Pray You Aren’t Dishonored: A Review of Arkane Studio’s Deathloop
My initial exposure to the existence of Arkane was watching a torrented episode of Face Off (not that one), a special effects and make up competition show. It was in this episode that contestants were faced with creating an original character design based only on concept art for a soon to be released game called Dishonored. While the episode was entertaining in its own right, I was enamored by the concept art I had seen. The magitech and steampunk environments, altered Victorian era clothing, rugged and brutish thugs in bowler caps wearing a scowl like a stylish accessory, it told me one thing: I need to play this game. Eventually I did, and I loved it. I think Dishonored is a fantastic game followed by two (not so) equally fantastic sequels. I played Dishonored nonstop for a few weeks, replaying every level, learning every aspect of every possible route in order to efficiently improve my abilities as a skull masked assassin. The Golden Cat and Lady Boyle’s Last Party stand out as my favorite missions. The Golden Cat stands out because I found it to have the greatest variety of approach when going about your objectives. Last Party is great because I find it refreshing when a game allows you to mosey about and rub elbows with NPCs that under normal conditions, would be trying to kill you. The ability to sign my name in the guestbook is the cherry on top on the cold blooded murder cake. It was through this game that the name Arkane was engraved in the grooves of my brain, ensuring that it would acquire my attention any time I saw news or reveals that included it.
When I saw the announcement of Deathloop, it was inevitable I was going to be excitedly anticipating this games release. Unfortunately, I missed my chance at acquiring it on launch, and every subsequent sale of the game on the Playstation Store (I primarily play Sony consoles, but I’m not a Sony fanboy. I won’t judge anyone based on their platform of choice in the pursuit of enjoying games). I was ecstatic to see the game being offered for PS+ subscribers. Immediately I added it to my library and completed the game in a few days. My bottom line is that it is the Jackie Brown of Arkane Studios.
I’ll be honest, I’m still new at this whole review thing, and after noticing I spent a page simply describing the first twenty minute of the game, I knew to cut it. Maybe if I was doing a video essay sure, but that’s too much to ask someone to read.
All in all I had a good experience with Deathloop. In it’s earliest reports I had assumed the game possessed a roguelite design plan, and while it does possess some mild mechanics of the genre, it very much is not a roguelite. Deathloop, like Dark Souls, is a game that expects you to die and to learn. A lot. Depending on your skill not only with first person shooters and stealth games, but also if you’ve played literally any other Arkane game, will affect your mechanical grasp and progress within the game.
The game’s story revolves around Cole, waking up on a beach, and discovering he’s trapped in a Groundhog’s Day loop. No matter what happens, whether he sees the end of the day, or is stabbed, shot, beaten to death, or caught in the explosion of a nuclear reactor, he is destined to live the same day, over and over. Cole soon discovers after his awakening, he has been trying to break loop for an undisclosed amount of time.
The game is broken down into four levels and four periods of time, morning, afternoon, late afternoon, and evening. The player is given the freedom to choose any level at any point in time within a given loop, so long as they survive to make it to the end of the current level. But, once the loop is over, meaning evening has past, every item you possess that you haven’t infused to retain it, is lost to the void, whether it’s a weapon, power or trinket.
Initially, I really loved the gimmick of how the levels played out. Enemy and resource layouts varied depending on the time you visited the level. Visiting one area my boast a blanket of snow, while visiting another area in the afternoon may have less enemy presence. Certain puzzles may only be solved by visiting a specific location at a certain time, waiting for a specific NPC to perform a specific action to hear a specific password to open a specific door. While the game boasts in the ability to allow freedom of player traversal, to get to the bone marrow of what lies beneath still depends on specificity. The island is also host to Visionaries, which serve as the special targets akin to the ones present in Dishonored. The catch is that to successfully break the loop, every visionary has to die within the loop in a single run.
Here is where I become a little less enthused on how the game is meant to be solved. Because no doubt while the game can be as much as a Hitman or Doom experience as you want it to be, it is also an investigative puzzle game. You need to journey to every corner and look through every nook and cranny if you hope to solve every puzzle made available in the game, which I will admit that I did not do. At least one of them required me to refer to a guide during one of the later stages of the puzzle, and rarely do I ever refer to a guide when playing a game (I don’t have anything against guides, but I find it immersion breaking if I keep having to pause gameplay to check one).
