Deathloop

It's 2002, and I'm the proud owner of a shiny new electric bass. Nobody is more excited about this than Tom. He's the dad of one of my football teammates and as jovial as they come, and he knows exactly what I should learn first: We Gotta Get Out of This Place by The Animals. You're gonna love this riff, he says before his excitement gets the better of him, forcing him to hum the iconic dmmm, do-do, do-do-do-do dmmm, do-do, do-do-do-do. I'm assured that it's an incredibly simple bass line, but that it's oh so good, just dynamite stuff. When I get home, I raid my parents' CD collection for what I need and get to listening. As advertised, it's straightforward but catchy, and proves to be a good starting place for my career in bass playing. If I stumble as I learn more complex riffs and techniques, I can always duck out from the frustration into a few bars of that Animals loop. It's a comfy riff, a nice enough place to vacation, but not a place to linger. Loops seldom are.

It's 1963, and Colt Vahn is having a very bad day, one he will be forced to relive time and time again unless he can kill eight particular people before his carriage turns back into a pumpkin at midnight. This is the titular DEATHLOOP, one that Colt seems determined to break, though his motivations for doing so don't seem to extend beyond simply spiting Julianna, his sadistic but spunky warden. My working theory is that Colt wants to make it to 1965, the year in which The Animals recorded We Gotta Get Out of This Place, because it's a good song that is very relevant to his current predicament. It's as good a guess as any, given that DEATHLOOP doesn't so much have a narrative as much as it has a loose justification for murder; it's kill or be killed, even if dying for Colt just means waking up on a beach, trading some expletive-laden barbs with his nemesis over the radio, and heading back into a city that doubles as the world's most heavily guarded pop art installation.

While I'm sympathetic to Colt's plight, what is obviously a disorienting and frustrating experience for him is, by virtue of its highly regimented and generously annotated presentation, turned into a fairly straightforward experience for me. I have four different possible locations to visit (for the purposes of gathering intel or killing one or more of the "Visionaries" that are keeping the loop alive), and four different time periods during the day in which to do so. When I grab a piece of information about how one of the Visionaries has a habit I could probably exploit to bring about their demise, DEATHLOOP is kind enough to jot that down and tell me when and where I should follow up. Things then usually play out as expected – I leverage the information to kill the Visionary or get them to go hang out with another Visionary later in the day so that I can kill more efficiently – and that problem goes onto the "solved" pile. I then search through more locations -- dealing with fodder enemies in my path with some combination of stealth, loose and unsatisfying gunplay, and a small stable of familiar telekinetic powers – until I find intel that puts me on the scent of the next problem. After four excursions, the day ends and the loop resets, dead Visionaries and all, and I pick up the trail on the following identical day. Eventually all of the individual problems have been solved in isolation and I'm ready to try to tackle them all within the span of a single day and thus break the loop. If you have a desperate need to categorize DEATHLOOP based on genre conventions, you might be able to cobble something together with some combination of the terms immersive sim, first-person shooter, and your pick of either run-based or roguelite. But attempting to find DEATHLOOP on the game genre map is a fool's errand because, at its core, it is not a game; it is a day planner for the only day left in existence. DEATHLOOP is not just orderly, it is order made manifest.

But it's descended from chaos. It's 2018, and Arkane Austin, sister studio to DEATHLOOP's Arkane Lyon, has released DEATHLOOP's spiritual predecessor, the Mooncrash DLC for 2017's Prey. Like DEATHLOOP, Mooncrash asks me to repeatedly re-enter a world that is being reset to its factory settings. And like DEATHLOOP, Mooncrash's ultimate challenge is a single run in which I have to take the individual successes I've been rehearsing and run them back-to-back-to-back in a single loop, this time in the name of getting five stranded unfortunates off of a doomed moonbase. But unlike DEATHLOOP, Mooncrash is willing to be surprising. It's not above messing with my best-laid plans by cutting power to an essential part of the base or placing an inescapable sandworm in my path. And while the world may reset with each loop, each rescuee within a given loop is inheriting the world left by their predecessor, so I need to be careful to not mortgage the fate of the next soul – by, say, snatching up all of the ammo and healing items strewn about the world – in order to solve my current predicament. It's billiards, where a shot is only as good as the one it sets up. In this way, Mooncrash more effectively pulls off the time-bending sensation of "past me left a battery here so that now-present me can turn on the tram" than DEATHLOOP ever dares to. DEATHLOOP's miscalculation is that it focuses almost entirely on what happens between loops – asking me to take the knowledge I've gained about enemies and the environment and use it to push further and faster on my next run – but rarely bothers to encourage interesting interactions within a loop. The greatest skill I acquire from DEATHLOOP is the ability to circumvent its obstacles. As I learn where the enemies and traps are at a given location and time of day, I slip past them with increasing ease on my way to whatever piece of information the game says is waiting for me to find. I grab it, I learn that the next task will need to wait for the next loop, we reset, and the war of attrition continues. There's no new wrinkle that pushes me to change up my tactics in any way whatsoever, so I bask in the occasionally pleasant comfort of familiarity and do whatever it is I always do to get from here to there in this part of the map at this time of day. My days in the loop have left me forewarned, and in DEATHLOOP, forewarned is not forearmed, forewarned is foregone.

