Deathloop

Arkane Studios strikes again. And we can only be happy to try its new collaboration with Bethesda after the masterpieces already presented by the French studio – like Dishonored and Prey – which was recently acquired by the Xbox Game Studios company.

Deathloop, released for Windows and PlayStation 5 on September 14, 2021, is a first-person shooter heavily colored by the action and adventure genres typical of the Lyon-based studio. It brings to the table a mechanic used by few and masterfully exploited by them not only as a game mechanism but as a narrative resource: if you die, your loop restarts from zero, losing all progress made.

Break the loop, Captain

Have you ever gotten so drunk you don't remember anything when you wake up? The only memory you have is a strange dream where an unknown woman kills you. Not pleasant, to say the least. In the new work from Arkane Studios, we step into the shoes of the protagonist of Deathloop, waking up on a cold, deserted beach – and a bit dilapidated at that – without even remembering our name, where we come from, or our purpose on the island. Besides the apparent hangover, our unknown protagonist sees strange messages written in the environment around them, urging them to explore this unknown place. Confused about our mental state and its possible alteration due to drugs and alcohol, we decide to trust these peculiar hints anyway. After finding a weapon to start our adventures and reaching one of the many bunkers on the island, we discover more about our identity thanks to a peculiar walkie-talkie called ’hackamajig.“ Part of our identity is revealed – our name is Colt Vahn, we have military training, and a strange female voice from intercoms urges us to find her. Still following these strange messages written around us, we increasingly realize that this female voice isn't as friendly towards us as it seems. In fact, Julianna, the mysterious woman, is also the assassin who killed us in the initial dream. Not too surprisingly, Julianna tries to eliminate Colt again by making him fall off a cliff using strange paranormal powers, but a past version of the protagonist tries to save us, leaving us with more symbolic messages, raising more questions than answers. Julianna manages to kill us, however, and... Colt wakes up again on the cold, deserted beach of Blackreef where he woke up the day before, carrying only the memories of the previous day. Thus begins to relive a continuous loop with each death, trying to break this curse.

Thanks to the clues we discover we left ourselves in the past, and some encounters with a ghost of ourselves, we quickly realize that each of our deaths corresponds to a loop. To escape the loop, we must kill the eight Visionaries on the island – all on the same day, in a precise order. However, the mission is easier said than done, as to uncover information about the Visionaries and their locations, we must relive the loop multiple times, killing Eternalists and Visionaries, while Julianna will continue to try and thwart us, persistently attempting to kill us at every rewind of the day.

A somewhat too guided adventure

The peculiarity of Deathloop The point is that once you die, everything you've acquired — weapons, abilities, and progress — is lost. No checkpoints, no way to retrieve your loot. The game allows you to escape permanent death twice before restarting the day's loop on Blackreef, setting you back considerably in your mission to kill the Visionaries and break the loop that forces you to live through a cycle of death and resurrection. Being a good FPS, Deathloop it gives its best in gameplay, and this time Arkane Studios isn't forcing a stealth-only game on us like in many of its previous titles. The choice is entirely up to the player: thanks to the plaques found throughout the map – a semi-open world map divided into zones – you can upgrade the character's base abilities, such as moving more quietly or activating double-jump, or improve weapons by making them jam less often, increasing their magazine capacity, and much more. Each player is therefore free to experience Arkane Studios' continuous loop in whatever way they prefer.

To break the loop, you need to kill the Visionaries, the game's bosses, who, once defeated, grant us paranormal abilities similar to those seen on Julianna – invisibility, teleportation, and many others. By continuing to kill Visionaries in loops, you can upgrade these abilities, making them stronger and thus making the loops easier to tackle. The Visionaries are present at specific points on the map at specific times of the day, making the mission of killing them all problematic, as you cannot reload any kind of checkpoint. In fact, it's better to completely forget about the idea of checkpoints: no checkpoints will save you from the game's loop. You can hack parts of the surrounding environment, truly giving us free will in everything concerning the game: to access a bunker, we can simply use brute force, hack the security systems, or find a hatch on the roof; all imaginable alternatives are available, and it's up to the player to build Colt and his abilities to be able to achieve them. Unfortunately, despite the many ability combinations, the limited number of weapons compared to any other first-person shooter makes the gameplay experience a bit repetitive. If we combine this factor with the fact that, as you progress through the game, you can bring some weapons with you into the loop by paying with earned in-game currency, you somewhat lose the original sense of permanent death in the game.

