Redfall: My Exclusive Definitive Review
Not really - it's just a love letter to Arkane.
In the 1983 film Rumblefish, there’s a scene where the Motorcycle Boy takes his younger brother Rusty James, and Rusty’s friend Steve, to the wild part of town. As part of the film’s documentation of post-adolescent struggles and said youths defining their destinies in their own terms, a pivotal dialogue exchange underlines Rusty’s relationship with his brother. In a pool hall, as the Motorcycle Boy sets about winning a game, a patron remarks to Rusty that his brother is “one deep motherfucker”. Rusty replies that one day, he’ll be just like him. “You ain’t never gonna be like that, man” counters the patron. “He’s a prince, you know?”. The patron continues, “You know what he’s like? He’s like royalty in exile”. With a silent nod, the patron looks over as the Motorcycle Boy firmly plants the winning shot. Steve defeatedly asks “isn’t there anything he can’t do?”
Few things thrill my soul like a new game from Arkane. But each Arkane release fills me with trepidation; there’s always a fear that the latest may be their last, and that the lineage of sheer magnificence will come to an abrupt end. It’s a tremulous sensation. I cling to a dream that its next game will be a runaway success, giving Arkane the kind of financial security it deserves, while at the same time hoping that’ll never have to happen. There would be little worse than seeing Arkane’s wonderfully individual vision commercially homogenised into dull mainstream fare. And yet it would be a profound personal tragedy if Arkane collapsed into bankruptcy or was ejected by its corporate owners.
In a creative sense, Arkane is a prince among so many paupers. It carries that mystique of royalty, a magisterial air of supreme expertise in its craft. It’s never made a bad game and since Dishonored, has created four beautiful, exciting, interesting, novel ones. Arkane’s sense of world is so strong and so quixotically unique, plus it has a fabulous command of system and environment as a mutual partnership. We should look at Dishonored’s deep universe, rich lore and gorgeous visual style as a treasure fit for some cabinet of fine jewels. Likewise for Prey and Deathloop, which share precisely the same values. And that’s without considering how great the interactive design is, or the fact that they’re all wonderfully playable videogames in 2023. I went back to Dishonored after having been through Deathloop and then Mooncrash. That was quite a double bill, and it led me back to Dunwall to see if I could pick up some unifying thread of magic that ran through all three. Something that would explain how Arkane gained and expressed its ascension to those regal heights despite its exile in the brutal world of the high-end commercial market.
Dishonored
Despite being eleven years old, Dishonored is still wonderful to play. Mechanically it’s taut and precise and the environmental challenges live up to modern standards, but the quality that stands out most is that visual design. The broad-brushstroke shading, the idiosyncratic architecture, the sagely restrained steampunk technologies. The infestation of the latter upon the former. The combination of those architectural choices with the painterly style and the general temporal setting serve to remind us with UK or US upbringings of industrialised landscapes that are familiar, but that misses a subtle point; Dishonored is French. Despite testimony that London is the setting and how it, Edinburgh and other British cities are the architectural inspiration for Dunwall, in my view what we see isn’t so much a global-friendly melange of anglo-American victoriana, but something much closer to the invasion of modernity into 19th century Paris. The campaign that drove wide, gleaming boulevards through slum districts in France’s capital defines Dishonored’s landscapes. Hausmann’s renewal programs created precisely the same kind of towering modern abodes next to deprived, degraded remnants of the old slums that coexist in Dishonored’s residential districts. That main square of the first two missions, where we danced across rooftops to find ways past the walls of light, where we ducked into accessible buildings to pillage and complete side quests, is far more rue de Rivoli than it is any part of London, New York or Glasgow. Likewise the residential areas seen in Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches emphasise that clash of clean modernism invading a pox-ridden history. The exploitation of whale oil and the magical light it brings mirrors the miraculous electrification of Paris and the contemporaneous modernity in painting. This is where that deliberately artistic visual style brings the Fin-de-Siècle underpinnings of Dishonored into sharp focus. We are viewing Dunwall’s nocturnal streets through the eyes of Degas, Manet and Lautrec. As we cruise in Sam’s barge, we’re watching the confluence of urban earth and polluted water through a distinctly Monet lens. A testament to the skills of Arkane Lyon’s art team of Sébastien Mitton, Viktor Antonov, Jean-Luc Monnet and Cédric Peyravernay, the style is painterly because that was how the world was communicated at the time. Even as photography grew, the painting and the sketch were the primary media for communication and reportage. Much like Moore and Campbell’s From Hell drawing visual inspiration from the tabloid ephemera of its setting, Dishonored demands we watch its world through impressionist eyes. A key French game using a key French artistic school, and one that presaged an entire modernist revolution at that. However, there are other inspirations for Dishonored’s visuals. I distinctly remember a vague air of familiarity in the slummier parts of Dunwall and recalled the late-90s cult FPS Kingpin: Life of Crime, a game that almost revelled in portraying the destitute squalor of its dystopian urban environments, which similarly mixed late-Victorian and early-20th Century architectural cues. Interestingly enough, designer Viktor Antonov was an artist on Kingpin, so maybe it’s no surprise that Dishonored’s streets bear some visual kinship. Nonetheless, I feel a national character expressed across every aspect of Dunwall. If you want a really strong indication that Dunwall’s soul is more Paris than London, consider that Jessamine Kaldwin is an empress, not a queen. And we should all be able to remember the name of Napoleon’s first wife.
I suspect this cross-textural union of urban transformation and artistic style is coming from a French perspective, and it’s precisely that national character that makes Arkane so distinct. Arkane is following in a grand tradition of French speculative fiction videogame design that includes Beyond Good and Evil, Eric Chahi’s mercurial masterpiece Another World, Paul Cuisset’s Flashback and Fade to Black, adventures such as Delphine’s Future Wars and Ubisoft’s B.A.T. and the more ethereal fantasies of Exxos’ Purple Saturn Day and its seminal Captain Blood. This list could go on and on, and I want to avoid mentioning David Cage at all costs, but we have to also mention Simarils’ conceptually astonishing first-person survival sim, Robinson’s Requiem. Completely flawed, it nonetheless shone with a charisma born of its national tradition. This marks a subset within a wider contribution that includes comic icons like Moebius and Druillet, via superlatively individual art as seen in The Incal et al and the wild-ass exploits of space adventurer Lone Sloane. And this is without mentioning Mézières and Christin’s wonderfully fun long-running series Valerian. British children in the 80s were exposed to the frankly brilliant Franco-Japanese Greek mythology reinterpretation Ulysses 31. But the French tradition in Cinema stretches further back, via The Fifth Element, Barbarella, Fahrenheit 451 and Alphaville, all the way to Le Voyage Dans Le Lune, where we end up coming full circle with a 1902 film about a Jules Verne story from 1865. We easily forget how France has played a founding role in popular sci-fi, but I won’t stretch as far as saying that Verne and Dishonored are deliberately linked. However it can’t be ignored that Arkane sits within a tradition of speculative fiction that’s hallmarked by vivid imagination, adroit visual finesse and commendable divergence from a US-dominated cultural hegemony. Dishonored upholds those virtues in spades.
