I beat Deathloop (actually, I did a couple days ago). The game is one of brutal violence and utter cruelty, so the fact that it ends on a... well, vaguely hopeful note (I supposed depending on the ending you choose) is kind of surprising.
That might be enough of a spoiler already, but let's get into the cut for full spoiler territory.
SPOILER ALERT.
In Deathloop, the island of Blackreef is home to a bizarre temporal anomaly that, seemingly only when triggered or otherwise sustained, allows the island to reset at the end of each day, with the state restoring itself exactly to how it was at the beginning of the day.
The Eternalists, the AEON Project, and the Visionaries that lead both have decided to make use of this property to create a utopian existence in which everyone is fundamentally free from any consequences. Everything reset at the end of the day, so there's no risk you can't take, no abuse you can't submit your body to, that won't be erased with the coming of the next dawn.
However, what becomes very clear early on is that there's a hitch: the reset also applies to memory. With the exception of the player character and a hostile NPC (and, eventually revealed, a few others) everyone's memory is reset at dawn, and so to the Eternalists, this is only the first day - even though it's likely been hundreds if not thousands of days. It's possible that they've already all lived past their natural human life spans many times over, always tracing the same paths because, well, if they're reset to the exact same position, why shouldn't they make the same decisions?
Now, in and of itself, this is fairly horrifying, but also possibly merciful. The Eternalists are all in limbo, but at least they don't realize they are.
I did have a thought well before I ever played this game that you could imagine that Heaven is living in the best moment of your life over and over again. Hell, then, would be the same, but you're aware of the repetition.
The thing is, life on Blackreef is not heavenly. It's hedonistic and unfettered, but why, might you ask, would people want to live on an island where there's so much potential for violence?
Philosophically, you could imagine that even if this place were run by the genuinely most enlightened and benevolent Visionaries, that it would still ultimately be a nightmare. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that immortality would be so bad (it seems far easier to believe so if it makes you feel better about the fact that you're not,) but what is clear is that you've put yourself in a finite space with finite people, and no matter how gilded, that's eventually going to feel like a cage.
But it is also, perhaps, not surprising that the kinds of people who would sign up for this scenario are not, you know, great.
There's a range - for example, there's a great deal of pathos in the Visionary Frank Spicer, a former singer turned DJ who used to have a voice like an angel, but lost it due to a live of smoking and booze, and who seemed to misunderstand the project, thinking it would restore him to his glorious youth.
On the other hand, there's Alexis Dorsey, who is the main financial backer - his only contribution to the project being his family's money - and who wants nothing more than to engage in horrifying violence. He holds a party in the evening in which guests must prove themselves to be "wolves" or they'll be slaughtered like "lambs," and the surviving guests literally cannibalize the latter. With the loop in place, of course, the dead will be back and fine afterward, so he's using this to indulge in a monstrous fantasy.
The conceit here is that, at some point, the AEON Project found a way to transfer the essence of the time anomaly into the Visionaries. As a result, breaking the loop requires every one of them to die in the same day.
Thus, the game is basically about how the player character, Colt, uses his knowledge of how people will behave and where they will be to set up a lethal day in which he wipes out every single one of them by the end.
Given how horrible these people are, you don't really feel all that guilty. Even as you decapitate or blow peoples' heads apart, or drown them in icy water or chop into them with a machete, there's a sense in the game that these people deserve it all.
Do they?
I think that's open for debate. Morality and ethics are ideas that have developed in a reality where, among other things, death is permanent. If I get really mad at someone, I can't just go and shoot them in the head. Their entire existence (or at least earthly existence, depending on your religious/spiritual views) cannot be ended or something so petty as my momentary emotional state. The scenario in which taking another's life is morally justified is very narrow. Indeed, some might argue that it never is, even if your own life is at stake.
But if that guy who pissed me off is just going to wake up the next day, no worse for wear, is it actually that bad? Sure, death usually involves inflicting pain, and so even if he'll be better, he'll have that painful experience.
But what if he never remembers it? Did it even happen?
There's something disturbingly nihilistic about the very idea of a time loop. I remember when I first saw Groundhog Day as a kid (on video, but only a year or so after it first game out,) I was profoundly disturbed by a sequence in which Bill Murray's Phil repeatedly kills himself. I actually remember deciding at that point that I hated the movie, and it wasn't until after I graduated from college some fourteen years later or something that I watched the movie again and found, that in fact, it's a really freaking good movie.
