YMMV / Deathloop

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Why exactly does Colt want to break the loop? Is it as simple as not wanting to die, but being too stubborn to give into the loop? Is it because he was the only visionary besides Julianna who realized that everyone was stuck thinking it was the first day, rendering the whole experiment pointless? Did he see how the timeloop was affecting Julianna, his daughter, and wants to end it for her sake? Complicating matters is the fact that the player can decide whether or not Colt even breaks the loop in the end because of those reasons.
  • How sympathetic Julianna is by the end is debated. She thinks the loop is amazing and it lets her live forever, but she's ultimately the only one who benefits from it since Colt loses his memories repeatedly and no-one else can remember at all. She also never shares her memory retention techniques with anyone else and Colt is the only one she ever tries to make remember, nor does she seem interested in studying the anomaly or sharing that knowledge with the outside world.
  • Julianna's reasons for sparing Colt in the end if the loop is broken. Lingering love and sentimentality for her father? Having a Heel Realization that Colt was right? Thinking — in her own twisted mind — that letting him live is some kind of Cruel Mercy? Dismissing him as not worth the trouble at this point? Being paralyzed with indecisive fear and unable to make a serious choice now that her actions actually have consequences again? Some strange mixture of all of those? Hard to say.
• Best Level Ever: Aleksei's party is a highlight due to the interesting map and wide variety of ways you can make Aleksei show himself, including playing his song, cutting off his beer, recognising his voice/stated misdeed on the stage or blowing up his statue.
• Broken Base: Players debate whether this or Arkane Studios's previous timeloop game (Prey 2017's Mooncrash DLC) was the superior experience. Fans of Mooncrash praise its real-time clock which saw the station change and enemy threat intensify over time and more roguelike-esque structure, whereas others see the game as too complex to attain widespread appeal.
  • The invasion mechanic has been polarising. Some players enjoy the PvP element, others feel it can be frustrating if it occurs when the player is trying to simply explore and discover clues and gets in the way of them pressing forward with the story. While player invasions can be disabled a number of mechanics had to be changed or removed to accommodate it ^note  the game was originally going to have a melee combat system like Dishonored which was removed due to latency issues, and the player can only equip a limited number of weapons and powers and not change them mid-mission for balance reasons and some players don't see the cost as worth it.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Players will typically carry a silenced sidearm (typically a LIMP-10 seeing as one is easily found in Egon's lab), a sniper rifle to deal with distant enemies and a shotgun with power-suppressant mods to deal with invaders.
  • Shift will almost always be one of the player's two Slabs given it's utility for navigating the environment and for stealth or combat.
  • Julianna players are likely to spend a lot of time in Karl's Bay (Morning) and Updaam (Evening) seeing as both locations are the only times a specific Visionary can be encountered, as well as being part of the Golden Loop. Updaam (Noon) is also popular given how frequently players go after Charlie's Shift Slab or need to go there for sidequests.
  • Double Jump Drop Attacks are as notoriously useful as they were in Dishonored, and this is all the more prevalent in PVP. Due to the high-stakes nature of these fights, it is common to see the two players bouncing around trying to get the one-shot-instant-kills off rather than any sort of coherent combat.