As far as game templates go, IO’s Hitman series stands out as a phenomenally great idea that has no real rivals, despite its obvious appeal and genuine longevity. Beautifully, the only time Hitman compromised itself for broader appeal (by adopting features from the mainstream), Hitman Absolution resulted in its worst entry, proving that commitment to the niche of idiosyncratic style is far more a virtue than a vice. Where Sniper Elite 5 makes ham-fisted attempts to inject a bit of facile Hitmanning into its increasingly tiresome WW2 sniping melee, Dishonored takes the Kubrick route of shameless re-implementation. Dishonored asks the same question as Hitman, but gives you the answer in a different language. While there’s an element of clockwork theatrics to arranging the optimal low-chaos run for those non-lethal exits, Arkane isn’t running the same kind of complexity that contemporary Hitman titles offered - but then its takedowns aren’t about solving the puzzle. Dishonored’s play tends to be more about the traversal to each mission’s target than working out ways to make the hits happen, because it owes more to the linear railway tours of early Splinter Cell than any feature-packed sandbox. That Sam Fisher’s first outing is arguably Québécois offers an interesting gallic union between Arkane and Ubisoft’s Canadian wing. When I say railway journey by the way, picture yourself on a train. You can walk to the front and, at will, inspect compartments along the way, but you can never jump off the sides. Dishonored follows this surprisingly closely, although the first Splinter Cell is completely wedded to it (Pandora Tomorrow, of course, has an entire mission on a train). Undeniably, Deus Ex traits haunt Dishonored in its invitations to explore for personal gain and its other rewards from thinking creatively about how its player tools can be applied. When you realise the ‘blink’ power isn’t just for reaching balconies but can nip you behind guards for stealthy takedowns, that realisation of true efficacy brings a warm grin. When you find out you can sit on street lights and can plot out a completely invulnerable route across a heavily patrolled area, you get a real Feynmanesque ‘kick in the discovery’. And that kick is a key recurrent delight across all of Arkane’s modern work. When you note that a single blink can be fully recharged if you wait long enough, you start to understand how the game sets different tempos for the low and high chaos runs. Refractory pauses to assuage the situation for stealthy high-climbers, staccato uproar, blue potions and high-frequency killing for the down and dirty.
Where Hitman adopts an amoral stance that prizes professional efficiency over everything, Dishonored has an explicit moral code. In Blood Money, there were the newspapers that coded some degree of judgement over your 47’s actions, but with Dishonored it’s the game itself that judges your Corvo. Follow a high chaos path and things get worse, right up until Samuel the boatman condemns you as more malign a character than those who twice conspired against you. As the game’s moral Charon, Samuel’s approval affirms a non-lethal player and nicely bolsters your patience for minimising chaos. His damnation at a remorseless, vengeful and murderous Corvo seals the maxim that violence begets violence, and how an eye for an eye blinds us all, explicitly so in his final drop-off. Notably, the high chaos player is contributing to the general decay and spiralling decline of the world at large in Dishonored. The world feeds off Corvo’s antipathy and rightly judges you as no better than the knife of Dunwall himself, Daud, who so brutally murdered the Empress in front of you at the game’s beginning. It’s fascinating how the game tempts you, as some nascent Luke Skywalker proxy, to dabble with the darker powers that grant easier killings. Even the archetypal stealth player gets the rare affordance of having dead bodies instantly disappear into ash if you spend enough runes - a temptation that’s hard to ignore. But there is a real and genuine reward from playing as a beacon of pacifistic light. A pride in your work that’s reported at the end screen of each mission, and a sense that you’re not making Dunwall a worse place to be. To have a moral fortitude that you choose yourself despite temptation is wonderfully mature in an emotional sense. That maturity is another Arkane hallmark, but the fact that Dishonored will commend you personally for making a low-chaos choice is, in a way, its own reward. And yes, I did sleep-dart all the weepers I came across.
Dishonored’s greatest success is in its expression of purpose. It encapsulates so much of the Arkane mode. The values it extols so admirably serve as Arkane’s mission statement, and many of the virtues in Dishonored are carried (often to loftier heights) in Dishonored 2, Prey, and Deathloop. The fact that Dishonored 2 allows you to play as Emily, a child in the original but now adult and every bit as skilled as Corvo, offers an insight into a deep theme in Arkane’s work - symmetry. Dishonored 2 gives you the choice of playing as Emily or Corvo, but it’s obvious the intent is to be Emily, because the game is more dominated by femininity. The chief antagonist is Delilah, as opposed to the male group behind Dishonored. Samuel the boatman is replaced by an incognito Billie Lurk. Dishonored’s DLC is helmed by the anti-Corvo, Daud. Death of the Outsider is Billie. Taken as a whole, the two main games and their DLC companions unfold a specific and quite beautiful symmetry, offering a kind of equality in power and ability, beneficence and malevolence, but also a symmetry between exterior street and interior arena. Where Dishonored is more about traversing the streets of Dunwall, with only a couple of building interiors standing out as exceptionally great, Dishonored 2 has a larger focus on its targets’ dwellings in Karnaca, managing to pull off not one but two of the most spectacular buildings in contemporary videogame history. Both Kirin Josh’s clockwork abode and Stilton Mansion’s temporal interposure showcase the Arkane mode at full force: expert craft, fabulous ingenuity, wonderful individual style. But that’s not forgetting the excellence of the Royal Conservatory and the Addermire Institute, both of which are simply superb environments for flexing skills, resplendent with the same distinctive architecture, tangible atmosphere and that rich Arkane charisma. That’s not to diminish the game’s streets, which are just as great, but they don’t feel like Emily’s natural home as they do Corvo’s in the original. Overall Dishonored 2 performs as a sequel spectacularly well, offering both continuity and divergence, focus and expansion. Where Dishonored sets a scene and defines a place and atmosphere, Dishonored 2 finishes a story and fleshes out a bigger, wider world. They also suggest a wider symmetry which spans the Arkane catalogue since Dishonored, one which seems fairly correct and one for which we’ll have to wait and see if Redfall is to be a participating element.
