How Deathloop Misunderstands the Best Aspect of Rogue-likes
Loss gives players more than what Deathloop sacrifices with its Infusions
It’s hard to make death fun in a videogame. For however much Souls-like fans may clamor for ever greater challenges, most players would like nothing more than to unwind, chilling out with a comfortable ride. So, whenever a game tries to inconvenience players, there’s typically some way to counterbalance it, but sometimes these countermeasures can go to far. What should help every facet shine instead drowns them out in a sea of monotony — and there are few more egregious examples of this than Arkane Lyon’s Deathloop.
Deathloop is all about dying and trying again, as you try to escape a malevolent timeloop enforced by a collection of crazed creatives on a remote island. Unlike Arkane’s past work, there’s no saving your game to try something over again. You have to live with your mistakes. This was a risky gambit, but the potential for merging the immersive sim genre with rogue-likes undeniably tempting.
The key thing with rogue-likes is that knowledge is your greatest asset — both mechanical and in muscle reflex. You learn how to surmount unexpected challenges through failure, layering improved skill with greater understanding of the gameplay sandbox. However, there’s always some unpredictability to keep things fresh. What’s most traditional is that your equipment has to be scavenged in the field for every run. Even in a world with relatively static environments, this enlivens things drastically. You might get a few essentials each go-round, but nothing crazy.
For example, Deathloop gives you an SMG and a double-jump perk every loop. Before you have to deal with anything else in your first loop, the concept of reequipping from scratch is promptly taught to you. Immediately after this brief intro, you’re directed to the Library, which has been retrofitted into a massive armory you can pilfer useful weapons from. You’d reasonably assume that hitting the Library for supplies is something you’d make a habit of across every loop, but this isn’t the case thanks to Infusions.
Due to the game’s lengthy tutorial sequence, players will go through a minimum two loops before gaining access to Infusions. Through a medical experiment, you unlock the ability to absorb the raw energy permeating the isle of Blackreef and its most important residents. Rather than use this energy in a more traditional RPG system, you imbue your favorite pieces of gear with a chronol-essence that ensures they’re available at the start of your next loop. This can be applied to everything from core powers stolen from your primary targets and to individual gun modifiers.
At first blush, you’d likely assume Infusions only carry over from one run to the next, let alone that they’ll have a high cost for everything given how powerful some equipment is. On paper, it’s a brilliant extra wrinkle: Die without infusing, and you lose something valuable. Infuse too soon, and potentially miss out on something even better. It’d be a brilliant risk-reward system bolstered by the danger of being invaded by other players participating as protagonist Colt’s main rival, Juliana.
Except Deathloop doesn’t do any of this.
In truth, Deathloop makes retaining gear so trivial that the second you’ve infused an ideal loadout, you’re set for the rest of the game. It’s a problem Yahtzee Crowshaw came up against in his own playthrough, where we each acquired a silenced weapon that was so applicable to every scenario it trivializes the difficulty curve into a bouncy castle. This isn’t the end result of some extensive sidequest, but a regular weapon drop that is inexpensive to Infuse.
For being easily one of the most complex immersive sim sandboxes by Arkane, Deathloop is the easiest to solve for the wrong reasons. There’s countless looped secrets to find and unique wrinkles, but despairingly little reason to explore them. Crafting an ideal loadout can be accomplished in under four total loops, with the only delaying factor being randomized loot drop rates and the odd invasion by Juliana. After that, eliminating your eight targets isn’t particularly taxing.
Despite the game’s own insistence to the contrary, brute force is totally viable.
Of course having the option to be brutal is welcome, but in the past, doing so has held some sort of consequence. There was impetus to play smarter, yet that nudge is sadly absent in Deathloop.
This absence pervades every element the second you can optimize to your heart’s content. Sure, there’s character perks that can kit you out to specialize, but why bother when a silenced gun can clear most rooms with ease? If that’s not an option, just use the freely given hacking tool to convert a nearby turret, prop it near a door, and let it clear the room. The latter is again a very easy option as you always have access to your hacking tool, in case you weren’t overpowered enough.
