Have you ever had something that you really wanted to like but couldn’t get into no matter how hard you tried? A book, a game, something that you’ve seen lots of people really enjoy but it just doesn’t click for any number of reasons. On Deathloop‘s release I saw a lot of people saying great things about it, both for its original ideas and the gameplay that its developer Arkane has perfected in Dishonored, but something just didn’t work for me for the longest time, with the game sitting in my Steam library for nine months until I finally was able to buckle down and commit to finishing it.
If you don’t know anything about Deathloop it’s a game that presents an interesting question: what if Hitman was a time traveling roguelike where you had to kill every target in the game in one go without dying? To that end the game follows Colt Vahn, a man trapped on an island where the same day repeats over and over again, and the only way to break free of the loop is to kill eight specific people in a little under eighteen hours. Unfortunately his targets also know this and are specifically staying away from each other so that you don’t have enough time to kill all of them before the loop resets and you have to try all over again, so Deathloop is not only a game about assassination but it’s also a game about finding how to coerce, trick, or otherwise arrange things so that you can kill everyone that you have to in the limited time allowed. It’s a fun concept that keeps you on your toes, since you’re always threatened with a loss of progress if you die before you can get back to your safe house, but there’s a question about the actual amount of content you have to play with here that we’ll get into later.
The game plays very much like Dishonored, Arkane’s other game series about assassinating key figures to bring down society, but with a couple of key differences. Rather than following a linear series of missions you’re given four times of day (morning, afternoon, evening, and night) and four different locations (a shoreline, a military base, a city, and a shipyard) that change based on those times of day, with different enemies, targets, and traps waiting for you in those areas depending when and where you decide to go. As you’ve probably guessed you can only visit one location per time of day before the loop resets, so the key is to find out how to kill eight people that are intentionally avoiding each other over four “missions.” To aid in your assassination attempts you can collect super powers that are essentially the greatest hits of Dishonored, from the franchise’s iconic Blink ability to less memorable powers like telekinesis and increased durability, but these powers are only obtainable and upgradable by killing your targets multiple times, as several of them have these abilities that you can remove from their dead bodies. This means that even if you don’t have any idea how to trick them to be close together you’ll at least have a motivation to kill them while they’re alone, if only for the sake of powering up your abilities so that you can kill them quicker in the future.
You might have noticed that I’m saying “kill” a lot, which you may find odd if you’re used to games like Dishonored or Hitman where the game encourages you to non-lethally handle non-targets or even not kill your targets all together. Deathloop is focused on the action first and foremost and as such has absolutely no nonlethal options for dealing with enemies, which definitely takes some getting used to. On the one hand this means that it’s a stealth action game that doesn’t bog you down with little details like hiding bodies or tip toeing around guards for the sake of keeping your hands clean, but on the other hand it also removes a lot of the creativity with how you complete your objectives. Despite plenty of opportunities there are no chances for memorable social stealth levels like Dishonored‘s ball or Hitman‘s… well Hitman‘s anything, instead you either have to sneak around murdering everyone or run around murdering everyone with the only distinction being how many people see you covered in blood. This along with the fact that there is only one set path to getting everyone where they need to be so you can kill them in time means that this is a less expressive game than other stealth games you might be used to playing, with less creativity than Hitman and less choice on how you approach missions than something like Metal Gear Solid 5.
As you’re playing as Colt and trying to kill your eight targets you’ll also have to contend with Julianna, seemingly the only other person on the island who realizes that time is looping (everyone else knows they’re in the timeloop but still thinks its the first day, not realizing that they’ve been looping this “first day” for years). Julianna finds the ability to do whatever she wants on the island with no consequences very freeing and doesn’t want Colt to get in the way, which leads into the game having a questionable multiplayer invasion component. Much like Dark Souls players can choose to play as Julianna and invade people playing as Colt, using many of the same tools Colt has at his disposal for the sake of ending that player’s loop early and forcing them back to the start. If this sounds like a pain for someone just wanting to finish the game as Colt you’d be right, it is, and while there is an option to play offline and avoid the PvP elements all together the AI will still invade you as Julianna and inevitably ruin a perfect ambush with an explosive sniper bullet to the brain, albeit without that human edge that might lead to more devious tactics.
The main reason I don’t care for the Julianna invasions is it’s ultimately a big part of Deathloop‘s less savory features. For starters if you’re open to invasions you’re not able to pause, which stacked along with your inability to save during a given level, multiplayer or no, is a big pain for those of us that might need to quit or step away in the middle of a mission. At least Dark Souls has the decency to auto save every ten seconds, but I guess not everyone can be From Software. Additionally the super powers and other abilities are noticeably toned down from Dishonored, with nothing like the ability to freeze time or possess targets, if only for the sake of having abilities that wouldn’t be too preventative to two players trying to kill each other. Along with that you can only have two powers equipped at a time, again for the sake of PvP balance one must assume since the combat itself isn’t so difficult and your powers aren’t so mighty that having a full arsenal would ruin anything on the PvE side. The PvE is ruined enough as it is by comically dumb AI and how overpowered (and easy to acquire) silenced weapons are, to the point that all difficulty in stealth generally floats away as you snipe people from across the map with a silent pistol or SMG.
