Unmissable Mods Month: The Cassandra Project

I’ll admit, of all the mods I championed while sitting around planning this list – all the crazy leftfield experimental stuff, and all the flawed beauties of the modding scene – this was the most difficult inclusion to justify. It went in and out of the list a few times when we were trying to free up some space at the end, but eventually I threw a bit of a petulant strop and demanded it make our Unmissable Mods feature. It’s not that the others think Cassandra’s bad, or anything. Clearly it’s not. It’s just that, y’know, it was never properly released. It was never finished.

The Cassandra Project is a fourth of a sixth of a very clever and just totally, astonishingly, obviously over-ambitious mod for Deus Ex. The plan, masterminded by games journo and comics writer Kieron Gillen, was to release an episodic single-player mod, with each larger mission split into four short chapters. In the end, the team only ever got as far as the intro. When you factor in that it alone lasted for up to two hours and featured 30,000 unique lines words of dialogue… well, you start to realise why releasing the whole thing was basically never going to happen.

What makes this such a tremendous shame is that The Cassandra Project, more than – ooh, go on – any other mod I can think of, was obviously going to be wonderful. Gillen’s writing, as anyone who knows him or knows of him will know, has always been embarrassingly good, and his nack for telling subtle, nuanced character stories is a real strength of his. Cassandra’s exquisitely penned plot is a suitably conspiracy-laden journey that begins in Birmingham and was set to galavant all over the bloody shop, all the while with tongue firmly in cheek but clever brains very much engaged. It’s hilarious and ridiculous, but it’s also touching and, occasionally, even properly thought-provoking.

Cassandra’s only released episode – essentially the longest and most complex introductory sequence ever – features a host of bizarre and amazing characters in a multitude of somewhat obscure situations. But the best bit, perhaps the best bit in anything, is the word “OHFUCKINGCOCKCHRIST,” which, in Cassandra, makes what could well prove to be its only public appearance ever. It’s more than enough to justify calling the opening episode a truly unmissable mod.

Why is it on our list?
Read again. “OHFUCKINGCOCKCHRIST”. Also, because it’s beautifully written and totally worth playing, even though the story never even got started before the team drifted apart.

Get it from
ModDB (although that’s not an official page)

Easy to install?
It’s a very straight-forward installer job, but you will need to have Deus Ex patched to the latest multiplayer version.

More Unmissable Mods…