The main difference in how the Visionaries in Deathloop are handled compared to Dishonored, is that while you’re free to kill them however you like and as creatively as you like, this game will require you to do so in a specific way in order to beat the game. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. While playing through the loops, you will have to find clues on how to do this. Because unlike Dishonored, the Visionaries are not always accessible depending on the location and time of day. Some are only accessible during one specific time in one specific level. Some won’t appear at all, or be reachable. But, while you’re there looking for clues, you’re free to kill them however many times you like, as doing so nets you a slab (essentially a totem giving you a power, where subsequent collections of the same slab gives you a new upgrade to that specific power), better graded weaponry, and residuum, a resource used to retain items in your loadout so you can use them in future loops.
It was recently revealed by Arkane that Deathloop does inhabit the same world as Dishonored, and if you’ve played both games, that much is evident upon exploring the environment. The world, buildings, the style of dress, and architectural aesthetic says that this is a world that went through a groovitude spiritual revolution, where hip isn’t just a bone in your body. There is also a noticeable but minor Easter Egg for fans of Dishonored at the end of the game. While I will explain some mild shortcomings I had with the game, the aesthetics and visual design is not one of them. The world of Deathloop is this beautiful and cacophonous amalgamation of spy fiction, 60s and 70s film, the Swinging Sixties, “lone wolf in a crapsack world” movies, and Quentin Tarantino. I bear no ill will nor love towards brown and orange as colors being of focus in graphic design, but Deathloop made me love them in a way I had not thought possible.
A lot of the story and lore is told through supplemental material. Notes, journals, audio diaries (a staple of the genre since BioShock’s popularity). Normally I would prefer a game display as much of its story as it’s being played. Obviously, there are exceptions and Deathloop is one of them. While there are aspects that are experimental, the writing has maintained a consistent gold standard. I think finding all the material in the game and taking the time to read it helps to take some ease from the stream of exploration and combat you’ll primarily find yourself in. Plus I find joy in mentally connecting the dots and strings on my imaginary corkboard while unraveling the mystery. Another game I recently completed, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, allows for the same thing. Although, in 13 Sentinels, there’s a dedicated menu for you to piece together the lore and plot. I found all the files in Deathloop to be fascinating, and discovering them was a reward all on its own.
Cole and Julianna also have a lot of interaction, albeit mostly through the radio. The voice performances are excellent. I never found myself becoming disinterested when listening to the characters. Cole himself had me chuckling on several occasions. The conversations between Cole and Julianna come off more like squabbles most of the time. Which is interesting seeing as she is the primary force of opposition in the game. But, even when I’m in the control of a person who can phase through space, he always feels real due to the level of authenticity brought on by his voice actor, Jason E. Kelley. The same goes for the voice actress for Julianna, Ozioma Akagha.
Deathloop also borrows concepts and mechanics from Dishonored. Veterans of those games will recognize Blink, albeit under a new alias, this time known as Shift. One of my favorite levels, Lady Boyle’s Last Party, receives a remix here, where in the evening in Updaam, you infiltrate a party hosted by the wolf mask toting Visionary, Aleksis (pronounced like Alexis). Unfortunately, I was not able to freely mosey around the party like I had done at Lady Boyle’s manor, thus making her a more gracious host. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to be locked in that creepy guy’s basement.
As mentioned, players are free to play loud or quiet in Deathloop, similar to other stealth action games such as Metal Gear Solid V. I used a mixed approach, as I carried a rifle, a semiautomatic shotgun, and a nail gun on my person at all times. This isn’t so much a criticism of the game itself, but I’ve always been the type of player who tries to find the most efficient toolkit to carry with me. The games hosts a variety of weapons: a machete which is always carried by the player as their melee option, handguns, SMGs, rifles, shotguns, and a laser. All of these weapons have a unique variant barring the laser, which is a unique weapon in and of itself. The gear you acquire comes in four tiers: crude, sleek, exemplar, and unique. I bet based off those words alone you can guess how they’re color coded, but I’ll give you hint: green isn’t used in this tier list.
Exemplar weapons are special in the fact that each of them has a randomized perk, increasing some aspect of the weapon, like it’s damage, or applying a buff to your enemies when damaged by it. Unique weapons will usually possess a singular shared ability, but if you happen to find another unique version of the weapon, it may have a different secondary perk.