It's 2008. I'm practicing with my band in the jam room underneath the college's student center. In a bit of a running gag, my guitarist segues from whatever droning, noise-laden solo he's got going into the riff from Led Zeppelin's How Many More Times. It's not appreciably more complex than We Gotta Get Out of This Place on my end, even if we are playing it at breakneck pace, but it's a nice comfy place to be. And against the backdrop of a few repeating bars, it becomes easier to mix it up and try a new technique or flourish, knowing that if it doesn't pan out, there's a familiar riff to hop back to. The risk, of course, is that we get stuck in the rut of this loop and can't get out until one of us has had enough and just lays down arms, but that's not our fate tonight. No, tonight's mix-up comes in the form of yet another running bit: the reggae card, an experiment in which, once per practice, one band member might instantly mix up the rythym to give it that reggae sound, continuing until we either make it kind of work or, more likely, die laughing as it all falls apart. But that's the beauty of the loop: now that you know how it feels on its own, you can see what changes when you get a little weird with it. When you go reggae on it.

It's 2021, and DEATHLOOP makes a lone attempt at going reggae on it. I'm just emerging from the underground tunnels (which is to say, I've finished loading into the level) into the town of Updaam. A warning flashes on screen: JULIANNA IS HERE. Another player (since I have not opted out of the multiplayer invasion mechanic) has been dispatched to my session as Julianna to hunt me down and protect the loop by blasting me into tomorrow. I can't leave until I at the very least hack into a satellite dish to unlock my escape tunnels, so I get to work. I use my suppressed SMG to quickly dispatch the two hapless guards in front of me, teleport onto a nearby rooftop, use my cloak power to move up undetected, drop down to the tunnel under the apartments, disable the sentry guns that are there because this is the more heavily fortified evening time slot, teleport onto another rooftop, engage my cloak power again, hack the dish, and watch for the telltale jumpy movement of a Julianna responding to the scene of the crime. At this point it's a coin flip: either we engage in some sort of tense and enjoyable cat-and-mouse routine as we warp and cloak our way between vantage points while watching for proximity mines left by the other player, or we blow our cover and bunny-hop around with shotguns until someone goes down. Either way, what I'm doing at this point is not so much playing a game as it is experiencing statistics. I'm doing what I've done the other dozen times a Julianna has shown up at Updaam, always spawning at the same place and always as soon as I enter the level. Usually my routine works, sometimes it doesn't. On very rare occasions, I get caught off guard on my way to the rooftops, alert the crowds of normally useless armed goons, and get into some proper spur-of-the-moment hi-jinks, but the statistical mode is very well defined at this point: either someone is going to die on the rooftops, or I'll make an early exit via the unlocked tunnels because I don't actually have anything critical I need to do here. Even when DEATHLOOP injects a living breathing human into the mix to introduce some mayhem, it can't escape the immense gravity of its own stale predictability. Even the chaos is on a schedule.

It's still 2021, and I've successfully killed all the Visionaries and broken the loop. Credits have rolled. But I go back in for another run because there's a loose thread that I'd like to tie up, a potentially interesting affair off the critical path that involves a bunker locked behind three codes, of which I have one. I piece together a few clues based on map references, and after a few loops mostly spent getting the better of invading Juliannas while I comfortably move about the familiar levels, I catch a break and acquire the two missing codes. It's not rocket science, but it has, by leaps and bounds, been the most involved and interesting job I've had in DEATHLOOP, probably in no small part due to the fact that I've been left to do a little sleuthing on my own, beyond the reach of the game's organizational tendencies. There have been a few small environmental puzzles thus far – usually undermined by a trivial reward like a weapon upgrade that's already dropped from three different enemies in the past minute – but this one feels different. It feels bigger. The bunker doors slide open, rewarding me with a glimpse into the very soul of DEATHLOOP, a near-perfect encapsulation of the game's meager aspirations: a few lines of throwaway backstory about Colt and some documents detailing how best to defeat certain Visionaries, instructions I already have, about how to topple enemies that I have already bested on numerous occasions, none of which have demanded any major deviations from my standard sneak n' shoot n' stab tactics. It's a shining monument to DEATHLOOP's performative non-linearity, in which it is more important that the player sees this really cool and clever thing we made than it is that they have any real agency. It's a case of DEATHLOOP failing to take a lesson from IO's 2016-era HITMAN series (also about repeating levels to learn better ways to assassinate folks) and using this bunker and other locations like it to offer new and different information – hints which I could use to concoct alternate versions of a successful loop – instead of as an insurance policy to guarantee that I don't miss the scent of the only possible solution. It's the kind of tragedy that unfolds at a Dungeons and Dragons session run by an inexperienced or self-absorbed dungeon master, one who has written out detailed story beats and then corrals the party into following them, squandering the open-endedness that is the format's greatest strength. DEATHLOOP can ill afford to run its table in such a railroading way, as once it becomes clear that the game's nonstandard temporality is more cosmetic than structural, all that remains is an array of competent-but-unremarkable features and some characters who, as perhaps befits people stuck in a time loop, fail to offer anything new or interesting past the game's opening hours. This loop thus ends up like the one I learned twenty years ago: occasionally a cozy and familiar comfort, but ultimately nothing too interesting.