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dkirschner's Deathloop (PC)
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| [March 9, 2023 07:43:38 AM]
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Deathloop is stylish and creative. I've never played anything quite like it, part roguelike, part FPS, part Dishonored. You play as a guy named Colt. Colt is stuck in a loop, a la Russian Doll. When he dies, he wakes up on a beach on an island the next morning. There are four areas of the island, and Colt can visit one each part of the day (morning, noon, evening, and night), for a grand total of 16 permutations of time and place. What happens in one place at one time can affect other places at other times. Colt isn't stuck alone, though. He's part of some experimental utopia with other "Visionaries" who collectively founded this strange place and keep it running. Colt's goal? Kill all the other Visionaries in one day to break the loop and escape. The problem? Figuring out how to manipulate the Visionaries to go to various parts of the island at various times such that Colt can actually perform this feat. Even more complicated is that Colt is constantly harassed and hunted by a woman named Julianne. There's fun story to uncover, and I won't say any more about it!
Moment-to-moment gameplay feels like a more gun-focused Dishonored, but there's larger strategy to it involving the loop. See, when you die or the day resets, you lose your guns, slabs (powers, like in Dishonored), and weapon and personal modifications. You also lose your "Residuum," which is like the substance that makes the loop tick. You use Residuum to "infuse" items and make them permanently available. Found a badass gun? Infuse it so you have it for all loops going forward. If you don't, it's gone on the next loop. There are some fun weapons to find, especially the quest-related ones, like the laser gun that melts enemies or the sniper rifle that blows them up. My favorite gun was a pretty plain silenced SMG. Silence is your friend. I put accuracy modifications on it and could quietly headshot someone as far away as with a regular sniper rifle. By the end, I was also carrying a special sniper rifle with strong zoom and a humongous machine gun that got more accurate the longer I held down the trigger for those up-close-and-personal moments. I used two slabs for most of the game, one that makes you temporarily invisible and another that lets you teleport. Each slab has various modifications as well, but I didn’t bother much with modifications for anything. My third favorite slab was the one that “links” enemies, so what happens to one happens to all nearby. I preferred the stealthy, silent approach in Deathloop.
This is what Deathloop boils down to. Choose where to go at different points of time on the island, infuse items to become more powerful, follow story leads to learn how to kill all the Visionaries in one loop, and eventually break the loop. I was mesmerized by this until I started running out of leads to follow. At some point, there becomes little to do besides follow one or two leads, which means you’ll be skipping through parts of the day, trying and retrying to accomplish one task. For example, the part I died on the most was one part of the island at night when one Visionary throws a party and another attends. The objective is to find a way to identify the host. The party attendees are wearing wolf masks and are indistinguishable from one another, so you have to lure him out. I had already killed him two or three times, but I wasn’t killing him the exact way that the game wanted me to. This resulted in a few hours of me looping just to get to this part of the island at night, playing detective in his mansion trying to figure out what I needed to do, then actually executing the plan. And it turns out this is the ultimate murder in the day. Once you set everything up, there will actually be four Visionaries present on that part of the island at night. Goons everywhere, lots of ways to die. Oh yeah, speaking of death, you can die twice each part of the day and resurrect before the loop resets. This is because Colt has a special slab with this ability. I appreciated this forgiveness.
So, overall, I enjoyed Deathloop, especially its creative take on roguelikes. But, it still didn’t avoid some pitfalls of the genre, which are repetitive runs with no real change in between. Luckily though, the repetitive runs come at the end when you are down to just a couple leads, and they’ll be over quickly enough. I’ll miss hearing Colt and Julianna bicker over walkie talkies; the voice acting and writing were top notch!
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dkirschner's Deathloop (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Friday 10 February, 2023
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 8 March, 2023 |
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