• Critical Dissonance: The game has received universally positive reviews from critics, scoring an 88/100 on Metacritic, but player reception has been more mixed, with around a 4.5 and 6.5 on PC and Playstation 5 respectively. Many of these scores are from technical issues due to the Porting Disaster from the PC version and the flawed netcode but concerns have been raised about the game’s poor AI, low difficulty and being a repeat of concepts already done in previous games by Arkane as well as not using its time loop mechanic in a fashion that was inventive as it was hoped to be.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Golden Loop to kill all seven Visionaries is pretty easy to execute once the player has all the necessary information. You'd think the final challenge would be some souped-up, high security infiltration but in practice it's just the Aleksei's party mission as normal with two extra, easily-dispatched targets on the roof and no additional security. This despite the fact that multiple Visionaries are known to have been killed earlier that day.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Julianna is charismatic, entertaining and has a tragic backstory which results in many players overlooking the fact that for all her high words about the wonders of the loop she's effectively trapping hundreds of people in an existential nightmare where they're unable to live their lives, just so she alone can keep enjoying her consequence-free, hedonistic playground.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending where Colt decides to give up and repair his relationship with Julianna seems happy on the surface. During the credits, we get dialogue between the two of them talking about their upcoming plans for the loop with them even experimenting with Julianna calling Colt "dad" again. Ultimately, it's surprisingly heartwarming. But even if this was the first time Colt came that close to closing the loop, Julianna made it clear that basically everything else leading up to that confrontation had happened many many times with Colt going through cycles of giving up, forgetting, and retrying. How long before he sundowns again and begins the cycle again? And even if Julianna taught him her method for remembering everything, how long before he gets tired of the loop again and decides to break it again? The game gives no implication that they won't simply end up right where they started. Not to mention many come away from the story agreeing wholeheartedly with Colt that the loop — or at least, the way Julianna handles the loop — is wrong and that Julianna just uses it to indulge in her worst traits; it's hard to imagine their relationship healing properly in these circumstances.
• Fridge Brilliance: The UI, combat, and overall gameplay being very similar to Dishonored makes a lot more sense when the game is revealed to be a distant Non-Linear Sequel to Dishonored.
• Funny Moments: The game is littered with them.
  • For starters, Julianna's incessant taunting and banter with Colt. She'll make comments on just about anything she or Colt does, from the Visionaries that he kills or the food that she eats, and it takes a good, long while until she runs out of things to say.
  • Our hero Colt: Amnesiac, sick to death of whatever's going on before he's even gotten used to it, quick with a joke and loves his stupid jacket, even if it gives him away on sight to enemies.
  • The Eternalists are out of their goddamn minds in general, but usually in highly amusing ways. In the Complex at morning, they've been tasked with opening up and powering on the power control center and one Eternalist is just sitting up on top of a generator singing "Battery! Battery! We gotta find that Battery! Batteryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy—" "You are not helping!" "-yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy or Wenjie's gonna flip!"
  • On the approach to Hangar 2, a demonstration of how the gas canisters works is visible: one Eternalist is trying to get high on the gas by holding a canister over his head and having another guy shoot at it. Somehow the shooter hits his target and while his buddy is choking on the gasses he remembers too late that the gas itself is flammable. The second shot explodes his friend and he goes "...oops. Well, see you tomorrow."
  • The Visionaries fall into this, providing many examples of Comedic Sociopathy, but special mention goes to Egor, Charlie, Frank, and Aleksis.
  • A group of Eternalists have an orgy scheduled for the Afternoon in Karl's Bay, which you can overhear as you pass by.
  • Colt’s failed attempts to invoke Rule of Cool. When you kill the radio staff of the bunker in Control, Wenjie will yell over the radio for someone to update her. The radio gets a prompt for Colt to “Say Something Cool” which immediately results in her, flabbergasted, asking “Colt? Is that you?”. The prompt to “Say Something smart” appears again but if you hit it Colt chokes on his words and only manages an incredibly awkward “…no?”
• Game-Breaker: With the variety of guns and powers at your command, it's only inevitable that some would end up this way.
  • The silenced LIMP-10 can be found in Egor's lab at The Complex at all hours of the day, and is undoubtedly the best weapon for stealth enthusiasts. It can even be acquired and subsequently infused during the final tutorial mission, essentially making it a Disk One Nuke. By a similar token the Tribunal pistol can also be found with the silencer perk, although unlike the LIMP-10 it has no set spawn and instead must be looted randomly from an Eternalist... unless you happened to get the game's Deluxe Edition, which gives you a silenced golden Tribunal you can add to your loadout any time after the tutorial is completed, even before you unlock the Infusion mechanic.
