Deathloop
You wake up one morning on the rocky shore of a mysterious island. You do not remember how you got here or even your own name. All that you remember is that there are people on this island that need to die. Guided by ethereal voices in your head, you head to the bunker nearby, picking up a pistol and a device that looks like a remote control of sorts. You made this, this device, didn’t you? While you try to gather your thoughts, someone calls you; their voice is that of a young woman. And then you remember. She killed you, plunged a dagger into your chest, and made you loop, made you wake up on the shore again to face another day full of violence, which you will inflict upon the island and its inhabitants.
Deathloop is like a big puzzle. It is a game where you have to search for clues and piece together a sequence of events that allow you to kill the 7 visionaries that are on the island within a single day. The game gives you plenty of ways to make this experience fun: guns, strange powers, environmental hazards, you name it. Clues are everywhere. Documents in the form of computer messages, text reports, environmental hints like numbers on a whiteboard, and audio logs that tell you what is going on. And then there is also that woman that tries to kill you and with whom you chat via radio every now and then. Most visionaries have a plethora of ways in which you can get rid of them, but in order to succeed at the end, you have to do it all in one very specific time order and do some setup throughout the story beforehand. This also means that you cannot stumble your way into the perfect loop from the start, as the things you need to do will take more than one loop to bear fruit. Ultimately that is fine, because for plot reasons you need to end the day in a specific district if you want to succeed, and you still have a good amount of options for how to kill the different visionaries; only time and place are determined if you want to get to the end. Also, the visionaries are more or less following their own safety protocol to not get killed all in the same loop, and your success hinges on you finding a way around their precaution. So while I was a bit disappointed upon realizing that I could not go for some of the the flashier kills on my final loop, it was still fun.
I must confess, I never played Dishonored from the same studio, but the powers (called ‘slabs’), which you get over the course of the game, reminded me of the abilities that I had seen in videos about it. So seeing that both games come from the same studio, is Deathloop a stealth game? Not necessarily. I did find stealthy approaches to be safer, but some powers and weapons make the option of “going in loud” a viable one; just make sure you have enough ammo before charging in.
While most of the time your fights will be with groups of grunts, the visionaries are your main target, and they can pack quite a punch. They are not big, long boss battles, to be honest, but each has their own personality and behavior that sets them apart from all the riffraff on the island, making killing them generally more difficult than a simple headshot out of the blue. And then there is Julianna, who will come for you when you are out hunting for visionaries. She locks your escape routes and is pretty relentless in her pursuit of you. The game has a multiplayer option for other people to invade your game as Juliana, but I did not successfully try it out, so I can only attest to the Juliana in NPC form being quite a menace. She comes not only with a strong weapon and a few trinkets that make her harder to kill but also wields at least one slab that she is not shy about using, and because it can be any of the different slabs, you will face a different threat each time. This way, even when you have a route to your target down and practiced, there is still a variable at play that keeps you on your toes.
Moving feels good. Early on you get an optional trinket to double jump. While I experimented with some different character trinkets, double jump was the one constant without which I would have ended up falling down from great heights more often. There were a few times when it felt as if jumps did not go far enough, like when trying to hop between ice floes, but besides that, jumping, grabbing a ledge, and pulling yourself up are very fluid. Then there is ducking, sneaking, and a feature I barely used: leaning. You cannot lie down, but that is okay because after waking up on that beach at the start of each loop shows that clearly Colt, aka you, has laid long enough for one day. Sneaking is the way to not get spotted when enemies are nearby. There are even trinkets that make sneaking more efficient, allowing you to either move faster or make less noise when sneaking. Sneaking also allows instant kills on unsuspecting victims, and although quite a lot of enemies come in pairs, it does have its uses, mainly conserving ammunition and the satisfaction of getting close and personal.
The game allows you to peek over barricades and around corners. By default, peeking happens automatically if you are behind an object and aim, which has some edge cases where the game is not sure if you should peek around or over the object, but if that gets too irritating for you, you can switch the automatic peeking off. Because most areas are pretty open and enemies tend to get closer, I did not peek around corners much, but sitting on a rooftop and having a shootout was made more fun by being able to peek around a chimney and feeling the air when an enemy’s shot whizzed by my head. Manual peeking is an option, but I did not make much use of it; sneaking is pretty powerful, and most enemies take time to react even when they see you, so peeking was reserved for shootouts when I was low on health.
