I recently finished Deathloop. According to my Steam account, it took me around fifty hours to beat it, though I should subtract about fifteen of those because it took me three or four attempts to really get into it. Well, all those dropouts were due to performance issues. I first played on an aging GTX 1070, and even on a much more powerful machine later, I had to settle for medium/high settings to enjoy a smooth experience with the FOV set to max (which I’m used to doing with just about every Arkane immersive sim). This shameful optimization is all the more surprising considering the game really isn't any more visually impressive than its two predecessors, Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Sure, there’s ray tracing, but it’ll chop your performance in half for a visual gain that’s completely imperceptible, aside from slightly less pixelated shadows.

But as usual, Arkane proves that a beautiful game doesn't need groundbreaking graphics as long as the art direction is solid. And the atmosphere of Deathloop is remarkable in that regard.

A Jazz-Noir-Punk Blend

It’s this clever mix of retro-futurism, combining brutalist Victorian-era exterior architecture with some buildings in the 60s-70s tones; interiors that are both retro and modern, from metallic bunkers to rounded armchairs on red carpet, from candy dispensers to arcade machines; all topped with a generous dose of surreal sci-fi with lasers, beeping lights, and bright colors. In short, a unique ambiance that truly makes you feel out of time.

I was a bit doubtful before playing, perhaps because the ultra-polished atmosphere of Karnaca in Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider had set the bar so high. But no, I was dead wrong. There’s a vibe in the air on Blackreef Island (the stage for Deathloop’s events), an indecipherable energy that makes everything feel curious and fun. The tones, colors, and contrasts give it an almost comic-book feel, light and humorous, but with a nice noir-detective edge that adds just enough tension and mystery.

In my humble opinion, it’s Arkane’s best artistic direction. The Dishonored games and Prey also shine in this area, but they’re not as innovative or daring. The visuals in Deathloop are truly original.

The character design is generally good, though I still prefer the more distinctive faces from Dishonored. Only a few characters stand out, like Aleksis Dorsey with his wolf mask or Fia with her style that reminds me a lot of Reyna from Valorant. It's just a shame that the Eternalists didn’t get the same love. They’re visually forgettable and indistinguishable, neither good-looking nor ugly... they just exist, and that’s it.

On the audio side, it’s solid. Good grief, what a pleasure to get drunk on some fusion jazz (leaning even into spy jazz) while massacring hordes of masked Eternalists — and without any negative consequences on the story, because Deathloop is free from the one constraint that plagued the first two Dishonored games: the chaos system.

No Guilt in Killing the Bad Guys

Dishonored 2 eventually got me to spare morally forgivable characters (read: pixels on a screen animated by a computer) and only kill the bandits, witches, and jerks. But before each execution, I was always forced to wonder if killing one more character would tip me into high chaos and ruin the optimistic ending. Thankfully, not in Deathloop. Here you can kill by the dozen, and no worries, making it a great stress-reliever.

And there are plenty of tools to have fun with. While we see the return of Arkane’s beloved short-range teleportation and the Domino ability from Dishonored 2, there’s one power I always kept equipped because it’s just so damn satisfying: Karnesis, which lets you send enemies flying in any direction with a simple hand gesture, like you’re throwing them with the Force. Throw them off a rooftop, into the air for a skeet shooting session, or out the window — it’s almost addictive.

The weapons have some serious flair, and as you progress through loops, you often swap your arsenal for better or cooler ones. But the gunfights tend to be a bit messy.

The Big Stain on the White Silk Tablecloth

It’s often easier to identify flaws than to fix them. Deathloop is no exception. Or rather, it’s hard to fix one particular flaw without changing the core of the game.

First, the game suffers from an obvious lack of polish, which becomes quite clear when compared to the studio’s two previous games, Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. The first-person execution animations are a bit stiff; when seen up close, faces lack character. I don’t hold this much against the studio though, as if I understood correctly, Deathloop was initially a small project without much ambition before Bethesda pushed it to the public with the emerging trend of time-loop games.

Because time loops are the backbone of Deathloop’s gameplay, the game suffers from its flaws. Only four different environments, offering different opportunities depending on the time of day you visit them, but never radically different. This choice makes sense, as adding more maps would exponentially increase the time required to finish the game, not to mention spreading the focus too thin.

These environments are also rather small: you quickly get the hang of them. And you’re forced to revisit them over and over. But the line between strategic repetition (scouting out clues and characters’ habits to exploit in the next loop) and annoying repetition (knowing these habits by heart, every trap’s location, and advancing without any challenge or thought) is thin.

Unlike the previous Dishonored games, these environments feel much less alive, despite their evolution throughout the day. The pure and simple absence of any friendly or even neutral characters, which you would have interacted with in a Dishonored, plays a part in this. It doesn’t break immersion or make the game any less good; it just makes it less interesting. Another simple detail that may seem trivial: in the previous Dishonored games, you could linger on every table, cabinet, and wardrobe, opening drawers and chests to find treasures; blow doors to pieces, break shutters... which is almost non-existent in Deathloop, I think. The environments are more rigid, and often static.

No Manual Saves — Seriously?

It’s extremely rare for a single-player game to get on my nerves. Whenever I feel my temper rising, that wonderful combination of keys known as Alt + F4 always solves the problem.

I fully understand that Deathloop’s developers wanted to prevent the infamous “save-scumming” (saving before attempting a difficult action so you can reload if things go wrong) because it would have interfered with the game’s core principle (i.e., death resets the loop, and restarting the loop helps you progress). And anyway, with the “Reprise” ability that lets you revive twice within the same level — a power you always have — you’re allowed to fail.

Deathloop only saves progress at the end of a level. If you quit mid-session, when you relaunch the game, you have to start at the beginning of the level as if nothing happened. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve uninstalled the game in frustration after a random crash that occurred after a good fifty minutes of progress through a level. Put simply, you should expect to potentially lose several hours of gameplay because the developers decided to implement an unforgiving mechanic in an unstable game engine.

I’m obviously referring to the crashes, but you MAY also just need to quit the game to do something else with your life. And I see no valid reason why the devs didn’t implement a mechanic like the one suggested in this Reddit post.

In the end, Deathloop could have been a bit better with more attention to detail. It would likely have been much more enjoyable without this tiresome repetition, as is the case with many time-loop games. And certainly less frustrating without the constant anxiety of losing an hour of progress due to an inexplicable crash at the end of a level.