The most underrated game on the quest. Wonderful to use interfaces and simple but effective puzzles, great stealth mechanics and a brilliant look.
From the developers of 'lies beneath' they forego the combat focus of that game for a more contemporary stealth horror that works to great effect. This game is also a decent length, which I can't say for most quest games, and has a good variety in its levels, even if there are a few too many raptor sections.
Would definitely recommend this to anyone with a quest, if you can stomach it, because this game is legitimately scary, AND physically strenuous.
Can't wait to see the expansion!

DR1, while not being the best title of the franchise, has its charm — the atmosphere of the game is almost claustrophobic, making everything better and definitely more immersive, but, especially, the cast of this first title are fun and (mostly) well written.

The story, other than creating a bond with the classmates, is what will keep you hooked on this entry, by it being full of surprises that I won't talk about, it's better if you discover them by yourself.

In the end, Danganronpa is a very good game, that despite what some people may say, it deserves all the massive recognition it has been getting since quarantine 2020.

Deathloop is the newest game from Arkane studios at the time of writing this review, and it carries the mantle of the sandbox style gameplay we have become accustom to through their similar games like Dishonored, and Prey. And i'm happy to report that this game does in fact carry that legacy on with style and grace, but it isn't without it's flaws. Deathloop is set in an alternate 1960s where scientists have discovered an island with an odd anomaly where the same day loops over and over again, and it's up to our protagonist, Colt, who wakes up on a beach with no memories to try and break the loop and not only set himself free but also the inhabitants of the island, willing to or not. This simple premise is what ties together the big mechanic of the game and that is the looping day system. This is where the same day is played on repeat until you break the loop. The day is split into 4 sections, morning, noon, afternoon, and evening, and within these four blocks you have to try and figure out how to take out all 8 targets in 1 run to be able to break the loop. The gameplay is your standard first person shooter fare in terms of gun play but with the added element of you gun having the potential to jam. This can cause some intense moments when surrounded by hostiles. This game also incorporates supernatural powers for colt to use to be able to traverse and manipulate the world around him to better achieve his goals. Some of these abilities are familiar ones from Arkane's other games while others are new, but all remain as fun to play around with as ever. My biggest gripe with the game is the lack of any pacifist route which has been present on Arkane's other sandbox offerings. Pacifism routes are probably my favorite aspect of Arkane's library due to the added challenge and unique plot elements presented through taking non lethal methods. Sadly this game exclusively opts for a shoot first ask questions later approach which made the game feel a little too easy at times. But once I got my head in the right space and started going in guns blazing I had a much more fun time. There is also the aspects of invading which you can be invaded by other players who take the roll of Julianna to try and stop you from breaking the loop but unfortunately by the time I played the game the servers were rather empty and more often than not I ended up fighting just NPC Julianna's, and when I tried to invade others it would take upwards of 10 minutes to find someone else. Regardless the game is still a blast, the story is engaging especially towards the end, and the world is dense with so many details that it feels really lived in. Here's to hoping Arkane's next offering isn't an exclusive to Xbox consoles so I am able to give it a try.

Deathloop, somehow; is mindnumbingly complex and incredibly simple at the same time. It has this elevator pitch that's so easy to rattle off;

"You're a guy and you're stuck in a time loop and you've gotta kill 8 targets before midnight to break it! So you keep doing the loop over and over again, learning information about your targets and upgrading gear as you go so that you can do it all in one run to finish the game!"

It's exactly the kinda thing that's really easy to describe but so much more complicated to execute through game design to the point where Deathloop is somewhat bloated with tutorials, menus, keywords, mechanics and all sorts of various explanations. Deathloop's biggest flaw is how it doles out information - which is to say too much, too fast. For a game with such a complex narrative and so much focus put on picking up clues and gaining dirt on your targets, it can be incredibly taxing to retain all the information the game wants you to because every time you read a document or listen to an audiotape, you get main character Colt remarking on it out loud and a little notification in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen giving you a brief summary of what you've just learned. So sometimes you have an audio tape playing, Colt talking AND a notification popping up on-screen, that's too much information to take in at one time, Deathloop! This stuff is supposedly crucial, and I can't multitask!!

