Hype, marketing, word of mouth praise, historical or 'legacy' franchise installments; whatever device game communities and institutions have inculcated their denizens with to foster core exercise regimens to develop a well rounded body type for navigating the historical and cultural ideas of the medium have largely run off my back. I don't pay attention to trailer releases, I don't browse subreddits, I don't pay attention to convention announcements, I don't frequent any discord servers - I have a small selection of critics I read, and I keep an ear to the academic presses catalogues for peer reviewed games studies publications (which are usually about 3-4 years late on talking about new games), and those are really the only outlets I have for peaking my interest in games (even on GG, I really only use the platform to formalize how I feel about games that I've played, rarely queuing games due to the hype on the site around any specific titles). However, Arkane is the one studio for whom, seemingly by force of their unique position in the industry as a AAA studio that is content to 1) let their intellectual properties die, and 2) has a design ethos that they want to flesh out and iterate on for artistic merit between releases instead of for the profit incentives, I've continuously been pierced by through my hype boundaries built of apathy and laziness, exciting me to their games prior to release in a way no developer which I don't already have standing respect for has ever done. The reason I bring this up before talking about Deathloop is that, despite my constant excitement for their games being announced, I don't actually like any Arkane games all that much: I think both Dishonored games are the absolute worst offenders in the AAA games industry in perpetuating and modelling a sophomoric, facile, inept understanding of systematic normative ethics in games, a problem which is bloomed to incredible proportions when integrated with their mechanics (which are incredible, of course - although their excellence is so aggressively curtailed by their narrative framework that it makes the broad brilliance of the toolset span negatively in my evaluation of the gameplay); I think Dark Messiah of Might and Magic could potentially be the worst written narrative of any 21st century first person game, surpassing credulity and poor wit to such a degree that even when compared to the fetishism of all that is militaristic in COD or Battlefront, Dark Messiah has so little within that even effective and fruitful criticism of the characters, plot, and dialogue are bloodless in comparison to more blatantly harmful fictions; I love Bioshock 2 but it's hard to say how much Arkane was able to be the makers of that game; Prey is probably their best game if Deathloop isn't considered, but it is also their least mechanically exciting and recuses itself (until Mooncrash) from truly extending the worldly agency afforded in their other releases, although thematically the false binary is more efficaciously designed around (Typhon powers and combat effectiveness upgrades just feels shit compared to Slabs and Outsider abilities). All in all, Arkane games have been like a tough morning run for me - they are often not fun, I don't go into them with an excitement of pure carnal delight, and they often cause me to question how this could possibly be endeavoured, but I always feel as though whatever I thought of the game constructively, it's occupation remains healthily persuasive to my conceptions of the 21st century games ecosystem.

All that said, I was fully expecting to find in Deathloop the same anticipation of a nutritious yet poorly seasoned meal, much the same elicitation as any other Arkane release for me. And after sinking 25 hours into the game, exploring as fully as I think there is for me here, I have to question again what I think the first person medium is doing for me right now: I was so totally refreshed and impressed with the game that, evolving even beyond my contrasting and elevating Arkane's games above the class (even if they still pass with a mixed grade), I think that I have to go back and replay some of the earlier Arkane games that I have been so critical of due to their inconsistencies in design care. Narratively framing the simulation between Colt and Julianna in dialogue as moral outlooks on the stimuli presented as optioning as opposed to optimizing, especially one that can be articulated with the mechanics of the FPS, I think, will allow me to appreciate particularly the Dishonored games (in a meta-textual way, because I still think there is a virtue ethics primacy rigidly informing the script of that world) in a way that was totally inaccessible to me prior to playing Deathloop.

I don't think I need to go into how good the actual play of Deathloop is; if you can conjure in your mind what exactly you would like a shotgun, a pistol, a sniper, or grenade to feel like, you've probably inadvertently played as Colt for a bit in your imagination; if you can concisely map out about eight different iterable navigation and impact tools for diversifying gameplay, you've just invented Slabs; if you thought online multiplayer was fun for only as long as it wasn't infuriatingly overplayed and economically unbalanced in who gets to win and how great the period of winning takes to be finalized, you're already invading as Julianna. Deathloop is undoubtedly a messy hodgepodge of mechanics all vying for the spotlight, but when the billing has only headliners and no opening acts, it can only lead to the type of bamboozlement that Arkane has always delivered.