Yes, you could in theory take out your many opponents through subtle trickery like Agent 47 in Hitman. Such moments can be quite satisfying when it all comes together, but it’s on you to actually go there. Worse still, these routes are typically more busy work than fun. When a bullet to the head does the job just as well, you’re left to question “why bother?”. That is, unless the story demands it, which it does on occasion.
The problem with these moments is that whenever Deathloop tries to evoke its predecessors, it ends up more restrictive. There’s no equivalent to Dishonored 2’s clockwork mansion here, just large shooting galleries with the odd cinematic puzzle. A few optional ways to kill Visionaries might be interesting on paper, but when you’ve finally lined up the way to break the loop, the course of action is again, regrettably, far more pedestrian.
Only two targets have distinct behaviors that matter outside of direct combat: one is so paranoid he’ll spot you if you hack his traps, while the other’s main twist is he blends in at a party and must be lured out. The rest are just buried behind a litany of guards with the odd button press lining them up somewhere more optimal for your final run.
There’s too little incentive to go outside your comfort zone, even when fighting the metaphysically empowered Visionaries. In fact, soon as you discover which Visionary drops a magnum with a poison cloud function, virtually every boss fight ceases to be a problem as well thanks to — you guessed it — Infusing the poison magnum. Yet through this consistent loot drop that Deathloop highlights a better way to implement equipment drops in a game like this.
If certain weapons were only available when pursuing particular objectives in a specific order, then Arkane could’ve more carefully tailored player options to ensure greater variety. Despite technically removing some player agency with the absence of infusion, shaping your options purely around what’s available would force vastly more ingenuity.
It’s clear that Arkane understands this, as your health can only be replenished on the go, rather than by hording healthkits. Your abilities also exist in a shared mana pool with a set recharge time. Whenever in combat or exploring while using your powers, you have a limited window to avoid being at a disadvantage. This sort of tension is great, and where Deathloop’s aims for spontaneity shine through.
Unfortuntately so many other elements run counter to this that it leaves the health system feeling cumbersome rather than inspiring daring risk-taking. You simply end up running back to grab more health from a dispenser, then charging back into whatever you were doing before.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Elijah, Juliana is so unpredictable given she be played by humans, she can irrevocably destroy your current loop!” Yes, yes she can. Except relying on the human element of an invasion system in an immersive sim to keep things fresh is a risky prospect at best, and a ship to made to wreck at worst.
At some point the only people invading in Deathloop are going to be veterans and total novices, resulting in battles as no better imbalanced than facing the lackuster AI Juliana when playing solo. She either abuses a certain ability/weapon, or is a helpless duckling as you send her sprawling on the floor with poison gas or fire off silenced headshots she never hears coming. A decreasing player pool is only going to exacerbate this aspect.
The result of all these conflicting elements is a game where the first half is demonstrably better than the concluding half. Getting to know Black Reef’s madhouse and its many residents for the first time is great, as is learning the ins and outs of certain side opportunities. Yet digging in and trying to get the most out of the world only serves to highlight how Deathloop lacks the hard edge a great rogue-like needs.
Deathloop is a mountain of untapped potential caught up in an inherently compromised mixture. This is understandable — as a major AAA singleplayer-focused project with a new IP, there’s a lot riding on Deathloop to be loved by as many players as possible, especially those with less patience than the typical rogue-like fans. Trying to balance for mainstream audiences and such a specific niche must’ve been incredibly stressful.
Warts and all, Deathloop is an incredibly ambitious experiment, one that can and has been be plenty entertaining for many players. However, at its core,it never quite commits to what it could be. As with Colt breaking the timeloop on Black Reef, it’s clearly benefited Arkane to hew towards the safer side of things. Maybe with an audience sold on the core concept they can take more risks next time around.
