Deathloop – Zero Punctuation

The premise is, you are Colt Vahn, grizzled mercenary type ‘cos you can’t exactly get a job at the DMV with a name like that, who wakes up with no memories on an island full of good-time Charlies who have deliberately locked themselves in a one day time loop so they can party forever and never have to deal with the ever-downsliding outside world. And Colt wants to escape from this situation, which is the first glaring plot hole for me. Fucking hell, airdrop in two crates of hard cider and a Realdoll and show me where to sign, guys. Colt discovers that the only way to kill the loop is to assassinate the eight superpowered nerds who set it up. None of whom are particularly hard to kill, but the snag is, you have to kill them ALL in a single loop, and they’re deliberately avoiding each other, so your quest is to repeat the day until you’ve figured out the precise sequence of actions that will result in all of them karking it, since they don’t remember things from loop to loop and will always keep the same schedule. And that’s glaring plot hole number two, because why would these party nerds want to set up a time loop that resets their own memories every loop? Surely from their perspective it would just be a normal day? One that ends with a grizzled mercenary type decanting their brain matter across the fucking Twister mat?

There’s a lot about the plot I don’t get that might well be explained in some random document or audio log I didn’t notice because it was hidden in an office psychotically cluttered with random pointless assets between a tray of sandwiches and a dog, but the dialogue’s fun and light hearted and OUR goals at least are made clear enough so let’s find other nits to pick. It’s not a huge game. There’s only four medium-sized open-ended levels to pick from for each of the loop’s four time periods – morning, noon, beer o’clock and regret o’clock – it’s more about practising the most optimal routes to take to get to your objectives and embracing your inner speedrunner. It’s also about building up your skills and arsenal of weapons because Colt can spend the wibbly wobbly time points he accrues to bank any piece of equipment for future time loops. Which swiftly means he can wrap the difficulty curve around his grizzled stiffy and bugger it like a bedspring full of ham, because combat’s fairly shallow and it doesn’t take that long to fill all your equip slots with endgame quality weapons.

I found a suppressed machine pistol in loop one that could accurately bestow instakill headshots at any range and that thing was my friend for life. I named it Norman. Which is a shame, because finding better weapons and improving your capabilities is supposed to be the reason to explore and do sidequests, but once I had Norman and the Nexus power that makes everyone around your target die as well, possibly thanks to magically induced flatulence, I was pretty much good to go. Would you like to equip this weapon mod that improves your range? What do you think, Norman? Would you like an extra 10% range on top of infinite? Norman doesn’t seem enthusiastic. But that might be the suppressor. And beyond Nexus and the Shift power which is bluntly the Blink power from Dishonored copy pasted and with the hue slider shifted half an inch, I never found a use for any of the other superpowers. There’s invisibility, which is just the lazy man’s shift and runs out of power faster than an army wife’s vibrator. And there’s a thing that let’s you pick up one dude and throw them across the room which I’m sure all the dude’s friends will think is a very impressive parlour trick as they subject you to lead-based hip replacement surgery.

The combat being shallow and not particularly hard is a pretty severe flaw for a game where mastering the combat is supposed to be one of your main motivators. It might have helped if there were more than one enemy type besides “substance abuser with gun and fragile squashy head.” Not for the first time I wonder if a time loop game would’ve been a more effective challenge if we WEREN’T allowed to keep stuff from loop to loop and we had to work “find effective weapons and powerups” into our daily routine between breakfast wank and celebratory post-breakfast wank. I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from doing a self-imposed no infusions challenge but if I’m having to design your game for you, Arkane, then I expect a mention in the credits and a consultancy fee. Then again, having to find weapons each time could be an almighty pain in the arse, especially near the end after I had discovered the ten step program for total supernerd assassination and had to start all over again because I got killed during step nine by a passing multiplayer liking person. That’s Deathloop’s other big feature: playing single player mode is like being one of the quiet studious boys at Scout Camp. You never know if it’s safe to go to sleep or if one of the rowdy lads from the tent next door will run in and fart on your face.

Multiplayer liking people are tasked with invading other people’s single player campaigns and killing them for prizes in your classic Dark Souls fashion. And I’ve always hated being forced to socialise ever since mum made me come out of my room to say hello to Auntie Val, but I probably shouldn’t complain because I was just talking shit about the combat being too easy and shallow and this does at least bring some tension back in. But every time I was invaded all they did was hide on a roof and snipe my quiet studious ass which tells me that the multiplayer liking people probably also aren’t seeing much benefit from varying their approach. You know something, listeners, I wanted to like Deathloop a lot more than I did. I do like time loops as a concept and a game about perfecting a string of sneaky assassinations is a fun way to explore it. On top of that there’s a nice eye for detail, an energy to its writing and depth to its characters. But at the end of the day it’s let down by a weak core gameplay leg. And that’s a problem, because the legs are what’s carrying everything. You can’t just show up to a figure skating contest with one leg in a cast and hope to make up for it with a sparkly miniskirt.