![]() ![]() The result is 16 slightly different levels you can scour for clues and objectives on repeat, until you acquire enough information to execute the murder spree that will take out all your targets in one fell swoop. Each time you complete one, time moves forward a notch. There are four separate, sprawling levels which can each be played at four different times of day. It can be exhilarating, even daunting, but Deathloop is not as ambiguous or free-flowing as it first appears. ![]() Unlike Arkane’s previous Dishonored trilogy, in which assassinations typically play out sequentially, Colt’s project requires learning about his targets’ routines and uncovering their secrets until he can come up with a way to murder them all in one day. To escape eternity, Colt needs to kill the AEON Program’s eight remaining leaders, some of whom have gained strange powers thanks to the anomaly powering the loop. ![]() Where other games might have veered into a ditch of grim melodrama, Deathloop swerves, holding just enough back to preserve the independence and richness of its leads. They’re two of Arkane’s best characters ever, elevated by two of the most memorable game performances in recent years, and aided by one of the period’s least cringy video game scripts to boot. In between bouts of killing each other they joke, they curse, and occasionally they make themselves movingly vulnerable with one another. Kelley and Ozioma Akagha respectively, Colt and Julianna are the heart anchoring Deathloop’s heady conceit. The setup is high-society James Bond meets the paranoia of The Prisoner with A Clockwork Orange’s hyper-violent menace coursing throughout, which is to say an excellent premise for a video game as long as you don’t think about it for too long. Julianna Blake, the only other Visionary whose memories carry over day to day, wants to stay, so she spends every day trying to hunt him down. They took over the island of Blackreef to leverage its anomaly for the shallow immortality of the time loop, and now Colt has betrayed them because he wants out. Colt was originally chief security officer for the AEON Program, a group of eccentric societal elites who call themselves Visionaries and command a cult-like army of masked lackeys called Eternalists. I wish the rest of the game was too.Īrkane Studios’ latest immersive murder sim plays like its predecessors but with an important new twist: you’re trapped on a mysterious island in a repeating 24-hour time loop. What felt like a blank canvas at first turned out to be a paint-by-numbers one, and the image eventually revealed felt like one I’d seen plenty of times before. Like its tragic hero, Colt Vahn, I also wanted to break the loop, if not so I could escape the purgatory of 1960s pastiche, then at least so I could put the game down, content in the knowledge that I had exhausted most of its possibilities. Not to a satisfying conclusion, but one I couldn’t turn away from. Up to a point.ĭying fuels its story and propels its fun. Some games have tried to mask this artifice in the service of more naturalistic storytelling. It’s written into the technology that builds them, the development practices that craft them, and often the very rules governing how they work: win-lose, trial and error. Video games are inescapably intertwined with iteration and do-overs. ![]()
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