The player also has access to special powers, a la Dishonored, this time referred to as slabs. Unlike Dishonored however, you can only equip two at a time, and only change them when editing your loadout between missions. The first power I acquired was Shift, which I assume is the same for anyone who plays for the first time. It was a staple in my loadout. It was my most used power, much like how it was in Dishonored.
Slabs come in a small variety of powers, with the two I would regularly rotate in my secondary slot being Nexus and Aether. Nexus is a fun and interesting power, as it lets you link enemies together. That means if you kill one, the other also dies. It was very handy when in specific missions, two Visionaries would be in close proximity to each other. It can also be useful when you’re invaded by Julianna, as she can take a lot more abuse than regular enemies can. Unless you link her to the schlub next to her and feed him a buckshot sandwich. Aether simply allows you to become invisible for the duration of your magic meter, which thankfully recharges fully when depleted unlike Dishonored which depended on a secondary resource. Whether that makes the game too easy is for you to decide. There are other powers that are fun to play with I won’t spoil, but they’re just as viable in their own right and I encourage anyone playing to experiment with them.
The game adds another layer of toolkit customization with the addition of trinkets, interchangeable attachments for your weapons, character and slabs. The trinkets you find for Cole and his arsenal also follow the gear tier list previously described. The weapon trinkets tend to add typical perks you would expect in a game with shooting based combat. Improved fire rate, increased magazine size, increased damage, less recoil, and so on. There is occasionally a more unique trinket, like the one named Explosive Healing, which does exactly what is stated on the tin. Not quite sure why I would want my grenades to heal me or my enemies. I’m picturing a grenade that instead of shrapnel, propels syringes into your face. Maybe it’s a political statement on the dichotomy of healthcare in the United States. Maybe it’s Maybelline.
The character trinkets provide a more unique variety. There are standard upgrades you’d expect in an immersive sim like faster hacking, hacking mines and traps, looting more ammunition, silent movement or faster movement, and health/power regeneration speeds. The game starts you off with a trinket that gives you the ability to Double Jump. That trinket, combined with Shift, makes the world of Deathloop easily traversable to an inquisitive explorer. There are also trinkets that if equipped, can greatly change and influence one’s play style. For example, I was experimenting with different “builds”, and one I came across was using Vampire, which recovers health when damaging an enemy, Party Time, where you take less damage in crowded areas, Last Stand, where you deal more damage while on low health, and Glass Cannon, where you deal and receive more damage. By doing this, I was in an almost permanent state of low health, outputting maximum damage while beating in my enemies’ faces, where every crunch of jawbone and tooth dislodging was refilling my health bar faster than they could attempt to kill me. I’m Alexander. You’re no Alexander. I’m the best ever. There’s never been anybody as ruthless.
Finally, we make our way to the slab upgrades. I will honorably mention the Reprise slab, although it can’t be upgraded or customized. It’s sole purpose is to act as the lives counter for the player while navigating the individual levels. If a player dies three times within a level, no matter the time of day, the loop resets. The only way for the player to get back their Reprise charges are to defeat Julianna in combat, or to enter the Tunnels, thus exiting the level.
The remainder of the slabs do have multiple upgrades to influence their abilities. I will expound upon the ones for Aether and Nexus, as I don’t wish to spoil too much of the gameplay, and I’ve already discussed these abilities. Aether as a base ability allows the user to become invisible until you attack an NPC or your power runs out and it has four sub abilities. There’s Ghost, where if you stand still Aether doesn’t drain your power. Flicker, where while you attack using Aether, you briefly appear but it doesn’t halt the effect. Erase, in which killing an enemy removes all trace of their existence. Phase, where taking damage doesn’t deactivate Aether and you take less damage while using it. My two choices for Aether were Ghost and Erase.
Nexus is the ability where you can link enemies, thus killing two birds with one well place sniper round to the back of the dome. Attraction has the Nexus projectile home in on enemies until they become unstable. That’s a direct quote from the game that I wanted to add because it makes no sense at all when trying to deduce it’s ability. What it does is auto target nearby enemies instead of having to do it manually. Influence has it where when you infect one enemy it will spontaneously create connections to nearby enemies. Parasite, where when you deal damage to an afflicted NPC, you regain health. And Protraction, where Nexus drains power at a slower rate. Personally, I leaned towards Influence and Parasite. Those two powers are also good additions to the prior “build” I described earlier.