Your character growth does not come in the form of levels and attribute points but rather through the weapons, trinkets, slabs, and even information that you acquire over time.
Talking about information, the game keeps track of the various hints and leads you have uncovered, allowing you to activate them as map markers if you have forgotten where you need to go for a certain thing.
There are a few instances where you need to remember something for a bit or figure out an order of things, but as long as it is nothing that would change between loops, the game will update your hints once you have completed our task once, allowing you to autofill a code or show you the sequence as helpful hovering ethereal text.
It should be said that a good number of codes (maybe even all) are randomly generated at the start of the game, so looking up the numbers online or reusing them when starting from scratch will not work.
This is something that I had not seen a big game do, but it fits the style, and as it is not too hard to get most codes, I did not mind not being able to look up a screenshot with the solution when encountering a new number lock.
The numbers Colt, what do they mean?
The game has a nifty arsenal of different guns, including a few special weapons you get to take off your enemies or find lying around. For the few times you are out of ammo, something that happened like once during my playthrough, you also have a machete to get close and personal with your enemies. And lastly, you do get grenades, which double as mines, and while you do not get a lot of them, they can help you take out a bunch of enemies or prepare a trap for unwanted guests. Guns come in different categories (small caliber, large caliber, nails, and shotgun) and different rarities. The number of different weapons itself is not endless, but as you can only have three weapons at the same time with you, the variety is large enough.
At the start all your weapons get lost at the end of each loop, as they technically are a part of it and thus reset with it, but you quickly gain the power to infuse weapons and other equipment, making them persistent. This allows you to build up an arsenal of things you want to have in each loop and to leave weapons you do not like behind instead of them cluttering your inventory.
The gunplay itself is pretty smooth; aim and bullet spread did not cause any big problems for me while playing, and while there is a chance for weapons to jam, it rarely happens and is not as punishing as you might fear. One option I did not use that much was having a weapon in each hand, partially because then I could not use my powers or hack things with the Hackamajig but also because I often used two-handed weapons that did not allow for dual wielding. But the few times I did run in guns-akimbo style were glorious battles that I sometimes even survived.
Weapons with higher rarities get some randomized special effect, like exploding headshots or being somewhat silent, adding to the overall strength of your build and adding more variety. Getting a silenced pistol early on made me use a lot of sneaky approaches, which would have been a pain otherwise. Eventually I ended up with a three-weapon loadout of my trusty silent pistol as my go-to problem solver, a shotgun for crowds, and a sniper rifle in case I needed to hide myself and one-shot a big target like a visionary (or if I wanted to clean out an area without the need to walk over there first).
One important thing to remember with guns is that they do create noise, so something like sniping works best if you have only a few enemies around your location, or else you will find yourself with a lot of visitors after taking out someone on the other side of the map. On the other hand, while your trusty shotgun might be loud, that loudness does not matter if you are already in a hot situation, so it is a great fit for heated fights where firepower is more important than being sneaky. My tip: make sure that whenever a gunfight starts, it is on your terms, that you are the one starting it; enemies noticing and shooting at you can lead to more people joining in, and that tends to spiral out of control fast.
It’s about to get loud
The next best thing to using a weapon to kill someone? Using some strange mystery power to kill someone! Slabs are your special abilities in Deathloop. You start with one called “Reprise” which you always have with you and which acts as a respawn mechanic that allows you to die 2 times before being sent back to the start of the loop on your 3rd death {Note: You can set the amount of respawns in the menu; they go as low as 0 and as high as infinite}. The other slabs are in the possession of the visionaries, and you have to kill most of them to get theirs. These other slabs give you powers like becoming invisible, short-range teleportation, knocking people away, or even linking enemies so everyone has some fun when you shoot one of them. Just like weapons, you need to infuse slabs to keep them around, and if you ice their respective holders more than once, you even get upgrades for them. For example, your invisibility normally would break when getting damaged, but one upgrade allows you to keep trying to blend in even when the enemies’ bullets find you.
While we are on the topic of upgrades, your weapons and you yourself can hold multiple trinkets. These also come in different rarities and offer bonuses like quicker reload, smaller damage drop over distance, or bigger clips for your guns. For your character you get things like a double jump, quicker hacking, or the option of healing yourself when standing in poison gas (I bet you can guess what it normally does). What trinkets you choose to take with you are ultimately up to you; I would recommend having the double jump, but you can pick whatever fits your play style. If you want to be sneaky, taking a trinket that makes you faster when crouching or harder to spot makes sense; however, if you love to be the center of attention and crash even the wildest parties, trinkets that make you deadlier and more resilient when surrounded by friends’ enemies are the way to go.