Prey
After Dishonored 2 came an actual surprise. It was something of a masterstroke, but the big unveiling of Prey was almost earth-shattering for me. Having languished a mire of endless fantasy RPGs or miserably lightweight and anodyne sci-fi settings (please, no more post-apocalyptics), the prospect of a System Shock successor under Arkane’s aegis was absolutely mouth-watering. Having witnessed Arkane’s commanding talent for generating atmosphere, I was in no doubt that Prey would be worth playing. I wasn’t quite prepared for what a monumental breath of fresh air it really was, or how long I’d been starved of really good, expertly-executed sci-fi content. Prey followed Arkane’s pattern of wonderfully managed denouement within a brilliantly-designed world, and delivered one of the best games of the generation. Just as the Dishonored games opened tactical possibilities like ripe flower buds as you acquire powers, Prey blossoms as you increasingly acquire access to its playspace. Similarly balanced around exploration and traversal, the fact that Prey has an acquisitional drive to open doors and engage lifts underlines the excellence of Talos station. As you acquire skills, tools, resources you also acquire places to go, and it’s a wonderful imperative for the curious. The other real wonder of Prey is its conceptual coherence. I’m not talking about the plot and the Typhon and Alex and whatnot, but the station and its people. I struggle to think of any other game that has made such a mature step. Every NPC is listed in a roster, and every dead body you find is in that roster somewhere. I think that every phantom you kill was also an NPC listed in that roster, as is every survivor that you rescue. This description of the group, of a community of people, is really quite unique. It’s making something extremely natural in a very non-natural situation. It’s giving enough of a fuck about how things really would be in the Prey scenario to make it real. When you consider how expendable or infinitely respawnable the average NPC tends to be, Prey’s treatment of them all as individual humans is quite astonishing. Likewise is the beautiful correlation of interior and exterior. Until Prey, I’d never played a game set on a space station that let you actually go outside and view the entire station. To apprehend its totality in your gaze is, again, remarkable from a videogame environment standpoint. Mostly because it makes sense! The scale of Talos 1 as you leave an airlock and turn around matches the interior spaces you explore. The location of airlock points tally with the internal maps you build. Talos 1 feels so much more real a space station as a result. I really cannot say the same for Citadel station or the Von Braun of the System Shocks, or the Sevastopol station of Alien Isolation. The former suffer the clunky disconnect of ignoring any need for the two to be in harmony and the latter uses the Death Star cheat of being so hilariously large that any human-occupiable space can be easily lost within it. Likewise for the sphere of the original, Human Head Prey (I am still in love with its straight-to-VHS schlock) or other gamey installations like Dead Space’s Ishimura or Halo’s Pillar Of Autumn. Neither Tacoma, Adr1ft or Breathedge manage to capture the sublimely realistic sense of scale, although Breathedge’s intricately placed and fabulously detailed debris field feels close. Shame about the game set in it, I guess.
Another wonderful aspect of Prey is its orchestration of experiences. It’s all so nicely pitched, from the VR shenanigans of the opening and its overt statement of a reality that’s not to be trusted, to the unfolding sets of micro-horror and tense encounters. Initial explorations, finding the office in the Lobby, gaining some weaponry, acquiring a turret. All lovely landmarks along the journey. For me, the first act ends when you first leave the station and step outside for the first time. It was such a thrill to be outside and free. So commonly, zero-G sequences are canned and constrained, but in Arkane’s Prey, it’s at your leisure. I also loved how Prey had stolen so brazenly from Half-Life. Not just in its portrayal of a scientific establishment undergoing a Poseidon Adventure disaster, but in its implementation of big tech. Prey has quite a few giant cylindrical energy things, but they’re named, with specific functions that make sense for a space station. I can’t say the same for the cylindrical energy things of Half Life and Half Life 2, where they feel like totems for an almost 1950s kind of blind scientific evangelism, every bit as inscrutable as a flip-flopping valve performing some element of a grander calculation. They actually recall the subterranean Krell technology of Forbidden Planet, and issue much the same one-note warning in their conceptual opacity and sledgehammer reiteration of Pandora’s box. In Prey, they are actual devices with actual purposes. They generate a magnetosphere for the station or provide the power. They contribute to the tangible sense of place, another of those key Arkane hallmarks. The Half Life comparison can go considerably deeper. Both it and Prey come from an American sci-fi horror tradition, and both deal with themes of primal fears (the other, contamination, the dark, predation, heights etc) and most obviously, the notion of unbounded technological progress. There’s even the squiffy justification of alternate dimensions to provide supernatural powers and unusual events. So while it purports to be System Shock though a new lens, Prey is actually Half Life and System Shock 2 as a hybrid. It also strays a bit closer to Bioshock with the imposition of a human asshole telling you what to do in the form of Alex Yu, but it all emphasises this idea that Prey is a sum. And it’s a very clever one, even though it stabs you right in the heart.
We all know the cool story about how the tests at the beginning are to see if you’ll use Typhon powers or not, but the rug-pull at the end of Prey really pissed me off. To see that we’re still under the thumb of Alex, that we were all along, is insulting enough, but to then be told that everything we did, every emotion, every effort, every consideration for survivors was all a simulation is the real kick in the teeth. If, like me, you laboured to save as many people as you could, then the final joke of Prey fell on profoundly deaf ears. I see it as a twist that’s too clever for its own good, a final page gotcha that corrodes instead of delights. Whilst it helps convey the sense of being trapped by a coercive-controlling abuser, I don’t think it’s the ending anyone really wanted. But then Arkane does love to provoke and infuriate and isn’t afraid to piss you off. There is a semblance of continuity with Dishonored in this final scene being the calculator of moral judgement for your in-game actions, but I don’t think Prey needed that. What’s worse is the conceptual issue of how many simulations deep are we, really? If we took Alex’s word that the entire journey across Talos 1 was definitely real after that introductory trick, and then we find out all of it was simulation at the end, how can we trust that the judgement scene isn’t a simulation too? In the ura-narrative, we know it’s all a simulation because we know we’re playing a game, but in context why the fuck should we now trust Alex after he’s done so much to betray our trust and so little to win it back? As with time travel stories that rely on paradoxes, Prey’s deference to the simulation undermines any ending point it tries to make. You cannot trust any reality it tries to show you, so you cannot trust any narrative resolution as being final.
