The MiBs were dead before they could utter their lines. Fifteen years ago I’d believed he simply could not – that the attacks from the Men In Black were simply too strong to escape, and all I could do was flee through the window as Paul demanded I do. In that hotel, I was ready for the big firefight, and I was determined that I would see Paul survive it. I’d lost him when I first played through the game, and I’d never seen the version of events as it plays out with him alongside.

So, of course, this time I was determined to save Paul. But our motivations were dramatically different. We were, in the end, playing the same game, in the same order. For me, I was heading to Hong Kong to meet Paul’s contacts, to break the news of his death to Chow. For Kieron, he was heading to Hong Kong to help Paul escape his kill switch, and to eventually learn more about his relationship with Maggie Chow. For me, I was breaking out of UNATCO HQ, via the medical facility to collect a chip from Paul’s corpse.

For Kieron, he was breaking out of UNATCO HQ, meeting Paul in the medical facility along the way. But it does have a major impact on your experience of the game. Now, looking back at it, Paul’s living or dying doesn’t have a genuinely major impact on the game. Kieron stopped me mid-sentence and said, “Paul didn’t die?!” And it dawned on both of us, on a new level, quite what a game we’d just played. I mentioned, off-hand, how disappointed I was that JC’s brother, Paul, died. We were talking about Deus Ex, having both finished it, and enthusing about our favourite moments.

And he was my extremely forgiving editor. I was a freelancer for PC Gamer based in Guildford, he was a voice on the phone I’d never met, but seen many pictures of in the pages of PCG. It was the time I talked on the phone to Kieron Gillen about Deus Ex for about an hour. Okay, I’ve been resisting writing this yet again, for fear of the groans of re-re-re-sharing an anecdote I’ve told probably more than any other, but I need to, for context. In this fourth edition, I once more fail to save my brother, become increasingly frustrated with the limits of the game's intelligence, and ponder whether real choice is actually usefully conveyed to the player. And so continues my chronicle of returning to Deus Ex fifteen years later, to see if I'm right when I tell anyone who comes near that it's the best game ever.

Deus ex dragon tooth