Despite there not being a real map of the place – except in the clues found – nor even a minimap to orient ourselves, the game is a bit too guided. While for many the idea of having to piece together clues to discover who the Visionaries are, where they are, what's happening, and why the loop exists, these are not an integral part of the gameplay experience. This is because no type of puzzle or enigma needs to be solved by us: the game does everything for us. It tells us what we need to find, what we need to do, and where we need to go. You could finish the game without reading a found diary, and the experience wouldn't change much, which is a truly wasted opportunity, given the enormous amount of material scattered throughout the semi-open world map.

Unexpected invasions

Seasoning the gameplay experience is the presence of Julianna Blake, our arch-nemesis who tries in every possible way to throw a wrench in our plans and prevent us from destroying the loop. Julianna will randomly invade our loop, trying to kill us, and we have two options: escape or kill her, receiving rich rewards and upgrades if we succeed. Julianna can be controlled by the game's AI, or... by a player. That's right, because the game has a multiplayer mode that expertly blends with the gameplay and its story, allowing players a choice: play alone, or play with someone, both as Colt and as the invader. Both experiences, if successfully completed, yield rich rewards for the winner. This mode does not disrupt the game, its story, or its mechanics, and it's truly interesting to see how a studio has implemented multiplayer in a game that seemingly had no room for multiple players.

The 60s: Bethesda strikes again?

The game is set in the sixties, and the sepia yet vibrant color palettes and old-style equipment do nothing but remind us of it. Graphically, Deathloop It’s really enjoyable. Visually, every element is harmonious. Even the design of the enemies, who wear strange masks on their faces, doesn’t seem as out of place as it rationally should be. The details are extremely well-crafted even at very low resolutions, and the reflections, lighting, and textures make the whole experience very enjoyable thanks to their extreme precision and attention to detail. The 1960s elements blend seamlessly with the paranormal aspects of the infinite time loop we’re forced to live through. The main issue is typical of Bethesda’s PC games: bugs, freezes, and so on. While we encountered few issues during our playthrough—mostly a few freezes while exploring clues—many players have complained about sudden drops in FPS, frequent freezes when facing large groups of enemies, or during map loading. Personally, we can only complain about the PC system requirements: the minimum specs call for an 8th-gen Intel processor (or 1st-gen Ryzen), a GTX 1060 or RX 580, and 12 GB of RAM. These are pretty high requirements—especially for RAM!—for a game that takes 20 to 40 hours to complete. And even if you meet the minimum or recommended specs, your computer will feel like a Boeing 747 taking off. So the various issues reported by other players honestly don’t surprise us much. Yet another technical flaw lies in the fact that you can’t really pause the game unless you’re playing offline, because if you’re online, Julianna can still invade you while the pause menu is open—whether she’s another player or the computer’s AI. Not to mention how simplistic the AI seems: not only does ragdoll physics occasionally disappear completely, sending corpses hurtling off into the infinite and beyond, but enemies are often unresponsive and predictable in their movements and routines—a factor that weighs heavily on the gameplay.

Ultimately, Deathloop is a game that is far from perfect. It has many small problems that, when added together, are difficult to ignore. Yet these negatives do not diminish the incredible, innovative experience that it is Deathloop. The idea of losing all progress after death is certainly not an innovation in itself; just think of the many level-based video games that implement the same mechanics in their most extreme difficulties. Arkane Studios truly surprises us with how the loop mechanic makes narrative sense, enriching its value.