It’s a testament to the game’s quality that I love it despite the ending. I loved the journey so, so much. Floating through the G.U.T.S. and marvelling at its smart space station design, crawling around the crew quarters and learning so much about all those dead people. The delight at seeing Danielle Sho at the window. The room full of ‘not a mimic’ post-its, the captured Vorona-1, floating as if Talos had been magically grown around it. So many delights, and they nearly all come as part of Prey’s wonderful, rich affordance of exploration. In many ways, the exploration of the environment was the deepest pleasure within the game. Extant from any particular challenge, it’s the leisurely core at the game’s heart, steadily beating away as the main undercurrent, even as you begin to purposefully criss-cross the station at the later stages. It’s down to Arkane’s excellence that there are new spaces to inspect in familiar maps right up to the very end. As ever with Arkane games, Prey also has little details that are so good, they stick with you as a key memory. I loved the graphic design in the game. The computer interfaces, mostly. There was a very European air about them, feeling like some infestation from Lyon on a chiefly American videogame. Despite Raphael Colantonio’s presence, a lot of Prey’s writing is by US staff. Prey reflects a lot of Americana in its capitalist billionaire dynasty, references to Kennedy and the space race, and the dominance of commerce. Dishonored projects the perverted colonial materialism of the 19th century whereas Prey straddles nostalgia for the 60s and a Gibsonian zaibatsu future. Dishonored is about power, Prey is about wealth - even if prima facie it’s about survival. Its crafting system makes this pretty apparent. If you have the resources, the journey is so much easier. One interesting symmetry that Prey strikes with Dishonored is how it sets an unspoken moral code between human and Typhon powers. Neuromod assignment is the player’s choice, and the assumption being that the more Typhon your Morgan, the less human they are, and therefore the more chaotic and all the more evil. It’s an interesting echo and even though there’s no explicit link between the two games, it’s a lovely thematic carryover. But Prey isn’t judging you by your constitution, but by your specific behaviours to particular moral challenges. This isn’t expressed in Mooncrash to anywhere near the same degree, but then Mooncrash has an entirely different agenda.
There’s a part of me that wonders if Prey and Mooncrash should have swapped places somehow, that Mooncrash should have been expanded to fill Talos 1 and Morgan’s rescue-and-escape operation moved to the moon’s surface. Certainly, the way Mooncrash presents you with a suite of playable characters echoes the classic 1970s disaster movie, even if the paths of each escapee don’t intertwine during play in the way that disparate characters of The Towering Inferno or Earthquake do. There’s even an expression of socio-economic groups, seen perhaps more acutely in the genre-ending The Day After, in Mooncrash’s roster. It spans slave underclass, skilled worker, aristo-technocrat, security soldier, menial worker (spy). Likewise it’s easy to forget how diverse the group is. It’s a fascinating spectrum to represent in a truly fascinating game. I hesitate to reduce the status of Mooncrash to mere DLC because it’s a magnificent piece of work. It deserves wholeheartedly to be seen as an entirely separate entity. It’s not an additional episode in the way Dishonored’s DLCs are, including Death of the Outsider. Mooncrash is far more radical than that. It sings as a real beacon of difference between Arkane and everyone else, genuinely. It represents this beautifully individual spirit, daring to try something really new, to take a real, serious risk and to create something that fits within the world of its parent IP but is boldly different instead of subordinate. Mooncrash injects a wildly creative new energy while simultaneously expressing the simulacra-uber-alles philosophy that underpins Prey’s ultimate narrative. It just does it much more honestly. There’s no big trick here, your job as the actual player character is to run simulations of the five others. But in knowing everything is simulated lies the real beauty of how the game allows you to plan and strategise. Prey involves a lot of ad-hoc reactionary strategising, with short-term goals dominating until the closing stages of the game. With Mooncrash, if you get the drift early enough, you can be running a grand strategy before you’ve even unlocked everyone to play. In short, you can game the game, take over Mooncrash as if you’re Alex Yu commanding the Typhon-Morgan hybrid aboard Talos 1, and exploit the game’s systems to create that one, final run. Critiques that the randomisation means it’s really hard to make progress if you’re unlucky miss the point - with Mooncrash the invitation is to negotiate with luck to amass the necessary sim points. With enough, you can mitigate the randomisation and even counter the rising corruption that ramps the environment into profoundly difficult territory. You can see each run as research and acquisition. Get info, get neuromods, get sim points. It’s beautifully capitalistic in the end. An unfair game you can beat into submission with raw material wealth. Again, as an Arkane hallmark, this all unfolds with a beautiful grace that cannot be wholly accidental. There’s an expert guiding hand in how Pytheas opens up for exploration as unlocked and upgraded characters progress. As you learn the geography, you learn the economies, find the resource stashes, the narrative keypoints. Knowledge translates directly to power and the game bends to your will. It’s another symmetry - a volte-face of Prey’s ultimate outcome, where you never really had any power at all.
On the topic of symmetries, I’m going to theorise another instance of Arkane’s genius for thievery and how it completes a set once you include Deathloop. There’s an unusually coincidental harmony with perhaps the best science fiction series of the 21st century in Prey. Alex Yu, Riley Yu from Mooncrash and the female Morgan Yu mirror Jules Pierre Mao, Julie Mao and Clarissa Mao from The Expanse. Now, the novels debuted in 2012 and the TV series in 2015, two years ahead of Prey’s launch. A particularly striking similarity is the protomolecule vs the Typhon powers of neuromods, and of course the patriarchal Alex sharing a commerce-first philosophy with Jules. If we use this to establish the female Morgan as the canonical choice (along with Emily for Dishonored 2), the gender binary of primary player characters from Dishonored to Deathloop runs male, female, female, male. A perfect symmetry. Or they can all be male, but that’s too boring to be the real intent, surely?
