Immersive Sims are probably the hardest games to spot in a line-up. They can be everything from aDeus Ex-style cyberpunk conspiracy across expansive but linear levels, and they can also be giant sandboxes likeFallout3. Fans of the genre will argue over what constitutes a true Immersive Sim, even among series likeBioshockandDishonored. Yet there are so few games that can match their depth that when you find one done well, it offers boundless replayability. There are so many options for how to solve every problem. At their best, they’re gloriously open-ended puzzles.
Which is why Arkane’s Deathloop falls so short of its true potential. It’s just one puzzle. A very broken, indecisive puzzle.
Dishonored asks you to weigh moral consequence against efficiency. Prey (2017) puts clever navigation on the same level as combat, making exploration a core tenet of the gameplay loop instead of just fighting. Yet Deathloop asks “How many ways can we make shooting the same three enemy types and the same eight boss fights across the same four levels not grow stale?” and never comes up with an answer beyond “we’ll add RNG loot grind!”
Regardless, this could’ve been salvaged had Arkane leaned into their roots and offered unique solutions to certain tasks. Instead, no matter how you go about each target, our ‘hero’ Colt’s response is always the same: shoot, whether by your own hand or one of many convenient sentry turrets. Maybe now and then, you stab someone instead. If you really want to mix things up, you can try and be stealthy. Well, you can try to be - before inevitably being spotted and going back to shooting because it’s faster to shoot everyone than it is to be patient and wait for the alarm to shut down.
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This is all Deathloop has, and what makes it worse is there’s next to no incentive to play any other way. The game outright tells the player through another variant of Colt that you have to “be smart”, yet it never really explainshow. Most levels are far more linear than they first seem. There might be multiple routes, but it’s a game of repetition - there’s an optimal path for each target. Sure, there are brief glimmers of cleverness, like luring Aleksis out by cutting off his supply of chocolate beer. Yet those options are sparsely spread out and made redundant by the game’s core systems.
Why do I need to single out the canine-masked fool if turning four of his sentry turrets on his party guests achieves the same objective with less effort, plus more loot drops? I don’t even have to risk going into the building. There’s no incentive to put more thought into it. Murdering Aleksis is supposed to be this updated equivalent to the Lady Boyle scenario, yet it lacks meaningful depth. Imagine if you could steal a mask from one of the Eternalists invited to the party, dress up as them, and navigate asocialsituation with the threat of Juliana spotting you. This would be a golden opportunity and give you a chance to experience Deathloop’s world from behind something other than an iron sight.
Instead, the best way to solve the scenario is to not engage with it at all. If you really want to be careful, you’ll snipe a few strays to support your turrets because the level will spawn additional squads - I actually walked into them as they spawned in a clump in the main hall.
The party-goers will all shoot you on sight, and due to the time loop you havenoconsequences for slaughtering nearly a hundred people. This goes for every level in the game. There are no potential allies to be made that aid you in combat, no convincing any of the Visionaries that every day they’re having their memories wiped without realising, and that the loop isn’tquitewhat they signed up for.
Imagine if that was an equivalent to a non-lethal approach like in Dishonored. Convincing the Visionaries that they’re stuck in the loop or unlocking their memories, so they realize what’s happening. That would be incredibly powerful and a more morally upright approach for Colt to take. He’d be respecting their agency, something he didn’t do before his latest bout of amnesia. It’d directly contradict Juliana’s arguments while giving more for the story to chew on.
Instead, the only mechanical difference between replaying levels in a traditional linear game and Deathloop is that Deathloop makes you press a few extra buttons to get the instance you want. It’s supposed to be a game about cause and effect, but cause is 99% of the experience and effect doesn’t really come into play until the last thirty minutes.
That’s a shame because those last thirty minutesarecompelling. Instead of scouring a level for loot or learning the level layout, you’re executing objectives with precision. In a mere half hour you’ll go to every level in the game and encounter unique scenarios you can’t find elsewhere. If there were more malleable timelines like this, the loop could’ve had more mechanical meaning as well. The potential on the table here is so incredible that it hurts.
Sure, your power grows, and so does your knowledge, but you’re essentially just learning the optimal order of operations. You’re literally practicing how to best play through everything a single way, across only four levels, against mostly a single enemy type that’s just armed with a different weapon, as well as a few self-destructing bombers and the odd officer who can summon even more of the same enemies. If you thought Avengers' levels repeated themselves, you have no idea how repetitious Deathloop can get.
The same goes for your equipment, due to those RNG elements. Only a handful of guns, quests, and characters have unique behaviors. Some that sound unique, like how Dr. Evans duplicates herself, turns out to just be a retread of the same AI behavior. It’s a little profound just how much Deathloop goes back to the same handful of actions. A goofy LARPing event? Shootout. A research outpost? Shootout. A bunker set to blow at any second? Shootout!
That frustrating tedium is compounded by an attempt to streamline the questlines by giving players a list of ‘leads’ for both the story and arsenal upgrades. This system is so thoroughly railroaded that at times it forced me to go out of my way to make actions I’d have otherwise skipped just to get it to move the story along. I could see this sort of system working if it wasn’t further illustrating how linear the design truly is. There is only one way to break the loop. Instead of a web of possibilities, it’s paint by numbers. If the story explored this somehow, that might redeem it. Except it doesn’t.
Both Colt and his antagonistic daughter Juliana justify their singular violence as necessaryandfun. You’re never given a tangible reason to change tact or reconsider your actions. In every way possible, Deathloop reduces years of mechanics put together by Arkane into a single joke that they eagerly repeat for up to dozens of hours if you attempt to complete everything.
There are absolutely multiple things you can do to get a kill in Deathloop - that they lack meaning, having no consequence, that’s what holds it back from surpassing its predecessors. I’ve played Dishonored 2 like how Arkane wants me to play Deathloop. This model of design can undeniably work, but Deathloop sells itself short. I don’t understand. It’s like Arkane is afraid to embrace the best parts of their favorite genre. Were they worried they were losing players by being too intricate before? Was it all in service of multiplayer? If so, why is Juliana’s side of things so threadbare?
Because everything else that Arkane is good atishere. The art style is gorgeous, the soundtrack is solid, the voice cast is fantastic, and the gameplay is as smooth as it’s ever been. Sure, the pre-mission menus are a bit clunky, but overall, the basics of what you expect from Arkane are here. It’s that extra specialsomethingthat’s absent. That feeling, like you’re playing a perfectly wound instrument that you can tinker with, is gone. It’s just an instrument with a single chord that offers a mere handful of notes.
Oh, and before anyone tries to say invasions grant Deathloop a pardon here: almost everyone I fought online tended to camp their spawn, and matchmaking could take upwards of five minuteswith cross-play enabled. Regardless of how interesting the idea was here, it’s been executed better in other games as far back as Resident Evil 6 and more recently in Sniper Elite 5. If anything, this is another area where Arkane would do well to learn from their peers.
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