Deathloop’s Reputation: The Definitive Review

The Impossible Life Of The Spectacularly Failing Masterpeice

The ebb and flow of videogame remembrances that filter through my addled mind has moments of curious synchronicity with the discourse where improbably, the whims of my unconscious are somehow in tune with some sliver of the zeitgeist. In this case, it was yet another reverie about my time in Deathloop that coincided with a friend’s mention of starting a replay, which was then compounded by a particular Reddit thread on why Deathloop is so criminally forgotten. Don’t click on that link. If you love and treasure Deathloop as I do, then you’ll find nothing but rage and consternation as your reaction to the foul spewings of short-sighted imbecilic philistines that wouldn’t appreciate fine culture even if it paid them a million quid and gave them a mutually-respectful and wholly fulfilling sexual experience.

Deathloop’s ‘problem’ is nothing of the sort. I’ll link it yet again, but the 2022 Develop Conference making-of chat tells you why; it was specifically made for a very specialised audience. What makes it interesting is its AAA status in spite of that intent. Scratching my head, I can’t think of many AAA-budgeted titles that can claim a similar spirit of strident elitism. I suppose you can say that Kojima’s Death Stranding is a similarly contradictory example, a game that seems to be fuelled by elitist thinking that nonetheless finds popular appeal. Perhaps mystifyingly so in comparison to Deathloop, although much like Kubrick, Kojima’s reputation engenders a more diplomatic approach from the general audience. There’s a recognition perhaps that ‘genius’ labelling makes the hoi-palloi more receptive to wilder ideas. Yet Deathloop’s ideas aren’t at all wild, nor are they coloured with the trademark strands of profound obsession that Kojima proudly stamps into his work. Deathloop, as I contended, was much more of a celebration of the mature Arkane mode. In the post-Redfall era, I believe with increasing fervency that the French studio felt everything could be at stake, so went all-in on making Deathloop the ultimate statement of what Arkane could do mechanically and environmentally. It was an act of supreme focus in that regard. I also think it has some of Arkane’s most fascinating characterisation, but the narrative - beyond the framing conceits for the gameplay and world - is a disappointment. But then, I don’t think the story was really the point anyway. Something which the Reddit thread missed was how Deathloop is resolutely about resolving a multitude of threads into a single path. This is the point of the game - players weaving their own yarns to thread a universally constant needle. Commenters suggesting the game was forgotten because there was only one solution baffle me when the game’s intent is so obviously about building the one golden run.

I recently realised that Deathloop’s singular path can be seen as an expression of the classical stealth triumvirate: observe, plan and execute. Much like the donor of its skeleton, Dishonored, the game is most satisfyingly played as a stealth title so for me at least, there’s something profoundly rewarding in finding the game’s overall path is in symmetry with its fundamental gameplay. Interestingly, we’d normally consider such thinking as part of the arthouse Indie sensibility, or something closer to other videogaming esoterica. The process of rehearsal and final performance has more kinship with the Shmup, but also has a passing familiarity with the speedrun in general, and Deathloop’s rewards for exploring every corner of environment and systome definitely align with the totality of knowledge that the speedrun demands. Hence, you fly through your ultimate run at speeds that were unthinkable in your early hours. Naturally, there is no definitive reading here, the point is that Deathloop’s conceptual depth allows it to dance across multitude strands of the culture it operates within. And it does that in a uniquely playful way that its stablemates do not. Prey is a celebratory continuation of a gametype that was criminally left in the 1990s, but is so wedded to that task that it’s culturally confined by it. Dishonored is a distillation of various imsim mechanics into a peerless setting, but from that setting comes a grit that absolutely serves the game’s tangible mood, but restricts its spirit from soaring beyond the envelope. Deathloop is a distillation again, of the culture and of both its predecessors, but with a broader license for anarchy that comes from an island gone mad, leaving a game that’s deadly serious about its nonseriousness. That is how it’s able to push beyond its confines with real charisma.

