2 years 11 months ago
The concept of a time loop has become synonymous with one thing in video games: the roguelike genre. It’s an easy association to make; should you die in those games, you’re sent right back to the beginning and must start afresh. You use the lessons taught by death to avoid danger next time, exactly like Tom Cruise does in The Edge of Tomorrow. But Arkane is a developer that never takes the obvious path, and so its time loop game, Deathloop, is not a roguelike. Instead, it’s supernatural Hitman.
A recent preview event, in which IGN was shown a hands-off gameplay presentation, allowed me to get a better understanding of how Deathloop works. You have one single day to assassinate eight targets - known as the Visionaries - that live on the 1960s-inspired isle of Blackreef. Killing them all within that single day will break the loop and free your protagonist, Colt, from eternal torture.
It’s easy to expect Blackreef to be an open world with a flowing day/night cycle, akin to Outer Wilds’ freely explorable solar system and its 20-minute loops. Instead, the island is split up into four districts, selected from a main menu, much like how you’d pick a Hitman level. You even choose your equipment before heading into the location, just like you would for Agent 47. There’s an added wrinkle, though: you also select what time period to explore the district in; either morning, noon, afternoon, or evening. Rather than putting you on the clock, time is a condition that you choose, akin to deciding day or night when setting up a race in a driving game.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/05/19/deathloop-preview-it-isnt-a-roguelike-its-supernatural-hitman"]
These time periods change what you can expect within the district. The presentation Arkane gave us demonstrated that mornings in the Updaam district - an area dominated by a towering mansion - feature construction workers putting together a stage.
