Arkane Studios’ hugely-anticipated Deathloop has been pushed from a May release to a September one. While the news illustrates the care and attention to detail the developers are clearly putting into the game, it’s safe to say that even the most patient fans are feeling the sting of disappointment. Since its reveal in 2019, excited gamers have been following the development of the time-bending game with curiosity as the team behind it have drip-fed details to the media.
The innovative time-loop framework looks like a fresh take on Arkane’s classic immersive sim games, and it’ll have plenty of competition once it does come out. Intriguing titles like 12 Minutes and Lemnis Gate will likely give Arkane’s Groundhog Day-esque schtick a good run.
So how can gamers who are impatient for Deathloop get their sweet fix of strange timey-wimey stuff in the meantime? Where have all these interesting games about time loops been all this time? Well, luckily for all you time travel fans out there, there’s a robust collection of innovative games hinging on time loops that you can already get stuck into while you wait for Colt and Julianna’s grand story to arrive. Here are a few of the best.
5. Elsinore
We’ve all probably read Hamlet at some point in our lives. Possibly at the behest of some poor secondary-school English teacher who wasn’t being paid enough to try and inspire a love of Shakespeare in a class full of teenagers. It might not have been everybody’s cup of tea, but if your biggest criticism of this early iteration of The Lion King was that you didn’t get to follow the character of Ophelia as she tries to navigate an inescapable four-day time loop that inevitably ends with the deaths of a bunch of people she cares about, I have good news for you.
Some of the text may be familiar to Shakespeare fans, but it does get remixed as things change.
Elsinore puts you in the shoes of Ophelia, who ends up going mad and drowning in the original play. The game, however, gives the young Danish noblewoman far more agency. You explore the grounds of the titular Elsinore Castle in classic point-and-click adventure fashion, learning more about the residents and trying to change the course of history. The game puts a big emphasis on its social systems, with small decisions having big, snowballing effects further down the line. Almost every action affects the dynamic and ever-changing storyline, which is constantly shifting in accordance with your deeds.
In other words, things can get weird fast. Is there a way to save everyone and get a genuinely good ending to the whole affair? Or is the future immutable, and death inevitable? It’s a hell of a journey to find those answers in this slick, smart, and genuinely quite moving adventure.
4. Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds – not to be confused with Obsidian’s similarly-named The Outer Worlds – is an absolute corker of a game. This quiet, intriguing mystery puts you in the boots of the newest member of an exploratory space program. Tasked with finding answers to the big questions in your corner of space, it’s a deceptively deep game. One of those questions is quite a significant one, too. Why does the whole solar system die every 22 minutes, only to restart again from the top of the loop?
Outer Wilds has a beautiful and distinct visual style.
Like Deathloop, the world of Outer Wilds changes as the 22-minute window marches on. An underground city becomes inaccessible later on due to filling up with sand, or a natural catastrophe rolls across the surface of another planet. The nature of the loop means you can go and explore different areas at different points in time, much like Deathloop’s different maps which can be visited at different times of day. Along the way, you’ll discover possible answers to the game’s mysteries – or, more likely, more questions that need answering.
Outer Wilds is a thoughtful game, and the 22-minute time loop encourages forward motion and keeping the momentum going. On the other hand, if reading, pondering and gradually piecing together a solar system-spanning mystery isn’t your thing, this might not be the right fit. But it’s a masterfully-crafted game in its own right, and should absolutely be on the radar of anyone who wants to explore a little self-contained universe packed with lore and history with astonishing attention to detail.
Watch out for natural disasters in some corners of the cosmos.
3. Minit
What can you even do in sixty seconds? A minute certainly doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room. But in the appropriately-named Minit, that’s all the time you have before you unceremoniously depart this mortal coil. Temporarily, at least: you wake up again at home shortly, ready to take on the day again.
This slick and charming adventure game, very much in the style of the Game Boy Zelda games like Link’s Awakening and the Oracle games, sees your character struggling to break the curse placed on him in sixty-second increments. It’s astonishing how much you can actually get done in such a short amount of time. The tiny time loop means that you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that you won’t be able to get everything done in one go. Somehow that manages to take a lot of the pressure off, though. Each new run serves a slightly different purpose, whether it’s reconnaissance to talk to the wacky NPCs and work out what to do next, or executing a carefully-laid plan to accomplish the next goal.
Most of the NPCs are super friendly! Others…not so much.
Plenty of work has gone into making the quickfire loops fun rather than frustrating. You can unlock new spawning points as you progress, making it easier to get back to where you need to be; it’s easy (but not too easy) to swap between tools for different tasks, and at the end of the day, if you botch a run, what’s the big deal? It’s only been sixty seconds. Maybe I’ll just give it one more shot.
2. The Sexy Brutale
Put on your investigator’s mask and prepare to hum along to the disarmingly catchy electro-swing soundtrack of 2017’s time-twisting macabre murder mystery masquerade, The Sexy Brutale. Set in the eponymous mansion, you play as Lafcadio Boone, who must solve the murders of his fellow guests. More importantly, you can actually prevent them, made possible due to the game’s mysterious 12-hour time loop.
What could be on the agenda in this creepy room?
The Sexy Brutale is a wonderfully detailed game, evident even from the very first mission. Generally you’ll be investigating what normally happens in the loop, then subtly tweaking a few variables – replacing a bullet with a blank here, picking a lock there – to set right what once went wrong. But as the game opens up you see how wonderfully and intricately interlinked everything is, much like the game’s thematically-appropriate clockwork. Characters will react to noises from the other side of the house – the smallest change can set others snowballing. Throw in some gorgeous visuals and dense layers of mystery even beyond the homicidal inhabitants and you have one hell of a game.
1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Majora’s Mask might not have been the very first video game about a time loop, but it’s easily one of the most iconic. Set immediately after the events of Ocarina of Time, stalwart hero Link sets off in search of his companion Navi but finds himself in the land of Termina. Before long, Link has to find a way to save Termina from a terrible fate arriving in three days’ time.
Even after all this time, Majora’s Mask holds up as a great game.
With only four main dungeons in contrast to Ocarina’s nine, the game initially got some flak for being seen as a shorter experience. But it more than makes up for it with a huge number of sidequests that see you traversing the four corners of the land, helping its denizens come to terms with their own issues and start to heal. In the main story, too, themes of loss and legacy are especially prevalent. A surprisingly mature turn for the sequel to a game that, as magnificent as it is, sticks fairly heavily to familiar tropes of the hero’s journey.
After languishing in the shadow of its predecessor for several years, Majora’s Mask has finally started to see more of the love that it was always due. A darker but arguably more heartfelt and personal story than Ocarina, with a smart approach to its time loop and a host of side-stories all happening alongside the main quest that you can choose to delve into at your leisure. All while a menacing moon glares down at you. It’s a game that uses its time loop mechanic as a tool to deliver the story’s own emotional beats rather than focusing too much on the timey-wimey stuff itself. Honestly, though, if you haven’t found an appropriate time-loop game for yourself by this point, well… perhaps we should take it from the top again.