Deathloop
In the Develop Conference 2022 keynote chat, Arkane Lyon studio director Dinga Bakaba revealed that for Deathloop, the team was given carte blanche to design whatever they wanted. So it’s deeply curious that Deathloop emerged as a beautiful summation of both the Arkane style and the Arkane mode, as developed over the Dishonored and Prey titles. It’s too reductive to assign it a ‘greatest hits’ label. The work is much more focused and passionate than that. There’s a distillation of love here, a refining process. Distinct from the process I accuse Sniper Elite of indulging in, Deathloop is not a retreat to some statistical mean of financial maximisation. It’s instead a grand re-implementation of regally-purified features and ideas from a fine body of work. Of mechanisms engineered to precision and of recapitulated powers and weaponry, combined with new foes and new avenues for their exploitation. The freshness lies in the recombination. It reminds me, strangely, of J G Ballard. His work seemed to repeat so many themes; clinical horror, medical terminology, male obsession, middle class sexuality, the corruption of sexual norms, male obsession, Shepperton and the borderland between London and the home counties, male obsession, altered dissociative mentalities, the romance of the psychological fugue state, male obsession. In Ballard’s repetition there seems to be the development of some super-refined uberstory, that in iterating through these themes is the process of seeding the reader’s unconscious with his real message - the essential obsessive nature of male humans. Deathloop can be seen as engaging in the same process. By re-implementing successful fragments of prior Arkane work, it iterates them in your unconscious, such that the experienced Arkane player will understand intuitively what their powers will be able to do. It adds to the natural acquisitional drive by helping you pre-plan, to anticipate what you could do and how things could go. Of course, the looping day allows you the obscene power of infinite rehearsal. Or more beautifully, the simple freedom to play. Perhaps in some way it’s a longform version of save-scumming, but it’s formal and structural in Deathloop. In a way, it’s a form of reward, a kind gift of latitude to the Arkane faithful, who I suspect would be getting far more out of the game than an oblivious newcomer. That’s not to say there isn’t an unfolding of wondrous pleasures for the Arkane virgin in Deathloop, it’s pitched so that the uninitiated will have a glorious ride if they succumb to the Arkane romance.
Deathloop combines assassination with ability and equipment acquisition in much the same manner as Dishonored, but with that extra acquisitional drive of opening out play-spaces from Prey as the player’s knowledge of Blackreef matures in search of solving the many-stranded mysteries at Deathloop’s core. The looping nature has an obvious root, but what’s surprising is the lack of overt moral judgement. The loop, and its daily reset, erases any moral wrongdoing, so there’s a strident amorality (in its purest sense) expressed in Deathloop, right up until those final decisions at the narrative conclusion. But I think there is a surprisingly obvious reason for this. Deathloop is a holiday. So much so, it’s even mentioned in the game’s haunting signature song. It’s sometimes so blatantly apparent that it’s easy to miss - the whole thing has a celebratory air and ultimately all roads lead to a massive, opulent party. The final dance being in which tools and abilities the player wants to deploy and in which fashion. The final challenge is amongst the most free in any Arkane game, it’s the invitation to flex whatever you’ve got, however you want, to get those final kills done. This sense of supreme joy and self-confidence defines Deathloop as the exclamation mark at the end of a sentence that starts with Dishonored. With Redfall marking a jump to the open world mode, you have to wonder if Deathloop is some kind of farewell to Arkane’s chapter of subtly guided corridors and arenas. It’s very much the fin of this particular siècle, decked out in vibrant psychedelia and exploding with fizzy fireworks, literally. In the brutal world of commerce, and locked within a doubly gilded cage under the profit-motivated keymasters of Bethesda and Microsoft, there must be the awareness that corporate tyranny could end Arkane as easily as we bump off a pesky Eternalist in Colt’s way. I mean, it’s not as if massive projects like Redfall haven’t been outright cancelled and entire studios disbanded by most of the giant AAA gaming conglomerates. Nor can the fates of Origin Systems, Looking Glass, Ion Storm, or Irrational Games be ignored. In that sense, Deathloop’s grand celebration is almost getting the farewell party going before any axe can fall. It is Arkane letting us be the Motorcycle Boy playing with the rumblefish, entranced by their visual vibrancy and their singular force of will to survive. At any point, the fishtank could be picked up and the walk to the river embarked upon. There’s even an end-of-the-world aberrant hedonism acutely expressed in the Eternalists, who charge around with the wild abandon of millennial cultists celebrating a coming Y2K apocalypse. The whole game has the intoxicating delirium of inevitable catastrophe. That which is hinted at in the chaos of the Dishonoreds and given alien form in Prey is now the player in Deathloop. Colt is become death, he is the destroyer of worlds. You are the one who’s ending this party before commercial brutalism does it for us. But I’m getting ahead of myself here by reaching a conclusion before I really want to. No bother, for I am Julianna and I’ve just shot you in the face.
Waking up on the beach during the Develop Conference 2022 keynote chat, Arkane Lyon studio director Dinga Bakaba revealed that for Deathloop, there was a clear intent to make a polarising game. There was an expectation that 50% of players would be enraged, with the game really being for the 50% that fall deeply in love with its charms. This strikes me as extraordinarily French. Literally laissez-faire, it’s a bold gambit but it underlines the confidence Dinga and Arkane had in the Deathloop proposition. A glorious refusal to compromise its belief in its concept. And I was absolutely one of the enamoured 50%. Even though I was left disappointed by the narrative ending. It had two problems for me; plausibility in motivation and unimaginative origins, both being faults within Julianna. As I’ve written previously, Julianna is a supremely great character, being both a wonderful update of GLaDOS and a towering embodiment of the entire game. Her sheer force and presence define Deathloop, but the denouement of how she came to be and why she’s doing what she does feels so terribly pedestrian given the wildness of the island and its supporting conceptual framework. It’s almost inexcusable to have explanations as opaque and circular as ‘because she loves it’ or ‘killing Colt makes it interesting’. This doesn’t really justify why she fights so ardently to protect the loop. Odder still is the justification for Colt’s behaviour and obsession with ending the loop being the result of Julianna killing him. In at least two talks on Deathloop, Arkane staff intimate that a deeper narrative justification does exist, but that revealing everything is too comprehensive an answer. Maintaining mystique is apparently more important. Without any deeper context, it really doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s questionable how much mystique is left to preserve when the anomaly’s central chamber is a literal red room, seemingly pulled from Twin Peaks. But at least it’s not as bad as Prey’s rug-pull. It’s just unsatisfactory, much like its treatment of Lila Blake. Surely I can't be the only one who anticipated some kind of reunion between Colt and Lila? Or just something more when Colt gets to the heart of the entire thing. The binary choice Julianna offers you seems so timid, so modest, so out of keeping with Arkane’s effortless grandeur. Most of the problem came from my own imagination. Given the 60s-ish setting, I was taken to the very 60s-ish sci-fi wrangling of Star Trek. I’m sure you can well imagine scenarios where Julianna is a product of the loop, so her entire existence is reliant on its continuation. Or crazier still, Julianna being a fractured timeline version of Colt from some other parallel, and ending the loop sends her to some less favourable place. Perhaps those are too cliche for Arkane? Who knows. But as with Prey, none of this dents my ardour. I adore Deathloop, I adore Colt, I adore his screeches, I adore Julianna and I adore Blackreef.
