A Review of ‘Deathloop’ by Arkane Studios

Deathloop is a video game by Arkane Studios. I got it for cheap during a recent steam summer sale.

It is an immersive simulation, time loop game. You play as Colt as he lives the same day over, and over, and over again, trying to break the time loop by killing the Visionaries who maintain the loop. The problem? Julianna wants to maintain the loop and live forever. So day after day, loop after loop, Colt and Julianna fight, with Colt trying to kill the scientists while Julianna fights to save them. Colt dies. A lot.

I had a lovely time playing this. I’d give it a solid 85%. If I were to compare this, I’d say it compares to:

• Dark Souls, in that you have to learn the map and all the enemy moves, so you can out think the enemy and gradually overcome them. This game, in an odd way, epitomizes the ‘Prepare to die’ attitude.
• Hitman, in that you go on missions to assassinate specific people
• Bioshock, in that you have a time-period specific environment where you have philosophically weird enemies, and have strange magical powers
• Dishonored, for obvious reasons

I spent ~30 hours playing this, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I loved the worldbuilding, setting and vibes of this story. The 60’s theme of the architecture and clothing was unique and lovely. I can heartily recommend this to pretty much any gamer.

THAT SAID, it’s not perfect. I had a couple fairly major complaints.

• This game had a lot of lore pickups. They took the form of books and papers you had to read to understand some part of the lore. I read the first two or three of them. After that I just ignored them. THIS IS BAD. They should have been audio tapes instead of papers.
• The game had four maps: the Complex, Updaam, Fristrad Rock, and Karl’s Bay. The game had four times of day: Morning, Noon, Afternoon, and Night. You can visit each map at the different times of day, so there are four different versions of each map one for each time. As a result, there are sixteen maps, and you have to search almost all of them for clues on how to break the loop. The problem is that you didn’t have to visit all of these sixteen maps. Of these sixteen maps, I think you only NEED to visit maybe 7-9 of them. It would be cool if you had to visit all sixteen for neat missions, perhaps making deals with the different Visionaries in exchange for knowledge.
• If you visit the same location at a later time of day, some of your progress isn’t saved. As an example, if you pick up a gun in the Morning in the Complex, and you return at Noon to the Complex, the gun will reappear even though the loop hasn’t reset.
• The game should have done more with the time loop.
  • For example, the game had 2 loops: the Golden Loop, which is the game’s ‘Final Boss’ phase, when you manage to kill all the Visionaries in a single loop, and the Rakyetoplan unlocking loop when in a single day you go to every map to get the parts of a password.
  • This was cool, that at certain points in the story you had to do something intricate at multiple times of day to unlock something or win something. I wish there were more of these.
• The game held your hand a bit too much. The game provides you a series of quests, giving you clues on how to kill all the visionaries. Once you solve all the quests, the game just straight up tells you the correct order you kill them in. I feel like straight up telling you the correct order was a mistake; I wanted to puzzle out the correct order myself.
• The world feels artificial. Compared to Dishonored, as an example, the world of Dishonored feels lived in and breathing; the time-loopyness of replaying the same map again and again makes this setting feel fake in some way. Not a bad thing per-se, I kind of liked it here.
• Finally, I wanted more from Julianna. I to have a non-combat, non-violent interaction with her. Maybe sitting down and talking with her at some point before the very climax. Or maybe instead having her fight by our side during an unimportant mission or loop, so we got to know her better.

This is a good game, but certainly a flawed game. Nonetheless, I insist I enjoyed it.