. He tells Jensen that he has retrieved the neural hub from the dead man, but it appears to have been modified. As with our last runthrough, Jensen exits the morgue and tells his boss at Sarif Industries that he has the goods.

And we're back to the front of the station again. This time instead of entering through the main door, Jensen heads to the side of the building and uses his strength to push a dumpster up against a chainlink fence, which he then hops over. Apparently he could also have overcome this obstacle by finding a hidden maintenance corridor nearby.

He mounts a nearby fire escape and ascends to a service door on an upper floor. It requires a code, and Jensen doesn't have it, so he tries to hack his way through. This door requires a level-3 hacking skill, so we dive into the augmentation menu. Here we see a list of available augmentations, each of which costs XP, and an image of Jensen. When he highlights a new augmentation the image shows where it would go, and each augmentation has its own tech tree. By spending a few XP here he's soon a level-3 hacker.