  • With a little luck one can find a Spiker that shoots timed explosive rounds, essentially turning it into a one-handed mini rocket launcher. While it does come with the downside of a smaller clip size, and the explosion likely attracting a lot of attention, the sheer power makes it an worthwhile find. It's especially useful against security elements like scanners and turrets for when you don't want to bother with hacking them.
  • Harriet carries a special Fourpounder that spreads a cloud of noxious gas at the point of the bullets impact, making it a great tool for crowd control. And if combined with the Steel Lungs trinket, the player can essentially heal themselves with the gas each bullet produces as a quick but effective alternative to finding health items.
  • Speaking of Harriet, her Nexus slab is far and away one of the most useful in the game. Essentially mimicking the Domino power from Dishonored 2, it allowed one to easily take out an entire group of Eternalists with a single shot. The best part: it even works on Visionaries, essentially turning their guard detail into their personal deathtrap.
  • The Havoc Slab is by far and wide an essential pick for players looking to create viable run-and-gun builds. When combined with the proper stat-boosting trinkets and the Withdrawal upgrade, Colt can potentially become a hyper-aggressive One-Man Army who is virtually immune to damage and can rapidly clear entire hordes of enemies in a way that would make the Doom Slayer proud.
  • One of the randomized drops you can nab from an Eternalist is a Rapier equipped with explosive rounds. Unlike the aforementioned Spiker, each bullet this gun shoots detonates on impact. When combined with the Speed Loader trinket, you would've essentially created a highly accurate quick-firing grenade launcher with zero bullet drop.
  • The Aether Slab with Ghost^note Your power doesn't go down unless you move or fire and Flicker^note You don't drop out of cloak when you fire, only flicker and a silenced gun is a game-breaking combo. Colt can simply stand, invisible, for as long as he likes lining up perfect headshots on Eternalists.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Originally announced as a timed console exclusive for the PlayStation 5, Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda a few months after that reveal made said exclusivity rather ironic.
• Ho Yay: It's heavily implied that Colt and Frank had some sort of relationship. One of Frank's song mentions dancing with Colt hand in hand. The floating messages above Frank's bed can say "I am not his toy" or "I can make him scream", and the messages near Frank's broadcasting booth describe a pretty erotically charged guitar lesson that can be easily taken as an innuendo.
  • Some scores go for Aleksis in his Runt monologue. He compares himself to Colt through their occupations, and sounds pretty turned on by it.
  "Military and business require you to dominate your enemies - completely - into submission."
• Inferred Holocaust: Related to the ending. Even if Colt breaks the Loop, the day plays out one last time, and nobody has any idea what they're about to do suddenly has consequences. The Human Sacrifice, the cannibalism, all of it. Even if Julianna manages to announce that the loop has been broken, there's still the possibility that the entire Blackreef inhabitants are now stranded on a barren, post apocalyptic wasteland.
  • The Goldenloop update extended the ending to show the reactions of the Eternalists to the Loop's end start right at the beginning of the day, with Frank in the middle of his first radio broadcast before being, likely, the first person to realize what's happened, and Harriet in particular having clearly abandoned her sermon. So it's not as bad as it could have been.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The game has one enemy type, humans which go down to a single headshot, have dumb AI that simply runs straight towards the player and is easily baited into bottlenecks or bypassed with level geometry. Even your targets only have fractionally more health and while some have powers these won't apply if taken unawares and they're still easily dealt with in open combat.
  • Enemy threat level and the security employed against Colt by the Visionaries never escalates, even after he has killed several of their colleagues. This means the difficulty ebbs away as as Colt's armoury and powerset expands and by the end Julianna is only source of challenge. This may be because of concerns that players would become frustrated if they had to repeat difficult sections due to a loop or because Julianna killed them, or to provide players with freedom where to go first but this results in an experience whereby neither stealth nor combat is particularly challenging.