Deathloop offers the best walking simulator proxy in Arkane’s lineage. As with Talos 1, I obtained some profoundly deep joy from simply exploring the beautiful regions of Blackreef and nudging my way around their details and secrets. I sensed the architectural links back to Dunwall on my first visit to Updaam and combined with the Horizon installations, this fermented a tangible charisma that propelled my curiosity. I loved noodling around each map in each timezone, for there was a surprising amount to find - not to mention the deeply pleasing aspect of how each location lets you see the other districts from new viewpoints. The setting itself, a frozen island, has obvious thematic nods to the game’s central premise, but there’s a real austere beauty in how Blackreef establishes its visual temperature. Most affecting was the Complex during a snowstorm, with thinly-clad Eternalists collapsed on the ground and shivering, deliriously, hypothermically. This pinprick of horror is one of few dramatic divergences from the game’s core comedy, which is surely born from laughter being the only sane reaction to such an insane place filled with such insane people. If it wasn’t hilarious, you’d cry at Blackreef’s empty hedonism and unbounded self-indulgence. The way the Visionaries express command over their indoctrinated populace has the insidious sheen of plausibility, and I’m sure there is plenty of reading to be done into each ego’s signs and signifiers, to view them as unignorable beacons for the ills of modern society, or as cyphers for the humans most responsible for them. But Deathloop’s staccato pace leaves little time for such reflection, especially when you’re in the ending phase of rehearsing the final, golden run. I loved how your knowledge of Blackreef’s traversal becomes so instinctual, you’re almost speedrunning objectives by accident. Such a wonderful path to follow, a real masterclass in moving the player from ignorant befuddlement to mastery of the domain, all at a fine pitch, running its various momenta with quite some savoir-vivre. It’s absolutely deliberate too, a foundational goal for the game’s design. The machine behind the magic runs more beautifully here than Dishonored or Prey. That evolution of player trajectory and its deceptive simplicity exemplifies just how refined Deathloop really is, should you be one of the chosen Eternalists to gain Deathloop’s favour. There’s a spectacular overview to take, of how the entire body of players picking up Colt’s thread are funnelled down an identical intro until the possibilities and freedoms explode into a wild, multivariate profusion of paths, which then merge together into a singular line as Colt flies to the centre of the anomaly. I like to imagine Dinga sitting late at night in Arkane Lyon, watching accumulated network data project a million concurrent Colts streaming through all of Blackreef’s possibilities before focusing into that terminal binary. A grand superposition of Deathloop, an path integral summing into a deific vision of a game in play to its fullest extent. Thing is, I can well believe Arkane would do such a thing purely because they could, just because it would be beautiful to watch.
Again, Arkane’s fine sense of detail inscribes plenty of fond memories to treasure. Fristad Rock had plenty, the most notable being Ode To Somewhere as the sirens’ call to Frank’s house. You can’t avoid the song diffusing into your subconscious as you have to go there in the first chapter to visit Colt’s office. Ode To Somewhere is Deathloop’s anthem, and I’ve written previously about its power and morphing relevance to various aspects of the game’s characters. It carries the air of a lament, that the brass and flute chorus has a distinctly mournful, sentimental quality. But it also captures an almost qualia-like essence of Fristad Rock; the city lights of Karl’s Bay in the distance, the blustery and cold winds among the cliffs and along the shoreline. The song for Dishonored’s credits feels a bit cheesy. Ode To Somewhere feels utterly integral. Later, when you’re trying to get into Frank’s studio, you’ll hear the song over and over as you scrabble about on the rooftop, looking for ways to bypass the ClassPass. Naturally if you look hard enough, there’s a covert way. Because there’s always a covert way. Fristad Rock has such delicious contrast - between Frank’s semi-Deco villa with its Vegas-on-Blackreef interior and the repurposed industrial environs of Fia’s art studio-cum-deadly reactor, there’s domiciliary idiosyncrasy linked by underground tunnels and overground equipment dumps, all peppered with 60s adornments to add a contemporary sheen. And an abundance of beautifully austere shorelines. But there are more secrets to be found - the spy base, for example. I think it has one of the best voice tapes in the whole game (amazing death noises), but the sheer level of intrigue it inspires is just delicious. As Dinga said, Deathloop is cuisine, not fast food. And the quality of the cooking is beautifully exemplified in the secret spy content. If found early in the game and completed quickly, it gives quite a nice advantage, but the real joy is in the extra narrative layers it adds to life on Blackreef, and the larger world it left behind. Just a small bit of extra detail that fuels the deep textural richness we’ve come to expect, A good cult always rewards its most faithful and devotional faith in Arkane is rarely betrayed. Deathloop rewards the faithful so very, very well.
It’s a testament to Deathloop’s sheer maturity that its little details could fill a book. Take the quixotic sleeping quarters for each visionary, or the library, or Charlie’s fun house. Karl’s Bay; a mad circus of cultural explosions and egomaniac leisure, with an obscene church to the cult of personality in Harriet’s warehouse. But it also has the enigma of the garbage collector, a post-hoc mission that hints at something far wilder and potentially more challenging than the managed microcosm that sits under Julianna’s purview. The sniper’s nest in Updaam, the stealthier paths around the Complex, the Hitman-like complexity of Alexis’s mansion. I mean, this is just talking about places in Deathloop. The weapons and the combat are great too. I loved that the Eternalists are all terrible soldiers, who often win by force of numbers more than deadly skill. They’re not trained spec-ops killers and the game is more leisurely fun as a result. I personally became a huge fan of the turrets. A beautifully transparent link to Prey, the turrets eventually became my primary weapon thanks to long-range hacking. There were such lovely ways to combine equipment and powers in a spectrum of stealth approaches, letting the player shake out the ones they liked through free play as you work towards the conclusion. It’s wonderful that to optimise your final run, you need to understand locales in both geographic and temporal perspectives, as well as there being a (well fore-shadowed) secretive, militaristic infrastructure to explore in a fragmentary fashion. I remember the raw tantalisation of looking at the original Horizon Project maps of the island and seeing installations that we couldn’t access, hidden places and purposes upon which a mad holiday camp had been installed. I loved how various Horizon places had key roles in the journey and in solving the various mysteries that Colt accumulates, as if the raw concrete utilitarian infrastructure provided the bedrock of truth for an untrustworthy reality. I also loved that 1960s appeal. Being a fan of The Prisoner, the echo is so strong I can’t believe it’s never been formally stated as an inspiration, even though there are startling parallels. The geography is almost enough but if Colt is Number 6, Julianna is absolutely a formidable Number 2. There are also interesting resonances with Gerry Anderson’s wonderfully psychedelic UFO and its episode Timelash, which sees a dreamlike battle between its hero and the antagonist-of-the-week within warped time and space. I can’t ignore some of the stylistic parallels with Archer, but most fondly the 60s visual style recalled a much-beloved and much-missed videogame series: No One Lives Forever.
