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Deathloop is the logical endpoint of the genre of Immersive Sim when it comes to how we tell stories using it.
Before that, we have to talk about Immersive Sims or at least one of them,
Hitman is a series of games that some would categorize as an ImSim, I say some because I know for a fact that even just stating that is going to piss some people off massively because the terminology of Immersive Sim is vague and undefined with a very niche fanbase of very dedicated people who are willing to discuss it for hours on end. Just know, I do not care. I’m mainly referring to it as such because a similar group of mechanics, ideas, and goals appear between Hitman and other ImSims
Agent 47 is literally a blank slate character, he is a person developed to just do his job and that job is sleek and quiet murder of any number of targets in a given level, so it’s interesting to note that in Hitman, you are still required to basically live up to the role of a Hitman, rather than place yourself in those shoes.
The way the narrative is signposted throughout the series and all of the surrounding elements of the games paint the player character as a silent assassin who plans every minute detail to a tee so they can slip in and out, murdering their target before anyone even realizes something has gone wrong. This is pretty much guaranteed to not be the way you actually play the game starting off.
To get to this point, you have to go through these maps multiple times, learn their secrets, their layouts, their enemy placements, and everything else before you can be the person the narrative tells you you are. This essentially makes most of the gameplay as it pertains to the story disconnected. Agent 47 as a man cannot physically turn back time, he cannot Save Scum, and he, nor anyone else in the game has any knowledge of the countless previous runs that it took to get to the point where you can actually be Agent 47. Death is an explicit fail state which has no direct place in anything outside of the gameplay.
Deathloop is different.
Deathloop, as a game, is deeply fascinating to me, because even with its own elements separated, they’re great. The Shooting is Punchy and all the weapon types have their own little quirks and feel that make them completely distinct, the level design has so many different paths to destinations and areas that can change based on your actions, that just learning to get around is a blast and the way powers intersect with combat and exploration through all of that makes a game that is so immensely satisfying to play and learn, again and again, and again.
But the real thing that makes Deathloop not just good but Transcendent is how it takes the defined rules of the games it’s inspired by and the traditional player response to those rules and exploits them.
The way it does this is through the idealization and mechanical canonization of:
THE PERFECT RUN
Colt, unlike 47, is much more of a defined character, he had a place in the world before the story and he will continue to exist once it is over. Despite this, it is much easier for a player to put themselves in Colt’s situation because the narrative and gameplay of Deathloop come together in a way that I have not seen another game with these design philosophies before (to my knowledge).
In Deathloop, Colt’s goal is learning the maps, scouting out locations, experimenting with systems, and discovering secrets, everything you do in gameplay and discover is canon within the story, putting you in Colt’s place much more directly, despite not being a self insert.
The mythologized nature of going through and beating levels, streamlining your run, and getting to a point where you can quickly and efficiently kill all of your targets is the end goal, even death in the game, while still a fail state that can halt your progress and be an effective punishment for failing, is just a reality of the game, something that in-game characters will comment on and react to.
Even in failure, the ability to make hard progress, even in runs that don’t go how you planned creates a gameplay experience that finally feels like it scratches an itch I’ve had for a good while. I’ve never been too up on ImSims previously, the stress of perfectly good runs being failed in an instant or the pinpoint accuracy needed to get through them, while not a direct criticism of the design itself, more a personal issue, scared me away from games like Dishonored or Thief because quite frankly I just wasn’t very good at them. Even the new Hitman games to a degree would have lost me if it wasn’t for the new accessibility features basically telling you exactly what you need to do to succeed but even then it never felt exactly right in the end.
Deathloop, in creating an experience where failure and learning from your mistakes are contextualized in the story as just a natural part of growth and getting towards the end, rather than a hurdle to become what the game is acting like you are, spoke to me in a way these games have never done before for me without throwing out the complexity or difficulty that ImSims are lauded for. And for that experience, I cannot be happier with the game.