  • Ammo and health tonics are spread generously throughout levels and some dispensers are unlimited, meaning players never have to worry about running out of resources.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Julianna is abrasive to Colt and enjoys killing him repeatedly even after it's no longer necessary to get his memory back, but she becomes more sympathetic once you learn her backstory. Colt, her own father, attacked her first, repeatedly trying to kill her to end the loop until she fought back and got a taste for killing him instead.
  • Charlie Montague is one of the most viscerally unpleasant Visionaries, but that's largely due to him being lobotomized and physically unable to feel empathy. His First Day is also arguably the most miserable. If left to his own devices, he's trapped in an endless loop of being dumped, beaten, and taunted by his paramour Fia - who, as it turns out, convinced him to lobotomize himself for her own amusement. And in the extended ending he still gets humiliated and beaten up by Colt.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Among the electric guitar twang cue sounds for things like enemy alertness states, the high-pitch twang accompanying a headshot to an enemy is among the most satisfying to hear.
• Nightmare Fuel: The more we see of Deathloop the longer the list gets.
  • Colt's situation in general. He wakes up every loop on an island with the only thing he knows about his past being his previous loops, and no knowledge of the way he ended up where he is. The people on the island wear grotesque masks that dive straight into the Uncanny Valley, and attack him on sight. Colt is one of the only people who retains memories from the loops, and that turns his stay in the loop into a living nightmare. The other person who retains memories from previous loops is Julianna, who hunts Colt relentlessly throughout the game. Unlike Colt, the thrill of this cat and mouse game doesn't get old for her, as her playful interactions with him imply, and she goes as far as to encourage Colt to gain more supernatural abilities and kill more of her henchmen. Whether it's meant to satisfy her sadistic need for a Worthy Opponent or serves some greater purpose, we don't quite know yet.
  • Julianna's first invasion is as terrifying as it's hilarious.
  *Closing portal sound*
  Julianna: Haha, looks like somebody came by to say hi! I locked the doors so the two of you can get acquainted.
  • Aleksis's party. It involves a party game where people stand on a stage and try to impress the audience with their evil deeds. If they fail to do that, a trap door opens underneath them and sends them into a wood chipper, so that the rest of the party goers can enjoy their pulpy remains as a snack. We get to see an example of this when a woman gloats about the way she smokes under inappropriate circumstances in the State of Play gameplay review.
  • If you break the loop, you wake up on the same beach as always, free to travel outside the island. The catch? If the blood red sky, dried out sea and warnings from Julianna that the world outside isn't that great mean anything, Colt has other things to worry about now. And that's before taking into account that Deathloop is set in the same universe as Dishonored - and given that Deathloop takes places around a century after Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, it points to a very grim picture of what happened to the world after the events of Death of the Outsider.
  • The Loop itself is terrifying in an existential way. The eternalists have been living the same day of anticipation for hundreds of years, unaware that there is no tomorrow or yesterday. There is only today, forever.
• That One Boss: The Garbage Collector is almost definitely the most obnoxious slab holder in the game to defeat. He holes up in a room full of mines and until you figure out how to open the door on the second floor, he must be lured out to be dealt with. The main strength he has over every other slab holder is that he is wearing a very heavily armored bomb suit which A:makes him very durable to all damage and B:makes certain slabs like Karnesis useless against him (he will just be slightly staggered if you attempt to toss him around). And on top of all of that, as soon as he has agro on you, about 4-5 eternalists will spawn and enter his domain, forcing you to deal with them on top of him. Fortunately, he is still vulnerable to an instant stealth kill like any other enemy, but luring him out of his bunker to actually get him is still a bit of a pain. And if you do instantly kill him, the aforementioned eternalists still spawn.