Monolith
Monolith’s journey from ex-demosceners to pro developer initially carved a lovely course of maturation and progression. Serious FPS heads will tout Blood 1 and 2 as key entries in the genre’s early years, but the studio really defined an Arkane-like stamp of technical proficiency, conceptual delight and superb game design with No One Lives Forever. On the surface it’s Austin Powers: The FPS with a female protagonist, but it really goes much deeper by applying that glib analysis in a far more passionate and profound manner. The game is in fact a vastly expanded Goldeneye 007 in Austin Powers clothes, but carrying on the joke’s concept with intelligence and taste. It explores the James Bond canon with surprising depth of scope, translating a wide array of Bond moments and settings into an FPS that isn’t as straight a shooter as it first appears. While not entirely fully-formed, No One Lives Forever offers the occasional extra, secret route in its levels. There are stealthy bypasses here and there, when the common standard in 2000 was to just blast your way through. There are vestiges of immersive sim in Cate Archer’s first outing, which are explored far more explicitly in the game’s sequel. Divergent level design involving conversation checks, mini puzzles or stealthy ingresses are sprinkled across No One Lives Forever. And it’s huge! There are so many levels and locales that it’s almost dizzying. You can go from Fleming espio-tourism in exotic climes to acutely observed underground lairs to a Moonraker-aping space station. There’s a stupendously inventive skydiving sequence (again from Moonraker) and you even get to indulge in some Thunderball and For Your Eyes Only scuba diving. It’s quite the series of maps, offering a wealth of riotous FPS fun alongside its comedic quips and gloriously hammy enemy deaths. The game’s pace suffers terribly with a mystifying inclusion of long debrief dialogue sessions between assignments, but this is one of very few points of criticism for No One Lives Forever. It’s an absolute triumph - a genuine classic in the FPS hall of fame, if not only for its glorious and unashamed individuality. That Monolith improved on its mechanics for No One Lives Forever 2, including much more sophisticated stealth, reveals a developer on a fantastic trajectory. You get points to spend on developing skills and there’s definitive signalling for your stealth status alongside an upgrade of its predecessor’s FPS sensibilities. History tends to favour No One Lives Forever 2 due to its slightly increased proximity to the modern FPS, but the original sings a slightly sweeter song. Seemingly charged with the momentum of success, Monolith then created one of the most criminally underrated FPSes of all time. A game so close to an immersive sim it should really be thought of as such: Tron 2.0. Where the No One Lives Forever games explore Bond through an Austin Powers lens, Tron 2.0 is an absolutely devoted and faithful exploration of the Tron universe. Conceptually it’s a masterpiece, effortlessly expanding Tron’s environmental aesthetic to reflect the game taking place within more modern, capable hardware than the 1982 computers playing home to Flynn’s original escapades. The beauty in Tron 2.0 is that you actually visit one of those elderly computers and experience the original Tron style (and architecture) as a fully-explorable space. Tron 2.0 also has you hopping into a PDA running out of battery, leading to a time-limited dash through a much smaller environment. A stunning interpretation of a PDA’s RAM and power limitations compared to the mega-network the bulk of the game takes place in. At one point you get to view an Internet gateway, a towering polygonal cathedral hosting a portal to infinity, precisely as the Internet should look in Tron-world. You can take or leave the nightclub full of programs having a boogie. Personally I take it, because I really don’t care how bananas Tron 2.0 wants to be. Given the level of consideration and respect some IPs get, any sins on Monolith’s part are absolved many times over, because the execution is unbelievably great. It feels as profoundly correct as X-Wing’s invocation of Star Wars space combat did a decade previously. Tron 2.0’s character models capture the Kodalith effect of Tron’s herculean filming technique remarkably well, reflecting the same monochromatic flesh tones that sat so contrastingly with Lisburger’s backlit wireframes, gradients and glows. It’s the kind of excellence that can only come from true passion, a real love for Tron, and a commitment to expand it correctly - to understand the initial concept and grow it into new spaces of higher complexity and sophistication. Tron 2.0’s journey is mostly linear, but its RPG elements and multiple tactical approaches push it another tantalising step closer to a thoroughbred Immersive Sim. I absolutely adore Tron 2.0. Like No One Lives Forever, it’s a vast exploration of its source material and repeatedly offers up the kind of polygonal, gouraud-shaded vistas that Vaporwave wannabes would die for, almost by accident. I could, and should, write a far more comprehensive account of the game, but let’s not make this the Monolith show just yet. These three games in Monolith’s sequence (I’m excluding Aliens vs Predator 2) suggested so much potential to come. It’s therefore a more affecting tragedy that it all came to a crashing halt.
F.E.A.R. may have won fans and critical acclaim, but it marked the death of Monolith’s explorations towards a true first-person RPG. We must erase Matrix Online from history, so looking towards Condemned: Criminal Origins and its sequel, it feels like Monolith as an entity had undergone some kind of horrifically traumatic breakdown and emerged as a violent, bitter sociopath. Gone was the sheer joie de vivre and delightful humour of the No One Lives Forever games, and equally missing was the stunningly rich, bright visual glory and joyous celebrations of Tron 2.0. Instead there was horror, decay, kinetic violence, urban degradation, misanthropy. Where there was a previous sense of Monolith romantically chasing some videogame design ideal, there was now the sensation of being dragged into an amoral fog of pessimism and commercial mundanity. A palette swap for the studio’s entire soul, which we can attempt to sum up in Shadow Of Mordor’s nemesis system. Systematically clever, yet mired in malevolent vengeance and inescapable darkness. There’s an obvious thread that connects F.E.A.R. to Shadow Of Mordor via the Condemned series and even though Monolith’s darker games carried on a certain sense of individualism, they also felt more compliant to mainstream trends, far more conformist. And something magical was definitely gone. Now, the hope of something as fun as No One Lives Forever or obsessively explored as Tron 2.0 seem distant improbabilities. This is my big fear for Arkane; that the party has to end sometime, and the magic has to die. Although I want to invest in my cultish faith that Arkane’s cultural value justifies its creative freedom as much as its existence as a top-tier studio, there is a nagging realist pessimism about its future. Monolith’s history signposts what can change when a studio strikes a certain mood change that coincidentally brings enough commercial success to fundamentally change its entire approach.
