No matter how much reading of discarded notes you do, you won't get a real sense of why hundreds of masked Eternalists flocked to the island to escape the passage of time, why the Visionaries invested so much of themselves in preserving the loop, or how any of them live their lives in Deathloop's four dreamy technicolor districts. Blackreef doesn't feel fleshed out in the way Dunwall and Karnaca did. What Arkane has built here in Deathloop is a multifaceted puzzle box. Blackreef is less a playground and more of a smartly-designed hedge maze there's only one exit and, every time that you die, you're put back at the entrance the story it wants to convey is one of escape and everything you do is in service of that. Deathloop has a different agenda to Dishonored and Prey.
When I said before that Blackreef felt artificial, that isn't necessarily a criticism. The steady acquisition of knowledge is a more powerful weapon than any gun or power in Deathloop.Īnd it's all a lot of fun. You'll work out where the Visionaries reside, the fastest routes to confront them, and, eventually, ways to encourage multiple targets to reside in a single location. Gradually, you'll discover how to retain your favorite weapons and awesome supernatural powers, even after dying. That is key, because consistency allows you to internalize enemy placements and begin to use them to your advantage. Deathloop is less concerned about delivering a coherent lived-in world, with Arkane focusing its energy instead on building something that is consistent. About the layout of Blackreef's four districts, the eight Visionaries that must be assassinated, and the hordes of Eternalists that are hell bent on preventing it all from crashing down around them. Death isn't to be feared in Deathloop, but embraced.ĭying is an opportunity to learn something new. As a reward for exploring enough to uncover a path less travelled, maybe you'll accidentally trap yourself in a depressurization chamber, or have your molecules obliterated by an unstable reactor. You'll choke, drown, be set on fire, and ground up into meat paste as you stalk rooftops in the morning, noon, afternoon, and night. You'll be shot, stabbed, and sent tumbling down cliff faces, splashing into the frigid waters that surround this island suspended in time. And I promise that you're going to enjoy it. Truth be told, you're going to die a lot. What we have in Blackreef is four creative, finely-crafted sets – each dressed to be seen during four periods of a single day – that are both self-contained and persistently tracking progress in what will at times feel like an impossible task: to assassinate eight targets in a single day, or die trying.Īnd you're going to die.
Your main point of interaction with its patchwork of spaces is through the barrels of some beautifully rendered weaponry. Blackreef might be Arkane's most artificial world yet. It's exciting then to see the studio try something different with Deathloop.
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