One character epitomises Mankind Divided’s biggest problem

The bulk of this article contains general, but not major, spoilers about the character Vaclav Koller. Just FYI.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is frustrating. The world Eidos Montreal built is convincing and diverting enough that it’s genuinely troubling when you realise Jensen moves through it without fully connecting with it. A lot of the time this makes sense: you’re a covert ops soldier, and you break into apartments and read personal files without ever meeting the person behind them. But other times you desperately want to make contact, and to me nothing represents the maddening heights of Mankind Divided more than one man. That man is Vaclav Koller.

Vaclav Koller is a beautifully-made character. He owns an antique shop on the south-east corner of Prague, in the same neighbourhood where Jensen lives. It’s called The Time Machine, and the only antiques it sells are paper books (everyone in the 2020s reads eBooks, although most magazines and, crucially, toilet paper are still in their analogue forms). Later in the game I read the emails of a faceless corporate bank worker and found out he’s planning a date at The Time Machine for some ‘antiquing’, which is a euphemism I’m not familiar with. Having met him by this point, I wondered how Koller actually behaves as a shop proprietor, and how well the couple’s date would go after meeting him. When Jensen first arrives at The Time Machine, early on, some mob goons are trying to flush Koller out, and are wantonly machine-gunning books and tipping over shelves. Koller never tidies it up.

Koller’s workshop is in the basement, reached via a secret door behind a bookcase in his office. The ceiling is hung with racks of dangling limbs, and it takes a second to realise they’re all augmented, although it’s still creepy even after you do. At least some – if not all – of them are recycled from dead bodies. Koller is very explicitly a 21st century Frankenstein, living in his lair with the kind of red-eyed exuberance that comes from not sleeping for several days and compensating by, e.g., huffing noz and slamming own brand energy drinks, which is not a reassuring vibe for a man who performs a mixture of surgery and electronic engineering. His face is fine boned, and dark, wavy hair flops into his eyes: he resembles a gaunt, Slavic version of Prince. The back of his skull is shaved and full of implanted electrodes. He wears a bastardised white lab coat – white insofar that it is not yet entirely stained – covered in random patches and studs. The collar is popped. He’s the sort of person you dated for a while when you were in your late teens, before realising they were only interested in you in a kind of absent-minded fashion. He’s immediately, irrepressibly likeable.

The back exit from Koller’s workshop goes out into a sewer tunnel. Not very far along there is a dead body slumped against the wall and illuminated by a dim spotlight. It’s very obvious that the devs want him to be found. There’s a sports bag next to him, and if you search him you find out he was friends with Koller. His name was Kamil. He needed help, and Koller told him he could stay in the storage room at the back of his shop. And now here he is, lying dead a few feet from Koller, and a long way from the storage room, apparently because he stole some of Koller’s stuff. His body is still there several nights later and I never bring it up. I don’t get the option.

You can find out a lot about Koller, just not from him directly, even though it’s made clear that he and Jensen have known each other a while. He’s tantalising. You get little slivers out of him, but they’re brief glimpses before the curtain is pulled closed again, usually with some hand-waving enthusiasm: Yes, yes, but let’s talk about your augmentations, Adam! You can read his emails and find out he’s tangled up with the Dvali crime family, but you might not find out exactly what the arrangement is or how complex the knots are, even if you end up doing favours for them on his behalf. His email handle for the illegal aug work is HiOctane, like a teenager trying to be cool online. Later on he gets an email from ‘PurdyPartyPatty’ asking if he wants to meet for food (specifically Chicken Feet). Above his headboard Koller has stuck post it notes with words on them, possibly representing the man he thinks he is or wants to be: DECISIVE; VIBRANT; CREDIBLE.

I want to ask Koller about these things. I want to ask him about Patty: are they just friends, or dating? Is it going well? Is he, Koller, sleeping on a fold-out sofa in the sewer basement of his huge wood-paneled antique store, happy? How does he sleep with a spray painting of a giant clown face on the ceiling above his bed? How deep is he in with the Dvali? Does he need more meaningful help? Does he need a friend? But I can’t ask these things. Koller’s backstory is palpable, lovingly written by someone, somewhere, and floating just below the surface. You can almost reach out and touch it, and feel it move under pressure, but that’s all you can do.

I know that in practise it’s unlikely Jensen would start asking Koller about his love life, but Jensen does trust Koller enough to let him tinker with his inner workings in a very literal sense. Surely he’d comment on a dead body lying around near the back door, even if it was just “Koller he’s been there for days. Please do something about it. Koller, it’s starting to smell. Koller.” Jensen is a jaded asshole for a good reason, but he’s also not a mute, anonymous instrument of justice. He still has a framed photo of his dog, who died several years ago. He has a bleak moral code. He has a character.

This is the problem with someone as well developed as Koller: he emphasises the divide between the player, who is being fed reasons to give a f*** about the world they’re experiencing, and Jensen, who seems to have never had any in the first place. In an immersive sim – which Deus Ex notionally is – it’s traditional to feel some connection with the character you’re playing, usually employing the first person perspective to make it feel as if you actually are the protagonist, and Deus Ex emphasises the different, branching paths you can choose, as Jensen, to take. But you can’t choose to interact very far with the stories you’re given. Jensen stops you by being completely disinterested, even as he reads the same messages you do, and sees the same bloodstains. He just can’t be arsed with it, which makes me think I’m playing as an asshole. He never even comments on anything he sees, unless it’s to have an exposition-delivery phone conversation. Maybe you don’t want to delve any deeper, but if you do want to, you can’t, and this is frustrating because the devs have included details to make you want to. This is the point when you realise you’re not really in control of Jensen. And Kamil’s body will stay outside Koller’s door. Possibly forever.