Deathloop game review: A dishonorable Bethesda discharge

If you’re looking for a simple back-of-box quote about how Bethesda’s newest video game works, you won’t get one. The list of inspirations in Deathloop, out this week on PS5 and PC, is long: the time-loop conceit of Zelda: Majora’s Mask; the multiroute sneak-and-sleuth genius of Dishonored; the aesthetics and trippiness of We Happy Few; and Metroid Prime‘s mix of backtracking and clue-hunting.

What a mouthful! Deathloop is certainly more ambitious than yet another generic shooter, which I appreciate. The studio behind it (Arkane Lyon, creators of Dishonored) can’t be faulted for not playing it safe. But ambition alone isn’t enough.

You may very well enjoy Deathloop‘s big swings—and at their best, they combine into something special. But there’s no denying the sloppiness players have to wade through to find the good stuff. Even though its core is compelling, Deathloop simply doesn’t feel finished. Instead, it seems unpolished, like it was rushed out the door. And its die-and-retry gimmick doesn’t make up for a confusing lack of world building or an egregiously small gameplay universe.

Let’s do the deathloop again

Imagine waking up as a full-blown amnesiac inside the world of a complicated video game—that’s how Deathloop starts. The game forgoes any introduction or stage-setting cut scenes. Fade from black, and the game’s hero, Colt (you, in first-person perspective), screams in confusion as he is assaulted with knife stabs and F-bombs by Julianna, the game’s constant antagonist. Moments later, another version of Colt shows up and saves you from a life-ending fall off a cliff. Then he drops you anyway.

You wake up after this brutal end at the exact same place and time, thus confirming the “deathloop” in the game’s name. All of your inventory is gone. But this time, at least, your consciousness is retaining memories. No more amnesia. The first thing you remember is a password to open a critical door. From here, you set out to accumulate knowledge and break this time loop. No one clarifies why Julianna keeps trying to keep you or why everyone on this time-bent island doesn’t just chill out and enjoy being able to survive death over and over again.

Every time you rewind from death, different things pop up on the beach where you wake: a gun, a hacking device (to unlock doors and remotely disable turrets), a “shard” that enables a special ability, and a “trinket” that buffs up one of your weapons. After the first few hours of gameplay, you’ll learn how to “bind” more weapons, shards, and trinkets to your consciousness. That way, they appear on the beach with you every morning, which is useful for the more dangerous scenarios ahead.

Shards are the most Dishonored-like part of your loadout, since they enable magical abilities. Some are rote, like a double-jump (the starting default) and a midair dash. Others are wild, such as Karnesis, which lets you throw enemies’ bodies around, and Nexus, which lets you drop a temporary cloud near a crowd of enemies. Hit any enemy in this cloud with an attack, and all the others nearby will feel it. Nexus is a fun way to clear out a cluster of foes who might block your preferred sneaking path.

Visionary quest

After about two hours of playtime in Deathloop, you figure out how to break the time loop and escape: Colt must kill all eight “Visionaries” on Blackreef Island. Crucially, he must kill all of them in a single day, which requires getting your daily murder planner down pat. Each day is split into four chunks (dawn, noon, dusk, and evening), and the island is itself broken up into four discrete regions. This isn’t a roguelike; the world is static, so its buildings, objectives, and events are consistent. But its events run on a schedule, the same every loop, which makes a place different at dusk than it is at any other time of day.

As an example, you can explore the Updaam district as long as you want with no timer counting down—so long as you get there at dawn. As soon as you leave Updaam, the day moves about four hours ahead. Before you leave, you may stumble upon a clue in Updaam that tells you to come back at dusk. That’s when a specific event will unfold that you can interrupt to, say, kill a Visionary or pick up a useful item. But, gosh, I need to go elsewhere at dusk to finish another mission. You know what they say: Why do today what you can delay for the next, uh, time loop?

You die every time you run out the day by leaving an island portion during the “evening” slot. After that, you wake up anew on the aforementioned beach at dawn, equipped with new bundles of intel and newly “bound” weapons and items to do it all over again, looping once more from dawn to midnight. Eventually, you’ll gather the knowledge and items necessary to chain together the perfect full-day itinerary, bouncing to the right parts of the island at the right time of day to kill all eight Visionaries.

In good news, Deathloop mostly does a tidy job of tracking the hints and intel you pick up as you explore each corner of the island. Pick through a veritable corkboard of clues to narrow down any hints and outright objectives, then use menu toggles to stick them to your preferred time of day or island region. Usually, you can chain together something useful to do at each time of day, which is good because you’ll accumulate “Residuum” points through the course of a full day—and you’ll need these points to permanently bind any nifty new items you find to your future loops. If you’d rather skip straight to one time of day, then start the whole day over after finishing a murderous errand. That’s easy to do, too.

A slog of a plot

Sounds intriguing, right? Well, that’s only because I was talking you through it.

Deathloop‘s opening is so obsessed with creating attitude and confusion that it fails as a gameplay introduction. Hints of each Visionary litter the island before you have any idea who they are, how many there are, or what their deal is. And you’d think the blocks of text that Colt sees over walls or in hallways would be useful. But no—they’re either head-smackingly obvious tips (“go underground”) or portentous nonsense (“Death died here,” “They’ve got no idea, no idea at all”).

The constant chatter between Julianna and Colt over a radio system is equally useless. Mostly our two narrators are just trying to see who can swear more. Because Julianna has no interest in helping Colt, she uses the bulk of her air time to taunt and confuse him—but guess what, Arkane? Colt isn’t a real person. Deathloop‘s players are. And your narrative approach does them no favors.

To piece together the game’s cast, players must paw through notes, diaries, computer terminals, and audio logs, much like in Fallout and BioShock. But without any early anchor for how Deathloop‘s island functions or how characters relate to each other, it takes a long time before any of this content begins to click. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game’s buildings, posters, statues, or hallucinatory texts delivered their own storytelling—maybe which Visionary lives where, what their belief system is, and how each cast member interacts with the others. Instead, the game’s visual design focuses mostly on how outlandish the Visionaries are or how Colt is an intruder who needs to be stopped.

Deathloop‘s missions eventually string together a vague story of the Visionaries’ crisscrossing relationships. Clearly, someone at Arkane tried building a cohesive world where these characters grapple with the high-concept weirdness that keeps the islanders not only trapped in a time loop but also able to interact with clones of themselves. When it’s good, it’s classic, Bethesda-at-its-best storytelling. There are a few moments where Deathloop‘s plot shines in unique, only-in-games ways—especially when you sneak up on certain characters talking to clones of themselves. But such highs only make Deathloop‘s general plot failures all the more disappointing.