Deathloop (Video Game)

[elfs]

Deathloop is a very pretty game with an absolutely fascinating premise that, unfortunately, dies on its own writing. I had only played one Arkane Studios game before, and that was the later Prey, which held together quite well all the way to the end. The “twist” in Prey was annoying but, thankfully, came only after the end credits and could safely be ignored.

Deathloop’s premise is that sometime in the mid 1960s a group of eight uber-wealthy people formed a corporation and took over the island of Blackreef in the North Atlantic that was home to “The Anomaly,” a rift in the fabric of spacetime. They found a way to control the anomaly enough to create The Loop: the entire island resets in time and space in a way that lets people enjoy their entire world, Groundhog-Day style. Only something went wrong and everyone’s mind is reset along with the world.

Everyone except Colt Vahn, former head of security for the corporation and a man determined to destroy The Loop. He remembers everything he learned the day before.

So this is just like a video game: when you die, you remember all the mistakes you made, but the game treats you like the same person you were on the previous iteration. You learn in real-time at the same pace Colt does. It’s a fascinating premise that takes the whole “iterate on the mission until you get it right” and makes it a part of the game mechanic!

The final mission, you learn, is to kill every one of the eight wealthy people. Each is from a different discipline: two scientists, a game designer, an artist, a musician, a theologist, a writer and a CEO; together, they’re known as The Visionaries. Each Visionary has a “Slab,” a component that gives them a super-power (invisibility, short-range teleportation, the ability to link people into a single experience (usually death), and so forth), and that connects them to The Loop. The problem is that if you don’t kill all eight in one day, they all wake up the next day with their Slabs… and you get to keep a copy, presumably stolen from the previous timeline. So you not only have to figure out how to kill each of them, you have to figure out how to kill ALL of them, in 24 hours, in Deathloop’s weird timescale. There’s a puzzle, and it’s actually a very good one.

Also, the island is crawling with Eternalists, people who are sycophants of the Visionaries, and who are psychopathic in their own right. They spent months preparing to activate the Loop, having brief experiences of the Loop, learning that death in the Loop means you’d be back the next day. When they turned the Loop on permanently, they didn’t expect the memory-erasing. And the writer character, Julianna, has taken it upon herself to tell everyone “Colt wants to break The Loop. Kill him on sight!” So everyone on the island is a hopped-up lunatic out to kill you, when they aren’t partying to enjoy their “aternal” unkillable existence.

The problem is with the writing. There are four factions at play: The current Visionaries, the AEON program they founded to research the loop, a prior research program known as Horizon, and before that a group known as The Army of the Motherland. We learn almost nothing about these factions. We learn that Colt is probably a lot older than he looks, having been stuck in not just this Loop but several beforehand, and before that stuck in a “natural” Loop with the fishing village that used to be on the island shortly after World War 2. And yet all of this is just to build plot bunnies– they never do anything with this. He’s just a cipher for killing ciphers.

And that’s the problem with the game: everyone is a monster. Colt especially; the Loop gives him the excuse to learn how to murder people in dozens of creative ways, from intimate neck-breaking to blowing up an entire warehouse full of Eternalists, from kicking people off cliffs to reprogrammed sentry guns tearing up the audience at a rock concert. You have no idea what kind of man he will be when that’s not what he’s doing. And the “good” ending is basically him and one of the Visionaries making a deal: look, don’t end the Loop, let’s work to cross timelines deliberately (something that happens at “random” to forward the story), find variants that are more interesting than this one, and spend the rest of eternity treating The Loop as our hunting and killing ground.

I play video games to hang out with interesting characters, even though many of them are quantitatively mass murderers: Morgan Yu (Prey), Captain Titus (Warhammer 40K Space Marine), the Doom Marine, Gordan Freeman (Half Life), Issac Clarke (Dead Space), even Blood Rayne. Their worlds are surreal but fleshed out, giving them a moral purpose that excuses, to some extent, the gun-weilding horrors that they commit.

None of that really applies to Colt. There’s no world to save. There’s no one being hurt by The Loop, except Colt. We get some vague sense that he’s outraged to be trapped in the Loop again, trapped with them, but that’s not a reason to go all murderspree on them. The only way to get out of the Loop is to kill all the Visionaries, although we do get the sense that if the Loop breaks they’ll all wake up again, mortal once more, but even Colt isn’t sure.

So it was a great game with a fantastic premise and good mechanics, but it fell apart at the end by just being… unsatisfying.

---

One thing that is amazing about the game? The soundtrack. If you can find it, it’s amazing; there’s a consistent theme throughout the soundtrack, and it can sound repetitive at times because of the two main lietmotifs, but overall it really holds together.

But even there, it represents a problem. One of the two common lietmotifs created by Tom Salta, the principle composer, is spooky. It consists of a three-note, pause, three-note minor key chord sequence underlain with an expertly played Theremin. Except there’s nothing spooky about Blackreef. The game doesn’t know the difference between “spooky” and “weird,” and it shows. It works in the context of the game but only if you don’t think too hard about it.

But it is a damn good soundtrack.