I can’t help but think of other developers with bravura catalogues where the light in their eyes seemed to pale. Considering Mooncrash, I recall Alpha Protocol’s daring attempts at divergent narratives, how interesting and yet how wobbly it all was, and how it was left as a failed dead-end instead of the foundation for an exciting new era of adaptive stories. Then there was Obsidian’s eventual timidity with The Outer Worlds. A game that wished it could be New Vegas, but something or someone had clipped its wings or trampled on its enthusiasm. It had been bullied into subservience, thereby producing a thinner, less able tribute that could never fly quite as high, or weave though the clouds as deftly. I remember my first sense of deflation came when I saw the most flagrant Rick Sanchez clone possible and felt a pall of copyist devoteeism descend across every aspect of the game. As I mentioned earlier, Julianna in Deathloop is GLaDOS, but she’s not a copy - she’s a joyously fun re-implementation. Phineas Welles is simply a pretend Rick Sanchez, but somehow less fun. At least he’s less of a terrible human being. Phineas embodies the game; despite flashes of greatness, The Outer Worlds felt so rushed, so unfairly compressed. And yet in a contradictory fashion, thin and emaciated and under-supported. It was tragic in a way, to see such a towering presence release something that seemed far less than it should be. Why include so many planets to visit if all you’re offering is a postage stamp to explore? I wanted New Vegas’s Mickey Rourke. I got Matt Dillon.
Like the Motorcycle Boy, Akane still reigns and Redfall excites me tremendously. But that fear, born of bitter experience, grows with every release. I hope Redfall opens a new chapter of open-world Arkane titles. I’d love GTA: Dunwall or Deathloop: New Vegas. My ultimate dream of Arkane in charge of a Bethesda open-worlder is likely something I’ll take to my deathbed but for now, that dream isn’t shattered. I’m not sure I actually care if Redfall is great or not. As mentioned earlier, commercial success is as much a curse as a blessing for highly creative studios, particularly those which may have previously suffered less-than-stellar commercial performance. Talking primarily about Prey and how its sales influenced Deathloop, Dana Nightingale remarked that a studio can make a perfect game, balance everything correctly, tell an enthralling story and still flop commercially. The videogame market is cruel - in some ways it’s the cruellest of all entertainment markets, but to Nightingale this was the call to make your commercial failures a creative triumph. I think we can bet on Arkane making sure Redfall at least aspires to that goal. Seeing as its primary audience seems to be Game Pass, one has to wonder if raw player figures are the metric under scrutiny by Arkane’s masters. I also fear Redfall may be a sacrificial lamb to prop up Bethesda’s Q2 2023, something to perhaps shield Starfield for a precious few months. But I am an Arkane devotee, and I can’t really see them fucking it up. Whether it continues the unbroken run of greatness is another thing entirely, as is its potential for securing a creatively-free future. We can only hope.1
Motorcycle Boy came back from California with a curse, one he couldn’t shake, one with an inevitable fatalism. That romance may sing so very sweetly in Rumblefish, but I can’t apply it to Arkane in quite the same way. But there is that charismatic difference, that fundamental individual spirit that eternally separates Motorcycle Boy from Rusty James. Arkane extolls it with everything it makes, and long may it reign. As Tom Waits mentions in probably the most profound monologue in Rumblefish; “Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see when you're young, you're a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years, a couple of years there... it doesn't matter. You know. The older you get you say, "Jesus, how much I got? I got thirty-five summers left." Think about it. Thirty-five summers.” I really hope Arkane gets thirty-five more summers, because the studio’s panache, grace, its sheer excellence is just too precious for this world and the commercial context Arkane has to operate within. Too weird to live, too rare to die? The modern industry is rarely kind to such animals. It’s a cold place where summers are all too easily spent and the long winters are earned in lieu.
I hope I haven’t laboured my Rumblefish references too much and that you can understand that ‘royalty in exile’ analogy, for Arkane’s divergence from the increasingly standardised notion of the capable and dependable AAA product is that signifier of regal status. Forever an outsider of its own making, forever a cut above. With its ethos and its staff keeping a fire burning that stretches back to Origin Systems and the stupendously ambitious open-world wonders of Richard Garriott’s Ultima series, the lineage Arkane continues is one of the most important in modern videogame design. Where we may see AAA define itself as a succession of solid open-world adventures, annual sequels or thematically heavy prior-media tribute fodder, we find Arkane dancing to a different drum. Long may Arkane brave the waves, perhaps out near that California beach where its offspring or acolytes arrive by motorbike to stand looking out to sea. Arkane certainly has the momentum - it’s riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. I hope we never have to look ‘with the right eyes’ to see the high water mark where the wave finally broke and had to roll back.
[21]
Writing now, on May 9th 2024, this paragraph and much of the section that it lies within have an eerie resonance. It’s awful to think that in just over a year, Arkane Austin has gone through a public humiliation over Redfall and a brutal assassination at the hands of its corporate overlords. Its summer seemingly spent, the absolute worst that I wrote has actually happened. As I wrote in this piece’s Deathloop section, the sense of apocalyptic celebration in Blackreef feels far more palpable now we know what a muddled, presumably-ordered-by-corporate mess Redfall turned out to be. Perhaps internally as Deathloop matured, all this was well-known and the closure of Austin perhaps sensed as inevitable as compromise upon compromise struggled to make Redfall a viable product. This seems especially significant given Lyon’s leap to licensed IP for its next project. But at least the obituary editorials and “Prey was a masterpiece and you should feel absolutely ashamed for not buying it twice” pieces are flooding the formal games media, proving once again that in this modern age, we only seem to truly appreciate greatness once its undergone some tragedy that prevents it from happening again. For a solid take, please do read Nathan Brown’s excoriation here: https://newsletter.hitpoints.co/261-dishonoured/ . As someone who’s written thousands of words about the ‘consolidation contraction’ of the current high-end AAA videogames industry, Nathan’s bitterness is entirely valid, and seethes with the righteous indignation at a managerial class that has systematically failed to protect its true assets in favour of brutal, economic fundamentalism. The brutal truth being these assholes fucked it all up for all of us. And, in Microsoft’s case, it really does seem like a decade of absolutely laughable mismanagement patched over with a series of acquisitions to mask profound failures in branding and product strategy. In a way, I can see a kind of romantic fatalism at play, something that allows the studio that made Prey join a choir of ascended angels alongside Origin Systems, Looking Glass, Ion Storm, Irrational et al. Given the savagery of Microsoft’s creative self-harm, we can almost certainly bet Obsidian no longer feels a secure warmth under Microsoft’s wings. Can Arkane survive Blade? Who knows. But at least I know where the real celebration of the true Arkane spirit lay. The afterparty is Deathloop, with all the came before the fine cuisine we should all savour with an extra sense of gratitude that it ever happened at all.