• That One Level:
  • Frank's club is this if you play it straight; it features doors that will only open if Colt wears a power-nullifying ClassPass, meaning he can't rely on Reprise to save him if he messes up. Thankfully, the player only has to complete it once due to him not having a Slab, unless they want alternate versions of his gun. There are also ways to get around the ClassPass requirement, ranging from sneaking in through an air vent, finding and disabling the security, or simply hacking the doors open.
  • Fia's fortress borders on a Stealth-Based Mission, since if she's alerted to your presence, she'll overload the reactor to blow Fristad Rock sky high and you only have a brief window of time to turn the reactor off. The design of the rooms often means it's difficult to spot all the enemies in an area, so killing one might alert others you weren't aware of. And since a Visionary is on the map, that means you're likely to be invaded by Julianna.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game is very light on narrative without any major twists or turns (you learn more about the backstories of characters and Blackreef but Colt's task never changes) so players tend to focus on just replaying assassinations over and over.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version suffers from stuttering issues that result from poor optimization on certain controllers as well as the infamous Denuvo DRM system. The PC version's Metacritic fan score sits at a 4.0 as a result of this. Considering both this game and fellow fatality Dishonored 2 ran on the Void Engine, it seems to be a complete performance sapper.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Invasions can be this if the player is midway through a long event chain that requires actions in multiple time periods and risks losing their progress and equipment. Thankfully players have the option to limit themselves to less threatening CPU invaders.
  • Julianna can only unlock new weapons, slabs and trinkets by levelling up which provides them with a randomised assortment of new gear, which may contain duplicates. If the player has specific gear or mods they wish to use they may have to wait a very long time. This even applies to Julianna's signature weapon the Sepulchra Breteira sniper rifle despite her being shown holding it on the loadout screen.
  • The existence of PvP leads to numerous inconveniences in the game's design including the inability to equip all your powers at once, change your gear or weapon mods mid-level, pause the game or quicksave.
  • The fact time only passes when travelling between areas has been widely criticised, resulting in a world that feels like a set of videogame levels rather than an organic, interconnected world.
  • Rather than allow the player figure out their own path towards killing every Visionary in a single day the game provides one exact sequence of events that must be followed to the letter, and which the game signposts constantly.
• Tear Jerker:
  • As silly as it is, hearing 2Bit cry out for Charlie after you kill him and deciding to try extra-hard to protect his "father" and fight you even harder on the next loop is a little upsetting. This is only amplified when it is revealed that he is the only one other than Colt and Juliana to truly have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, so as opposed to everyone else in the game, he genuinely does remember you killing his master time after time. To hammer home this bit of bleakness, Charlie does not reciprocate this love, berating 2-Bit and ordering him to dump his memory at the slightest irritation.
  • Understanding the relationship between Colt and Julianna leads to this. She's Colt's daughter. The relationship has been completely warped and twisted as she started to enjoy killing and tormenting him in retaliation for her own deaths when Colt started trying to break the loop. The two endings for the game only make it worse.
    • Actually breaking the loop will destroy the relationship completely, with Julianna going to Colt waking up on the beach to shoot him as she promised. But ultimately, she can't do it, and leaves Colt before vanishing away with Aether slab.
    • Deciding to give into the loop to repair the relationship might seem like the better alternative on a surface level. We even get to have some dialogue over the credits of the two of them being friendly. There's just one problem. Julianna implies that Colt has made that decision before. It's only a matter of time before Colt's loop amnesia kicks in, and the two are right back to killing each other like they were at the start of the game.
• The Un-Twist: Colt being the 9th Visionary. Given that he was AEON's Chief of Security and the author of the Loop Protection Protocol, it's fairly obvious that he would have himself as an added protection measure. Even Colt is unsurprised. Furthermore, one of Wenjie's notes on how the residuum infusion works lists Colt among the Visionaries, so the game tells you Colt's status explicitly at the end of the prologue. And to top it all off... Colt has his own signature Slab as most of the other Visionaries do: Reprise.

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