Halfway through Deathloop developer Arkane’s previous assassination fable Dishonored 2, you come across the heralded Clockwork Mansion. It is a remarkable piece of game-making; a shifting, morphing millionaire’s home where the rooms transform and shift around each other like a demented rubik’s cube.
Deathloop feels like the ethos of the Clockwork Mansion writ large. Its whole construction is of a similar mind-bending intricacy, except its moving parts are not mechanical walls and revolving staircases, but time. Its Groundhog Day-esque loops are nothing new, granted, but rarely has the concept been used in games with such mechanical bravura. Multiple timelines, player skills and discoveries are layered on top of each other until you have Deathloop’s fabulous temporal mille-feuille. You might not understand the recipe or technical skill that goes into its making, but you do know it is entirely delicious.
You are apparent amnesiac Colt Vahn, waking up on the sun-dappled shore of Blackreef Island. It is a brilliantly twisted place; in each of its four districts you might find a cavernous hangar housing a cult, an exclusive member’s club outfitted in 70s psychedelia, sprawling laboratories or a tower block transformed into a deadly real-life RPG. Patrolling the island are heavily armed ‘Eternalists’, mask-wearing hedonists straight out of Clockwork Orange bedecked in lilac rollnecks and assault rifles. It’s a trip.
Blackreef has been purposefully placed in a single-day timeloop, the island resetting at midnight with death and consequence reversed. Colt has, for reasons that unfurl with his own memory, taken it upon himself to break the loop and escape the island for good. This means killing the eight eccentric ‘visionaries’ that run Blackreef in a single day. Colt is an efficient assassin and none of the visionaries on their own should give him too much trouble, but getting them together is the real trick. The whole island is put on alert by Julianna, a kindred spirit of sorts with Colt who is determined to protect the loop, sending murderous eternalists to track you down. Or hunt you down herself.
