by Preston Rizzo
During winter break, I finally had the opportunity to play a game I had been waiting to play since 2021. Deathloop is the latest single-player focused game from Arkane Studios, who’ve made games I liked such as Dishonored and Prey. Naturally, I was interested when I heard they were making a new game and it involved a time loop.
Unfortunately, it was a PS5 console exclusive, and I wasn’t going to hunt for one of those during the peak scalping time, so I waited until I finally was able to get a Steam Deck, which, thankfully, could run the game quite well. I had no strong expectations going in; I’d mostly avoided major spoilers and was left slightly underwhelmed.
You play as Colt, trapped on the island of Blackreef within a time loop created by the AEON program, which Colt (who now has amnesia) worked for as head of security before snapping and deciding to break the loop. He’s being hunted by Julianna, one of the “visionaries” of AEON and the only other person who remembers the loops that can show up at anytime to try and kill you and send you back to square one.
Luckily, almost all the visionaries of the AEON program have special objects called “slabs” which give them special powers, including Colt. Colt’s slab which can never be removed is called Reprise and allows you 2 free deaths before getting sent back to the beginning (barring certain special deaths). Mechanically, I can understand including that to give less experienced players some grace to learn the game, but it makes everything feel too safe: there isn’t enough risk within your decisions. Outside of those special deaths, I don’t believe I ever got a full 3 deaths to get sent back.
With only a few basic starting items and your first slab, you have to figure out how to kill all 8 of the visionaries within 1 loop, and if any are alive by the end of the day, you go right back to square one. This sets up the gameplay loop of Deathloop, hunting down different visionaries each loop until you ultimately know how to set in motion the singular perfect series of events that will put everyone where they need to be when they need to be there, all the while collecting stronger weapons and other slabs that you can make persist between loops so you can be more equipped each time.
Speaking of the visionaries, each one has a very different personality, as well as some having far more characterization than others from my experience. There’s Harriett, a cult leader and the only person who actually follows protocol to protect the loop from you; Charlie Montague, a computer programmer with an inferiority complex who’s obsessed with games and used part of his own brain to make a super computer; Aleksis Dorsey, a rich healthcare CEO who funded the whole AEON program so he could party forever and do every psychotic thing he wants; Ramblin’ Frank, a musician who ruined his voice on a tour that went to 85 cities in 80 days and got involved thinking it would be able to let him sing like he used to. The rest didn’t stick out as strongly to me. I wish we could’ve had more interactions with them somehow to establish more of Colt’s relationship with them before he went rogue because we don’t get much except with Frank implying that he liked and maybe even loved Colt romantically.
The visionaries will only appear in specific areas at specific times. Charlie, for example, will only be accessible at noon in the Updaam area and without moving along, the story isn’t accessible otherwise and none will ever appear together without being coaxed by you to appear in different places at later times. It creates more of a Groundhog Day vibe of figuring out the perfect day down to the last detail instead of a more improvisational approach, which I think disappointed a lot of people, including me.
Back to the gameplay, the island is separated into 4 sizeable areas rather than being a continuous open world like I was expecting. Again, I understand the compromises to make it zone-based and having time only pass when leaving 1 area to go to another (you can’t reasonably make one loop 6 real hours), but it just feels a little underwhelming when you’re never under any real stress from the loop. I never got a feeling like, “I only have 1 minute left to get to the hideout to make some of my things permanent for the next loop. I have to scramble and play riskier.”
In terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay, Colt can use a machete, a variety of guns, slabs, and grenades to get by. Weapons exist in tiers with the lowest tier supposedly being capable of jamming, which I never had happen and you get new guns of tier 2 and 3 which don’t jam so quickly. It was a waste to add unless you want to challenge yourself.
The variety of guns was also pretty underwhelming. There’s an SMG, a pistol, a revolver, a jury-rigged nail gun, 1 assault rifle, and 2 or 3 shotguns depending how you classify the last one. But they have the item tiers to improve the variety, right? Tier 3 guns have random special abilities which should help, right? Not really. The only one that majorly changes things is being suppressed, which makes the nail gun worthless.
The slabs, however, are a lot more interesting. They include, shift, aether, karnesis, fugue, havoc and nexus. These let you do a lot more interesting stuff, especially fugue and nexus. Fugue by default confuses enemies, but with an upgrade, it makes enemies berserk. Nexus makes enemies linked, so what happens to one affects others, meaning you can make a whole group go berserk and all start attacking each other until all of them are killed. They all felt very useful besides havoc and karnesis, but those not being useful is partially because I didn’t try playing loud and aggressively often.
Ultimately, the game just feels like missed potential. Everything surrounding the game is pretty good, like the feel of the game, the powers, the aesthetic, and the visionaries, but it’s just constantly held back by poor AI, underwhelming weapon choices, a zone-based world rather than being fully continuous, and a story designed around following a preset sequence of correct events rather than allowing improvisation or other story options. I talked about this game frequently last month when the semester began because everything about it just fills my mind with thoughts about how it could’ve and should’ve been better. I’d love for them to revisit the concept one day now that they’ve been bought by Microsoft and have access to seemingly infinite resources. However, I believe the branch of the studio behind it was shut down, so the odds of it ever being revisited in a new world with more ambition in scale are slim at best.