Outside of combat the frustrations of your limitations leads to the quest design as well. Not to let its time gimmick go underutilized the game will routinely give you direction to do a thing only for you not to be able to do it until earlier in the loop, forcing you to twiddle your thumbs or hunt targets you’ve probably already killed again for limited upgrades until you get another chance when the day resets. For example, one part of a quest requires you to find information in the morning that tells you about a door code you can only get in the afternoon, but when you get there in the afternoon the building with the code inside of it has burned down and you have to wait until the morning again to stop the building from burning down. This is a pretty inoffensive one compared to another quest whose entire gimmick is going to the same place four times in the morning just to open doors on different parts of the island, which originally I was going to let slide but then it occurred to me how truly mind-numbingly repetitive such a quest would be without a time travel gimmick. Imagine in something like Skyrim or GTA where you have to return to the same rotten building a half dozen times, killing the same ten guards only to have to drive/ride/fast travel across the map to do something for five minutes only to have to turn around and go back to do it again. I’ve burned games like Mass Effect Andromeda for far less, and those were side quests versus Deathloop forcing players to do this to actually finish the game.
Fortunately a lot of what keeps these frustrations in the background are our lead characters. Colt and Julianna have great dialogue, both in terms of what they have to say and how the voice actors say it, and you’re treated to a radio conversation between them at the start of every level. They might talk about their own history, what Colt did in the previous level, or just general banter, and it’s surprising how it rarely overlaps and is almost never infuriating to listen to. It’d be no exaggeration to say that Colt might be one of my favorite game characters just based entirely on the dialogue alone, which is great considering how horrible the voice acting and writing was of the player characters in Dishonored 2. The world itself is rather interesting as well, assuming you’re into a weird techno retro style with half the enemies painted weird colors while the other half have strange helmets on. I’m not a huge fan of the retro aesthetic myself, but it’s presented consistently enough that I don’t have a huge problem with it and I also didn’t commit to unlocking enough of the game’s secret lore to have a relevant complaint about it. What I can complain about is the game’s technical requirements on PC, which are surprisingly intense in terms of the VRAM you’ll need and the game will love to crash on you even if you turn things down to compensate. Also the game has VERY strange UI decisions as well, with your controller acting more like a mouse cursor in menus than an analog stick to select things but you can also quick select things with buttons sometimes. It’s really quite odd.
Speaking of the game’s lore I’m going to take a quick moment to talk about the ending, not because it’s really relevant to enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the game but more because I’ve seen a lot of people say things about it that I feel like I want to address. These spoilers will only last through this paragraph, so feel free to skip past the next picture. The game ends on what many people call a “downer” or “unresolved” ending where you can either choose to break the loop or continue running it due to certain revelations about Julianna and maybe what you yourself think about the situation the two of them are in together. However, there are more than a few good points that people make about how there isn’t much of an explanation both about why Colt would want to change his mind after working so hard to break the loop, and what’s so different about this version of Colt compared to the other versions that have allegedly gotten to the point of ending the loop and simply chose not to. Granted we only have Julianna’s word on the other Colts’ lack of follow-through, but at this point in the story I don’t know how much of a reason she’d have to lie. No, my big points are about the “true ending” where Colt breaks the loop and wakes up to a much different world where the sky is burning and Julianna vanishes, which a ton of people on the internet found to be unfulfilling and not without good reason since it ends on a ton of unknowns. What state is the outside world in? How does everyone react to the destruction of the loop? Is everyone doomed given how ominous the sky looks when you wake up? These are all questions that I’d also love answers for too but I’m pretty sure the lack of answers is the point of the whole thing. Colt and Julianna spent almost two decades (or more) in the loop, living with the certainty of what everything around them was going to say or do, and choosing to break the loop means now you have to live with unknowns again. You as a player CHOSE THIS when you decided to leave the certainty of a hellscape where terrible people live out the same day, every day, and instead willingly went back into the real world and everything that came with it. It’s perfectly thematic and quite honestly a great way to end a game like this, though I’m as frustrated as anyone else that we may never know what happened to Colt and Julianna after this. But I guess if I wanted closure I should have stayed in the loop.
The weak combat, lack of fun flashy abilities, single player gameplay balanced for the sake of multiplayer no one asked for, and limited gameplay variety that comes from killing and doing the same things over and over again makes it hard to recommend Deathloop on anything more than a deep discount. I wish characters alone sold a game, because I’d put this as one of my highest recommendations just for Colt and Julianna (whose voice actors were completely snubbed at the VGAs just because everyone wanted Lady D to step on them) but unfortunately an action game can’t live on its writing and cast alone. I might feel differently there were more creative ways to kill your primary targets that weren’t far more convoluted than “shoot them in the head,” or if you had a motivation to do so like Dishonored‘s nonlethal options. But with almost no reason to not just stab your targets to death and the linear, repetitive route that it takes to get there you’ll be sick of the timeloop mechanics and even more sick of Julianna invading you well before you reach the end of the game… and it’s not a very long game to begin with. That might tie in perfectly well with the game’s themes that I discussed in the spoiler section, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun to experience.