So, we have the setting, the tools, the set up, and now what? I guess I can try to describe my overall impressions with the game. So, upon initially booting it up, I was enthralled. Cold open accompanied by a cold, distant sunrise. After slowly trudging my way through the introduction, the game finally opened up to me, throwing me head first into the water (literally). I’ll be honest and say I had gotten upset during my first venture into the actual game after playing for roughly an hour. I had been methodically killing enemies, collecting dozens of trinkets, and thousands of residuum. And then I had been invaded by another player, wearing Julianna’s skin. For context, I have some of the best internet service available in the United States, where I have my PS5 and my computer directly linked via ethernet for a better connection than Wi-Fi can provide. So, imagine my frustration when my opponent kept randomly disappearing and reappearing while I was engaged in combat with them. Now, you might think “well, what if they were using Shift or Aether”. That’s a good thought. It’s an incorrect thought. Using those powers, whether as Cole or Julianna, will leave some particle effects, or it creates a slight haze around the player (similar to the cloaking used by the Predator). There’s still a level of visibility, if only slightly.
This was a situation where there was a bad connection. It was unlikely that it was on my end. My opponent was like vapor. A visible whisper that I couldn’t get my hands on. Needless to say, I got smoked. It was the beginning of the game, and I had little to none when it came to viable options to engage Julianna. They had multiple powers and high level weapons. I only had Reprise, an SMG, and a nail gun. That’s one unfortunate thing about Deathloop. You can only equip or modify equipment between levels. When Julianna kills you, she doesn’t leave the map. You have to either kill her, or go to a specific location to hack a device so you can access the Tunnels and escape.
Losing about an hours worth of my time due to poor connection optimization being exploited by some random player was enough to make me delete the game. I went a full two days without even thinking about Deathloop. But, after remembering that I had recently replayed the entire Dishonored series and Prey earlier this year in preparation for Deathloop, I downloaded it again. Overall, I’m happy with the decision. I did turn off the internet to my PS5 though. Not dealing with that again.
Your first few loops will probably have you moving about slowly. Making mental maps. Understanding enemy patterns and behavior. Beefing up your arsenal. But, after I had acquired my first few proper slabs, I was a death machine. With some experimentation, I was able to discover the proper distance to snipe enemies. I could take them down with one shot, without alerting anyone. Considering that the maps tend to have a handful of ammo dispensers, I was free to fire away. Bulletproof. I was free to wipe an area clear of enemies, then scavenge for supplies.
Whenever I wanted to go loud and proud, I’d pull out my trusty semi auto shotgun. One pump to the chest, and the enemy was finished. I was able to clear rooms faster than the time I savagely consumed the wine and communion wafers at Sunday Mass. Eventually though, enemy encounters became trivial. As I was making progress towards finally solving the loop, the less I wanted to engage in the gunplay.
It’s not because it ceased being fun. It was simply slowing me down. Why take minutes of my times clearing whole areas of a map, when I can just Shift passed everyone? I can grab the objective and leave within a matter of minutes. Shorter than had I took the time to kill everyone. I ended up getting several trophies by accident, where I had only killed the Visionary, or completed a loop without killing needless NPCs.
And that brings me to my overall thoughts of the gameplay loop. Deathloop had the unfortunate implications that it was a roguelite thrust upon it. It doesn’t help that prior Arkane games provide a lot of player freedom and versatility. In the first Dishonored game, players were given a plethora of options to take down targets. Up close assassination, crossbow bolts, pistol shot to the face. You even had nonlethal options, such as having the proprietors of the Golden Cat put into slavery working their own mines. Or after identifying the correct Lady Boyle, quietly deliver her to a masked admirer who takes her away into the shadow of night. Likely, she was never to be seen again.
While you can kill the Visionaries however you like, there is only exactly one way to end the loop. To do so, you’ll actually have to manage a way to get half of the Visionaries to leave their own levels and venture to another Visionaries’ level later on. For example, Aleksis hosts his party exclusively at night, and earlier in the day you have to sabotage other NPCs personal endeavors to force them to attend. For me, I was able to get them in one central location. I used Nexus/Influence to link a ballroom of people together. I then silently sneaked up on a party goer, and proceeded to behead them with my machete. As every other person started to recoil in horror and brandish their weapons, they quickly dropped to the ground. Dead. Never to know why they suddenly failed to live.
