Recently I’ve been playing Deathloop, Twelve Minutes and The Forgotten City: three time loop games all released in 2021.
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That year produced a bumper crop of time loop games, with games released one after another in the span of three months. But while I’d first experienced — and since replayed — Twelve Minutes when it was first released in August 2021, The Forgotten City and Deathloop had been stuck in my backlog for a while, their critical acclaim placing them high on my priority list until I finally made time for them.
Time loops fascinate me because, in a way, the device is endemic to videogames. If you can’t get past a certain segment in a game, you would play through it over and over again, the repetitions of these game loops a facsimile of these temporal cycles. The key difference, at least in a time loop game, is the character’s growing knowledge of their circumstances, as they are driven to figure out why this seemingly inescapable reality is happening to them.
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As such, time loop games become a nifty narrative puzzle, with new details fed to them in every cycle, while introducing wrinkles in gameplay that transform a typical game loop, be it exploration or point-and-click, into invigorating, investigative work.
What I’ve learned playing these games is that time loops are also a way to invite introspection. While Twelve Minutes is a stylishly intimate nightmare of Freudian proportions, The Forgotten City reckons with the concept of immortality and morality, set in the days of the Roman Empire.
Then there’s Deathloop, in which the very people who stay on Blackreef Island wield the time loop anomaly as a device to be abused. The games are all remarkably evocative from the very first loop, although some are eventually ensnared by the repetitive, sometimes verbose trappings of this narrative device.
And for these three games, the loops have unravelled the mysteries at their core in vastly divergent ways.
Cycles of brutality
Let’s start with Twelve Minutes, a star-studded affair that features the voice talents of Hollywood heavyweights Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe.
A top-down point-and-click game, it begins with you arriving home after work and settling down for dinner with your wife. Some minutes later, a cop barges in to interrogate both of you, resulting in a violent scuffle that you would eventually pass out from. The cycle restarts, and you’re returning home from work once again.
It’s an extremely gripping start, and changing your circumstances means tinkering with objects in the vicinity, from a hidden, unopened present to even fiddling around with a light switch. And as the cycles inevitably continue, you’ll see patterns emerge, like your wife reading a book, or her anticipation as she waits to break an exciting piece of news. In a world where the perimeters of time have disintegrated, these become routines that you simply must disrupt in order to glean more insights.
The unfortunate reality, however, is the sheer violence it inspires. Twelve Minutes is ultimately bogged down by these cycles of brutality, with the consequences-free nature of these cycles meaning you can even stab your own wife just to see what happens. At the same time, these routines soon become dreary and tedious to relive over and over again.
Then there’s its twist ending about your wife’s actual identity, a revelation that remains just as distasteful when I experienced it again years later.
Historical loops
The Forgotten City, on the other hand, uses the time loop mechanic to tell a vastly different tale of historical fiction.
You stumble upon a portal that takes you back centuries and into an underground city in ancient Rome, where its denizens have to obey the Golden Rule at all costs: when one sins, everyone will be turned to gold.
The point is to break the cycle, and your first lead is to discover the identity of a would-be sinner who may doom the whole city. Unspooling the narrative thread that holds The Forgotten City means exploiting the time loop, as each cycle introduces new information that can reshape the outcome of its mystery.
What’s notable is that The Forgotten City takes its time to portray its denizens as folks with very personal stakes in this hellish reality, with some even bringing up intriguing theories about the Golden Rule. It’s a deftly written tale rooted in a historically accurate setting, filled with fascinating twists and turns that hardly become overwrought.
Yet some quibbles persist. The incredibly helpful Galarius will be your best guide and buddy in this city, but his tendency to dash off and fulfill tasks you’ve completed in previous cycles (so you don’t have to do them again), unquestioningly, is an oddity you’ll need to overlook, alongside some inexplicable coincidences the story throws at you.
Then there’s the game’s finale, which concludes on a cheesy and self-aggrandizing note that slightly sours the experience.
For a game predicated on tightly conjured twists and in-depth discussions on morality, it’s a pity that The Forgotten City struggles to find its footing towards the end.
Breaking the cycle
But perhaps my favourite time loop game from 2021 is Deathloop, which wields the time loop conceit without falling prey to tedious repetitions.
Like Twelve Minutes and The Forgotten City, Deathloop doesn’t steer far from the basic structure of investigating and breaking the loop, but it does inject new ideas into this formula so the cycles never feel trite. Waking up every morning at a deserted beach, you eventually realize that you’ll need to kill eight individuals in Blackreef within a single day.
It’s a seemingly impossible objective initially, but becomes within reach as you tamper with the events through your knowledge of the time loop. But rather than chuck you in a constrained space, there are four different districts, across four time periods (morning, noon, afternoon and night) to visit.
Every cycle still remains compelling to revisit even after your day ends and the loop restarts, as Deathloop drips tantalizing leads and revelations to you gradually.
Each district, too, will differ depending on the time of your visit. Certain events may render a part of the map inaccessible until a specific hour; for instance, one of your targets may be hosting a party only at night in the Updaam district, and another would be busy tinkering away at their research in the afternoon at the Complex.
Making your jaunt across these places even more hair-raising is the abrupt appearance of your arch-nemesis Julianna, the only other person on this island who retains her memories across these temporal cycles. She’s hellbent on stopping your progress, and her appearance tends to ratchet the tension to a thrilling degree.
Yet the inability to quick save and exit the game at any point is extremely aggravating. This is by design — a means, perhaps, to avoid save-scumming — but quitting the game before you exit a district means losing whatever progress you’ve made in the same visit.
One thread that ties these three games together is the need to achieve the perfect, flawless run. It’s a trait that harkens to the original, endemic loop of videogames, and therein lies the lasting appeal of time loop games as well; you keep trying, and trying again, to make sure you eviscerate every foe, uncover every conspiracy, and discover the reason behind the time loop’s existence.
You’re neatly checking off every task in the list. It’s the ultimate display of efficiency and accomplishment — a satisfying way to complete and bring these games to the finish line.
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