It's interesting here to compare this with another time loop game: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. In that game, though, the time looping was actually a tool in Link's arsenal, rather than the very thing he was trying to escape. A calamity strikes the world/land of Termina at the end of the third day, and Link has to loop back over and over to have a chance to stop it.
Colt uses the loop to his advantage as well - in some cases, he actually needs to kill one of the Visionaries one way before he can find the more efficient way to kill them later. But the loop here is not protective.
Or is it?
The main "villain" of the game is Julianna Blake, who knows what Colt is up to, retains her memories, and hunts him down periodically. In terms of gameplay, at random intervals (though I think only once per time of day, meaning once she's dealt with, you're safe from her until you complete your current level) Julianna shows up and tries to sneak up and kill you. Players can actually opt to play as Julianna online and invade other players' games, similar to Dark Souls, though you can thankfully opt out of this if you just want to play a single-player game, which means that Julianna only shows up controlled by AI (and thus is not nearly as hard to defeat).
Colt awakens at the beginning of the game with total amnesia, but he surmises quickly that he has some established relationship with Julianna, which must be why she's so intent on killing him. Eventually, though, we discover that Julianna is actually Colt's daughter, and that she is so furious with him for killing her in previous attempts to break the loop (yeah, it's also revealed that this isn't the first time Colt's tried) that she wants to keep the loop going so that she can commit endless patricide.
It's curious, though, when there's an exchange of dialogue, and Julianna insists that she likes killing Colt, but she doesn't like watching him die.
Ultimately, once you've figured out how to kill seven of the Visionaries, and you find a crazy method to get to Julianna, she doesn't fight you, only trying to talk you out of the plan. Over the course of the game, we find floating text that seems to be memories of Colt's, maybe even from before he suffered his amnesia (which has also happened multiple times before) and while she makes her case, we see a lot of the words floating next to her, implying that she's made this exact argument before, and that, evidently, it worked, and Colt has, in the past, decided to preserve the loop, maybe earning some time with his daughter.
But I think there's a part of me that thinks: you know what, if this is a time loop narrative, then why are we looking at this iteration of the loop? This has got to be the one that breaks it.
With one last moment of violence, Colt, and I, shot Julianna in the head. It's brutal - while there are some graphic kills you can pull off, most of the Eternalists wear masks and their bodies disappear shortly after they die - the former explained via a weird philosophical idea behind this... let's just call a spade a spade and the Eternalists a cult, and the latter explained as part of the temporal anomaly - but Julianna's body is sprawled in her chair, the bullet wound not disappearing in time-sparklies.
The thing is, Colt is also one of the Visionaries. He was one of the leaders of this crazy thing because, like Frank, he misunderstood its potential. He thought (as he discovers) that the temporal anomaly could get his lover, Lila Blake, back from the dead. He took their daughter there because he wanted to reunite his family.
And so, in a twisted way, this last lethal shot is intended to save his daughter by killing her. Jumping from the high platform on which you kill your daughter the last time (after doing so many, many times,) you wake up on the beach you always start your day with.
But things are different. The sea has dried up, the sky is filled with some orange swirling shape. Just how long was this loop going, and what happened outside the island while it was? Julianna has always been there, every morning. Maybe, when this all started, the two of them wanted to be able to wake up side by side every day for eternity. Julianna points her gun at you, but she can't pull the trigger. This would be the last time, if she did.
Consequences. Colt did what he did to let life move forward. He embraced consequence, and part of that means that he's going to have to live the with consequences of maybe never seeing his daughter again.
But in a strange way, he's also saved everyone. Every person you've killed (many of them over and over and over again) wakes up just like Colt does at the start of this new day - the loop resetting only this one more time.
Apparently, the ending to the game was expanded after its release with a patch, so we actually check in with the various Visionaries. Some are flabberghasted that the loop has been broken. Others are in awe. Some are profoundly upset.
But, truly, every single person on the island in this very violent video game is alive at the end of it.
And yeah, something is very deeply wrong with the world outside the island - which the island is now once again a part of. And the awful people - the Visionaries in particular - are going to have to face their awfulness.
But things can move forward once again. And isn't that exactly what hope is?
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