I don’t want to disparage the concept and design of the core loop of the game. But, I definitely feel like it throttles players expectations, especially if you’re coming with prior experience of Arkane’s library. It’s these small tweaks where I can’t accurately define Deathloop as being an immersive sim. Which to be fair, I don’t even think Arkane themselves have advertised or described it as being one. But, it’s a harsh juxtaposition when it stands next to the other games. So, this is my long way of saying, don’t go in expecting an exact experience that you may have previously had in Dishonored or Prey.
I had completed the loop and acquired the Golden Ending. There’s multiple endings to the game, and the one I got had received a new epilogue due to an update. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I will note this: the animations of the characters looked off to me. I spent a few hours pondering why the animations looked so weird. Eureka. Epiphany. It reminded me animations produced in Source Filmmaker. Mildly stilted, exaggerated facial expressions, slight uncanny tone. Very weird.
After this, I decided to reconnect the internet to my PS5 to try playing as Julianna. I had been hoping the “matchmaking” would’ve been better. After all, this was only about a month after Sony had added the game to the monthly games for PS+ subscribers. The soonest I had been placed in a game was 5 minutes. The longest was 20 minutes. I only played a total of 5 matches.
(This is a side note about how there’s a greater discussion of how games implement multiplayer features for what is primarily a single player experience. Thus creating an issue where part of your game is inaccessible to later players due to the game’s presence having lost attention and steam in the public eye.)
Conceptually, Julianna plays almost identically to Cole. Gunplay, movement, it’s all the same. A difference is that of course, Julianna is not affected by NPCs, because she and they are on the same side. In fact, it’s your primary object to defend the Visionaries if one is present in the level. Another difference is that Julianna does not have access to Reprise. Instead, she has access to Masquerade. Unfortunately, I was not given an opportunity to use it. But, the power allows you to disguise yourself as an NPC in order to hide in plain sight.
Your opponent will be notified of your invasion of their game, but they’re not aware of where you are. It makes it easy for you to disguise yourself as nonchalant NPC in a crowd. Your advantage is that you don’t have vision cones. So, while the NPCs may be unaware as Cole hops across rooftops because they’re dumb, you’re not. And when you spot him, you can tag him, effectively alerting his presence to those around you. Looks like someone came alone to a gang fight.
The way Julianna upgrades her arsenal is significantly different. Instead of finding and keeping weapons and trinkets, you are awarded with points depending on your actions during an invasion. How many times you kill Cole, how long you survive, what you use to kill Cole. That is then tallied up upon success or death, and you slowly unlock new weapons and abilities when you rank up. Despite killing every single Cole in every match I played, I had barely acquired enough points to get to level 3.
You are way more significantly handicapped when starting as Julianna. To progress and advance fast enough to get to a comparatively endgame state as Cole, you have to give this game a lot of your time. And whether it’s worth it? That’s gonna have to be your call. It wasn’t worth it to me.
I also want to mention the accessibility options of Deathloop. I didn’t tinker with them much personally, as I don’t have many ailments that lessen my ability to engage with games. Deathloop doesn’t have a concrete difficulty selector. But it does allow you to adjust the difficulty based on the presented options in its menu. The game didn’t launch with most of these options, as these were updated with a later patch update. And there are a lot of thorough options here. FOV, controller mapping, dead zone for control sticks, it’s all there. For those having a difficult time playing the game, you can also adjust the amount of lives you have, turn on one shot kills, or even slow down the speed of the game to assist in your reaction time. It’s not one hundred percent perfect, but this is a very efficient and thorough list of accessibility options to provide players the ability to structure the game to their liking. I will add a link to an article by Grant Stoner discussing the accessibility options more in depth, along with interviews from the devs at Arkane Studios.
https://www.inverse.com/gaming/deathloop-accessibility-update
All in all, Deathloop was a good time. It’s not the crown jewel of Arkane’s library, but it is a solid entry nonetheless. If anyone is looking for an investigative puzzle/shooter-stealth hybrid game, Deathloop is one I definitely recommend. It’s modern, it’s paying homage, it’s groovy, and as time goes on, it is the Arkane title most likely to be ignored by the gaming community. It is the Jackie Brown of Arkane Studios.
