Deathloop’s great twist is neither earned nor baked

Every morning DeathloopThe protagonist Colt Vahn wakes up on a beach, surrounded by empty beer bottles. He’s reliving the same day over and over again, along with all the other residents of Blackreef Island. He wants to break the cycle of time, but a mysterious woman named Julianna won’t let him. Julianna and Colt spend the game trading bullets and pranks with each other. Their chemistry was my favorite part of the game, that is, until DeathloopThe end left me cold.

Now that I’ve won the game and seen all the possible endings, I wish I hadn’t. I miss the version of myself that was 90% of the way through history, still intrigued by the possibilities and mysteries that have yet to be revealed. Because Deathloop‘s the answers are disturbing or unsatisfactory.

[Warning: The following contains full spoilers for Deathloop.]

If you played DeathloopI bet you had a lot of the same questions as me. For example, why do Colt and Julianna keep their memories, while other residents of Blackreef don’t? Why did Colt start? Deathloop with a case of amnesia, despite the fact that in the past he could apparently retain memories? Why do Colt and Julianna come across duplicates of themselves from other timelines, when no other character does, and their duplicates seem to exist? outside of the time loop? Otherwise, shouldn’t the whole island be full of duplicates? How did Colt’s past self write all those floating magical messages for his future self to find? And why does Julianna hate him so much?

I wish someone had told me that Deathloop I wasn’t going to answer all of these questions satisfactorily, because then I could have just sat back and enjoyed the ride instead of trying to follow your breadcrumbs. Now that I’ve won the game, I can’t get over the disparity between my intense satisfaction with my perfect endgame loadout and my dissatisfaction with the messy endgame storyline.

Breaking the loop on Deathloop requires Colt to kill all of the time cycle leaders, called Visionaries, within one day. This requires tricking each Visionary into showing up to the right place at the right time (to be killed). It’s a puzzle box, and it’s satisfying to solve, but the narrative doesn’t end as well, as several pieces of the puzzle appear to be missing. I never got an answer to my question about Colt and Julianna’s duplicates, or Colt’s messages from his past self, or how Colt and Julianna retain memories. All I have are some Reddit theories.

Then there’s the game’s big twist, which manages to be surprising and at the same time reveals nothing fundamentally interesting about the game’s main characters – Julianna is Colt’s daughter. Deathloop makes this discovery unsettling, even if you guess ahead of time, because Colt spends the first third of the game flirting with Julianna. From Return to the future for Bioshock Infinite for 12 minutesThey seem to love sci-fi stories about time travel, including the “Oops, you’re related” trope. Combine that with the fact that Julianna’s mother is dead and Colt was an absent father, and you’ve got a kind of bingo archetype.

Regardless, Colt assumes that Julianna is his ex-girlfriend during their first phone call (“We’re dating, right?”). Julianna does not correct him, but chooses to wait until she discovers a document that reveals that he is her father. The player can discover this after a couple of hours, or closer to the end, as I did. That meant I got to hear a lot of flirty Colt dialogue that became, retroactively, gross. Here’s an exchange, in which Julianna reveals that she knows the location of Colt’s apartment:

Julianna: Second floor?
Foal: It looks like you are looking for an invitation.
Julianna: Ha. So you can show off your little beer tap again?
Foal: Different of my. This one has finished talking to you.

The implication is that a “different” version of Colt took Julianna to his apartment for a date night. What actually happened? Who knows. Then there’s this conversation, which portends Colt ditching Julianna, but doesn’t specify that it was more of an inactive father situation than a romantic breakup:

Julianna: Which part [of the loop] Do you have a problem with: the feeling of security? Or commitment?
Foal: The part where everyone here is an idiot.
Julianna: Then you want to “go out”. Your answer to everything and everyone.
Foal: Someone got hurt a lot …

After he discovers that Julianna is his daughter, Colt lets out a prolonged “Fuuuuuuckkk” (and so do I). When he talks to Julianna about it, she teases him for wanting to have sex with her:

Foal: Did you know you were my daughter when this started?
Julianna: Why does it matter?
Foal: Because not knowing, makes me feel very weird!
Julianna: Ha ha. Why did you think we were going to …?
Foal: Yes! I mean no!
Julianna: I also thought about it before the loop. You don’t remember that, do you?
Foal: Why would you do this?
Julianna: To horrify you. To make you suffer. Let’s go! It’s fun!