I think that to really dig Deathloop, you need to have been through the hoops of its stablemates but also done plenty of its ancestral history. The tweaking and exploration for alternative routes of entry from Deus Ex, the distinct references to extremely specific bits of Half Life, the exploration of environmental mechanics and looping schedules of a Hitman and of course, the wide variety of problems and solutions from the Arkane catalogue. The proportion of the playerbase that has done all those things, or more importantly exhausted all of those things, is likely to be pretty small. It maybe explains why critical acclaim was so high, why it deserves a 10 from some, when the public at large seems to greet it with a bemused shrug. There’s a definite invitation in Deathloop to soak it all up if you like what you find and, perhaps more crucially, there’s an invitation to solve all the mysteries. Only, the game isn’t going to hand you any of that on a plate. So many moments of delight in my playthrough came from making sense of the oddities by working through them. A lab full of lasers with a crazy weapon in a corner is utterly confounding at first, but once you get the timings and the loadout right, you gain knowledge and power and solve a mystery. Given the modern vogues at the high end of the market, it’s almost an act of iconoclasm to deliberately confuse and frustrate the player before breadcrumbing them to enlightenment, and Deathloop pulls off that trick several times. Perhaps it’s this pricking of the player’s ego, along with its constant dangling of metroidvania-esque doors to who-knows-what that only open if you make the right kinds of progress, born of the right kind of curiosity, that nudge Deathloop into glorious failure territory. Of course, all this is part of Arkane’s grand plan as explained eloquently by Dinga in that Develop Conference chat. The kind of high-minded obstinacy that you can easily associate with the stereotyped national spirit of its country of origin.

When Dinga Bakaba described Deathloop as cuisine, he’s absolutely implying that many of his contemporaries are merely making food. And by and large, they are. They make smashburgers. Loads of them. Deathloop in that analogy is on some rarified level in comparison. I was insanely privileged enough to enjoy a 3-star Michelin meal last year. Prior to that, I couldn’t imagine that food could be so exceptional that it deserves a new term to describe it. And yet, I’d never tasted bread like that before - or since. And that was just the bread. I won’t bore you with the details, but it was like encountering a new dimension of food, a grand explosion of my horizon for flavour, but also for the theatre of the restaurant setting, for how a course of food unfolds on the plate. It was all extraordinarily pretentious and precious, but it was fucking glorious. And it absolutely ratified all the acclaim you can be forgiven for thinking is excessive or unfounded around haute cuisine at the highest level. The personal experience was so spectacular that the elitism earned both its validity and its value. A common theme on Affectionate Discourse is my disdain for the homogeny and safety of the modern AAA, and the deliberate elitism of Deathloop is the antidote. I reject the idea of elitism as gatekeeping, for the practice of opening all the gates to the widest audience is what leads, in the commercial context, to the kind of stagnation I can smell across videogaming’s contemporary high end. As I said earlier this year, I am bored by it all, as I am bored by all the smashburger outlets. And I fucking love a smashburger! Only the few weirdos can pierce the ennui and these are the elite few of which Deathloop is a spectacular member. Last year, I’d say Atomfall came closest and I found so many traces of Deathloop in its ambition and structure that it can’t be coincidental. And there were plenty of critics and players alike that found some beguiling charisma in Atomfall, even if it was mechanically bereft compared to Deathloop. I felt lucky and privileged to have Atomfall unfold accidentally in the way it did for me, and for its systome to be just enough to keep my acquisitional appetite engaged. I feel even more privileged to have found the same, in quite some excess, with Deathloop. Perhaps that is the game’s greatest tragedy - that not enough people will access it in the way I did. Joyously, eagerly. But at least it failed on its own terms, and with plenty of glory. For we lucky few,¹ it’ll always shine so much brighter than anything you’ve got left.²

[21]

1. Yes, this is a reference.

2. And so is this!