So, I'm starting to get Deathloop.
The objective of the game is to kill eight different "Visionaries" whose lives are keeping the endless loop of the same day going. To break the loop, you need to kill all eight within a single day, and that's pretty damn tough, because everyone on the island is trying to kill you.
However, with the exception of Juliana, who periodically hunts you down like a Dark Souls invader, no one but you and she have any memory of previous cycles. This means that the enemies have the same behavior on each loop, and things like access codes (with one exception I know of) remain the same each day.
One of the Visionaries is a musician/DJ named Frank, and when you first go after him, you have to take him out in his recording studio. However, within there, you find an audio diary in which he confesses to being reckless with fireworks - and he's set to launch the fireworks display at the end of the "first night of the loop" celebration (which happens every night because everyone thinks it's still the first day.) You can then find out that there is an access code to the fireworks controller you can find in a workshop in the residential area (one of four "levels") called Updaam. The problem, though, is that at noon (one of the four times of day in each cycle) the place explodes before you can get to the code.
So, you need to go there in the morning and deactivate an over-worked generator that causes the explosion, and then come back at noon to get the code.
But once that code is acquired, you automatically remember it, and can auto-fill it at the fireworks depot in another part of town any time in the future.
So, you can go there in the morning (it's near another Visionary whom I think you can only get to in the morning) and sabotage the fireworks controller so that it will cause an explosion that will catch Frank in the evening - the last of the four time periods.
And that means that you don't have to go back and attack him at his studio.
What's nice is that the game kind of tracks all of these things so that you don't have to remember every sequence of events you need to go through.
But it also plays with the bizarre ethical and chronomechanical implications of the time loop. I don't think you can figure out that you need those access codes until you've killed Frank the first time, but once you have, you'll do it a different way.
The tone of this game is fairly cynical - these are generally kind of awful people who have chosen a bizarrely awful way to spend their immortality. The player character wants to break the loop in part just to escape, but you could actually argue that by doing so, he's saving all the people on the island from an endless purgatory of violence and meaninglessness.
Thus, the rather brutal ways you kill the unnamed "Eternalists" who serve as the main obstacles of the game and the way you set up elaborate death traps for each of the Visionaries is, in a strange way, an act of mercy.
I don't know precisely how the end of the game will play out - whether the broken loop resets one more time or if the people killed in that final iteration remain dead. But it's kind of a fascinating premise (which admittedly has been played with in Majora's Mask 21 years earlier).
Deathloop is a spiritual successor of (and evidently set in a future version of the setting of) Dishonored, but I think I'm finding myself more in tune with this game - the repetitive nature of the missions and levels makes stealthy traversal something you can feel yourself getting better at - ah yes, I remember that there's a turret I can hack here, or I remember that there's this window I can open here, etc. There's also, as far as I can tell, no penalty for using violence, whereas if I recall correctly, Dishonored had the environment grow darker and more hazardous if you killed more minions on your way to your targets.
The game is not forgiving - and it can be very frustrating when you get taken out during a multi-stage leg of some quest (such as the first time I tried to get to that workshop for the code and was taken out by an invading Juliana before I could reach it) but I'm finding that the elaborate complexity of figuring out all of these paths to taking out the Visionaries get broken down into suitably bite-sized chunks to keep it from being too overwhelming.
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