And this flaw is emblematic of Deathloop's design as a whole in my opinion. Its core concept requires so many moving parts to work as a game that there is a lot to take in, and this is to the game's benefit and detriment. On one hand as I say, it's very overbearing with how much it tells you and wants you to understand at a time and how it delivers said information. At the same time, its mechanical complexities offer all the freedom of choice in how you go about your mission that you've come to expect from an Arkane game. The level design is simply incredible in this game, I'd argue even better than the very best of Dishonored; which is high praise in my book. The verticality of the levels, all the nooks and crannies to sneak in to and out of the various strongholds, the remarkable art direction that lends such distinctive and colourful, paradisiacal 60's flair to every street you roam and every room you creep through is just INCREDIBLE. Even having played these same 4 levels in essence tons of times over I'm not tired of them, they're so dense and detailed and I'm constantly finding new things - and the minor changes they undergo during different times of the day only accentuates this.

It's such a paradoxical game at times. So sophisticated in its presentation but often clunky in its execution. For a game with such suave, Bond-esque undertones, the enemies in this game sure are fucking moronic sandbags! Running mindlessly directly into your line of fire when alerted and following you straight down hallways in which you can very easily place traps. Doesn't help that they're the only one enemy type in the entire game, meaning that even your unique "Visionary" targets who need to be killed to break the loop fight exactly the same way that any random-ass NPC does. (A couple of them have "Slabs", which are basically the game's superpowers, but they really don't end up changing much when you're dealing with them.)

This of course comes with one exception, Julianna - who can invade your mission at any point to try and hunt you down and kill you as either a player-controlled online enemy or an AI-piloted pursuer. You can turn online invasions from other players using Julianna off, but never the AI Julianna. The first few times this happens, it's novel and very cool - adding genuine tension and a fun cat-and-mouse dynamic to the levels that are otherwise generally pretty breezy. But the novelty wears out after a while in my opinion and it just becomes pretty tiresome, impeding on your progress when you just wanna get something done. It's especially annoying when you're going for targets like Frank or Aleksis who basically require stealth, so every time you're deep into the strongly stealth-incentivised sections of their missions, you're just praying Julianna doesn't randomly decide to show up and fuck the whole thing up for you and force you to reset the whole thing. Julianna showed up multiple times during my attempts to go unnoticed at Aleksis's party and my only options were to either stand and fight her there and then and blow my cover and instantly have to restart, or flee the area (again, undetected, which is pretty hard as it is) and hope she follows me and fight her elsewhere. If she doesn't, then I'm gonna be waiting for a while! Seems like a pretty big oversight in design in my opinion, and a pretty unsophisticated one at that.

Still, at its core, Deathloop is an Arkane game; with all the satisfying stealth, gunplay and multiple tailored approaches you've come to expect from that. I think despite having superior level design to Dishonored, its core gameplay falls slightly short of it because it doesn't react to the player's choices in the same way it did. The only incentive to be stealthy in Deathloop is that it's safer, but doing an entire mission and killing a Visionary without even being detected once didn't even result in a PS5 trophy for me, which was pretty disappointing. A far cry from Dishonored's "high-chaos", "low-chaos" system that saw levels physically change depending on your body count in the previous one. (I also really miss the bodies mechanic, I get why it doesn't exist in Deathloop because of the game's fiction but damn do I miss just dropping bodies off of rooftops.)

Then however, what Deathloop has over Dishonored is significantly more enjoyable and interesting story and characters. Colt and Julianna in particular have a great dynamic (even if their "relationship" ends up pretty weird by the end of the game) and while your Visionary targets are one-note and shallow; that's the point. They're pretentious assholes who are still fleshed out beautifully by the minicom messages in which you can see them interacting with eachother. Some of my favourite moments in this game are just hearing the Visionaries complain about one another and watching them bicker, you can often get a real sense of who these people are before you even meet them through the game's various breadcrumb trails, and I think that's really impressive.

I compare Deathloop to Dishonored a lot because fundamentally they're very similar - right down to having pretty much the exact same "Blink" ability. I think Dishonored is slightly better as a game if you're looking purely at gameplay - but then Deathloop's level design still trumps it, as do its story and characters. Its art direction and world are fucking stunning, on a comparable level to Dunwall in my opinion. I think the games overall are very similar in terms of quality for different reasons. I don't think Deathloop is quite the masterpiece critics seem to think it is, I think it's a good game with some flaws, and that's where it ends for me.