Now, you might ask yourself, how do I even get rare weapons and trinkets? And the answer is killing enemies that have them or finding them in the different areas, either lying around or as a reward for doing something like solving a puzzle. The game has a mechanic such that enemies equipped with better weapons and trinkets appear the better you did in the last couple of loops. You can change the level of heat in the options so that your enemies keep their current strength or make it harder or easier, but I did like the dynamic ramp-up of more resilient and difficult enemies. Encountering the first normal enemy with rare trinkets was fun, and gradually getting better weapons from defeated foes was too.
I mentioned a couple of times that the game allows you to set certain mechanics in the options menu, so it should also be said that Deathloop is one of those games that allow you to turn pretty much everything in the UI off. If you want to, you can play without even seeing your health all the time: no crosshair, no inventory indicator, no visual aid if an enemy is about to spot you, no markers, no nothing. Playing with all the UI knickknacks turned off is pretty fun but can make you a bit paranoid when you are being hunted and look over your shoulder every ten seconds to make sure you have gotten away. In other words, if you feel like you want the game to feel more immersive, go ahead and turn off all that helpful stuff.
Deathloop has 4 major areas and also a small area at the start that serves as a kind of tutorial ground that becomes inaccessible later on. Importantly, the enemies and events in an area for a specific time of day stay the same. The whole deal with Deathloop is, of course, its loop mechanic, so learning the lay of the land, patrol routes, and what happens when you do certain things is part of the fun; there’s nothing better than to conceptualize how you can cleanly execute a visionary, only to run into the one guy you forgot about and getting a shotgun to the chest. Once you have a good memory of who is where, you can easily make your way through an area without having a shootout every 8 meters. The island is filled with enemies, cameras, mines, and automatic turrets, so unless you want to find yourself stepping into the same fight time and time again, having a look around and finding alternative paths is a great option.
The areas have ample places to explore once you have found your bearings, but they are not so big that you would get lost in them. The layout of each area is well planned and feels organic, melding some stylish disco elements with the brick and mortar of the island’s old buildings and bunkers. Along with the time of day, you also have weather changes and changes in the overall environment. As time progresses you can see how some things are set up; a bunch of fireworks for the evening party might be found in the early morning somewhere else, or a stage might be set up, always a bit more in each time slice. Some parts of an area can be only reachable at specific times as the visionaries themselves roam around and can even change their schedules depending on what you have done so far in the loop. This way, the exploration keeps being fun even later in the game, as you might uncover something you walked past before or something that was simply locked at the time. Overall the level design quality is top-notch, and even after 20ish hours they still feel good to traverse and fight in.
Because I do want you to play Deathloop, as it is a good game, and its puzzle-like nature and story are a big part of the fun, I will not go into too much detail about the events that transpire within the game; but I do have to mention that the story’s biggest flaw is sadly its ending.
The game starts with you getting knifed by Julianna, waking up without memory, and then slowly fighting against the loop, getting your memories back, and even meeting alternative yous.
And then, after going through trial and error, finding out who Julianna is, and how you relate to her (mainly through your absence as a father) before finally reaching the end, you get the choice to break the loop, ending the game with what looks like apocalyptic consequences for the world, or you can stay in the loop with Julianna, doing some father-daughter bonding.
Both options, the way they are presented and their (implied) outcomes, feel somewhat lacking.
After all, you learned at some point that Colt once managed to get out of a loop before (although back then there certainly was no party on the island) and that he came back to the island as part of the AEON program; you even learn about his dead wife, but the possible endings do not seem to care about these things beyond your direct relationship with Julianna and if she thinks you are cool.
What should happen once the loop breaks? Well, I am not sure, but having your daughter zapping away before you go off with the remnants of the crazy people that were on the island for a never-ending party surely does not feel like an adequate end to an otherwise good game, and neither does living in an endless, repeating cycle.Here be spoilers about the game and its endings.
All in all I like Deathloop. It gave me a fun 25ish hours of playtime with some stuff left that I could be doing. It will probably not scratch the itch of deep lore enthusiasts, but what makes it shine is being a fun action game with polished mechanics and built-in replayability.