Julianna managed to horrify me, but I don’t know if her plan worked that well with her dad. Unlike Oedipus, Colt does not seem to experience much suffering from this discovery. You’d think this new information would make Colt more curious, more introspective, and more engaged in conversations with her. Instead, it seems to check even more. Colt does not remember Julianna or his mother Lila, but he also seems strangely indifferent to the two, even learning that Julianna believes he abandoned Lila, who died of a mysterious illness.

Then, Deathloop had forced me to live in a man who sexually harasses his own daughter, but history is written so that she is the villain in that situation, the one who tricked him into doing it, as a form of eternal torture. (Women, am I right?) I thought this disgusting “twist” would at least have a narrative payoff, and when I completed the final cycle, I braced myself for a hackneyed scene about the father-daughter relationship of the triumphant couple against the wind. and tide. I also assumed that while I didn’t like how Julianna and Colt’s relationship had developed, I would at least get some more interesting details about Deathloopsci-fi world before the credits came out. Instead, I have none. The game’s final scenes are a pair of extremely short head scratchers that unfold depending on whether you choose to kill Julianna, yourself, or neither.

If you choose to kill Julianna, Colt will yell at her corpse that she is a “fucking liar”, questioning what her “plan” was. I don’t know why he reacts this way. At this point, Colt can either re-enter the loop again or he can kill himself and finally escape. If it is the latter, he will meet Julianna on the beach. She raises a pistol to her face; this time, his death would be permanent. But, sad and silent, she lowers her gun and walks away. The implication is that he disappointed her one last time.

If you don’t kill Julianna or yourself, they re-enter the loop together and she interprets this moment as a truce. The game ends with an exchange that was more awkward than moving:

Foal: You can call me “dad” if you want.
Julianna: Oooookay. Dad.
Foal: Okay, that’s it, huh …
Julianna: Very rare.
Foal: Yes, let’s not …
Julianna: Otherwise. [pause] Dad?
Foal: Stop. Please stop.

Even if they are in a truce for now, it seems likely that Colt will forget his past again and the events of Deathloop will start again. That seems to be the implication of Julianna’s dialogue in the game, as she’s referring to Colt having done all of this before. So they are both petty people who cannot grow or change. That’s not a happy ending for either of us. Although, it is the only one where they try to be a family. In the other ending, where they finally break free from their toxic cycle, I can’t feel happy for them, because I feel like I don’t even understand them.

Again, why does Julianna even want to keep Colt in the loop, thus preserving their relationship at its lowest point? Torturing him would surely grow old after a few decades; I got tired of it after a few hours. I was hoping she would grow up, or did I think, maybe Colt could change? But no, you stay focused on breaking the cycle even though you will create even plus of an emotional breakdown between him and his daughter. We also don’t learn about the state of the world outside the loop, so we don’t know if Julianna has a human reason for keeping Colt trapped; describes the rest of the world as “shit”, but does not elaborate (another mystery he mistakenly expected Deathloop would explain). We don’t even know much about who Lila was, even though her death supposedly motivates the main characters. If you go to put a mom in a fridge, At least make it count!

At the beginning of DeathloopI thought it was simple, a lot of fun: two killers who were probably going out, trying to kill each other. It didn’t need to be more complicated than that. And now here I am, spinning more and more questions in my mind, unable to free myself from the implications. Why does one of Colt’s duplicates have a mustache when all the other Colts have beards? How can a beard grow on the loop? It doesn’t make any damn sense!

But I don’t want to torture myself forever. So I wrote this article in an attempt to exorcise it from my own memory. I can only hope that when I wake up tomorrow, I am in a state of blissful ignorance. Maybe I do I understand why Julianna wants to preserve the loop so much. After all, every time Colt asks her why she wants to escape, she can’t give a good answer, and obviously neither can he. At one point, she responds, “It’s hard to hear your motivations on all those shots.” Deathloop he may have pointed that line at himself.