Deathloop is the first game to make me risk my life for an audiolog.
It’s the latest release from Arkane Studios, a studio best known for helping keep the lineage of “immersive sims” alive through first-person action games like Dishonored and Prey. And Deathloop most certainly fits into that lineage, with its stealth-focused exploration, supernatural abilities, and open-ended gameplay that almost always gives you a handful of ways to tackle a problem. On a moment-to-moment basis it’s as tense, thrilling, and creative as any Arkane release should be.
That’s just the start with Deathloop, though. What makes the game so interesting is its structure, which has players — in the role of an assassin named Colt — reliving the same day over and over again. (Between this, Twelve Minutes, and Returnal, I’m not sure what it is with game developers and time loops lately.) This conceit turns Deathloop into a game where investigation is as important as combat. You aren’t just fighting to survive, you’re doing it to learn new information that will help you unravel the strange and complex mystery at the heart of the game. It’s that mystery that will help pull you through the same day repeatedly, digging through dangerous locations in search of scraps of crucial information to hopefully make the next loop just a little easier.