TL;DR How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Immersive Sims
Before that, we have to talk about Immersive Sims or at least one of them,
Hitman is a series of games that some would categorize as an ImSim, I say some because I know for a fact that even just stating that is going to piss some people off massively because the terminology of Immersive Sim is vague and undefined with a very niche fanbase of very dedicated people who are willing to discuss it for hours on end. Just know, I do not care. I’m mainly referring to it as such because a similar group of mechanics, ideas, and goals appear between Hitman and other ImSims
Agent 47 is literally a blank slate character, he is a person developed to just do his job and that job is sleek and quiet murder of any number of targets in a given level, so it’s interesting to note that in Hitman, you are still required to basically live up to the role of a Hitman, rather than place yourself in those shoes.
The way the narrative is signposted throughout the series and all of the surrounding elements of the games paint the player character as a silent assassin who plans every minute detail to a tee so they can slip in and out, murdering their target before anyone even realizes something has gone wrong. This is pretty much guaranteed to not be the way you actually play the game starting off.
To get to this point, you have to go through these maps multiple times, learn their secrets, their layouts, their enemy placements, and everything else before you can be the person the narrative tells you you are. This essentially makes most of the gameplay as it pertains to the story disconnected. Agent 47 as a man cannot physically turn back time, he cannot Save Scum, and he, nor anyone else in the game has any knowledge of the countless previous runs that it took to get to the point where you can actually be Agent 47. Death is an explicit fail state which has no direct place in anything outside of the gameplay.
Deathloop is different.
Deathloop, as a game, is deeply fascinating to me, because even with its own elements separated, they’re great. The Shooting is Punchy and all the weapon types have their own little quirks and feel that make them completely distinct, the level design has so many different paths to destinations and areas that can change based on your actions, that just learning to get around is a blast and the way powers intersect with combat and exploration through all of that makes a game that is so immensely satisfying to play and learn, again and again, and again.
But the real thing that makes Deathloop not just good but Transcendent is how it takes the defined rules of the games it’s inspired by and the traditional player response to those rules and exploits them.
The way it does this is through the idealization and mechanical canonization of:
THE PERFECT RUN
Colt, unlike 47, is much more of a defined character, he had a place in the world before the story and he will continue to exist once it is over. Despite this, it is much easier for a player to put themselves in Colt’s situation because the narrative and gameplay of Deathloop come together in a way that I have not seen another game with these design philosophies before (to my knowledge).
In Deathloop, Colt’s goal is learning the maps, scouting out locations, experimenting with systems, and discovering secrets, everything you do in gameplay and discover is canon within the story, putting you in Colt’s place much more directly, despite not being a self insert.
The mythologized nature of going through and beating levels, streamlining your run, and getting to a point where you can quickly and efficiently kill all of your targets is the end goal, even death in the game, while still a fail state that can halt your progress and be an effective punishment for failing, is just a reality of the game, something that in-game characters will comment on and react to.
Even in failure, the ability to make hard progress, even in runs that don’t go how you planned creates a gameplay experience that finally feels like it scratches an itch I’ve had for a good while. I’ve never been too up on ImSims previously, the stress of perfectly good runs being failed in an instant or the pinpoint accuracy needed to get through them, while not a direct criticism of the design itself, more a personal issue, scared me away from games like Dishonored or Thief because quite frankly I just wasn’t very good at them. Even the new Hitman games to a degree would have lost me if it wasn’t for the new accessibility features basically telling you exactly what you need to do to succeed but even then it never felt exactly right in the end.
Deathloop, in creating an experience where failure and learning from your mistakes are contextualized in the story as just a natural part of growth and getting towards the end, rather than a hurdle to become what the game is acting like you are, spoke to me in a way these games have never done before for me without throwing out the complexity or difficulty that ImSims are lauded for. And for that experience, I cannot be happier with the game.
TL;DR How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Immersive Sims
This review contains spoilers
"Then there is no alternative to crossing swords."
"'Fraid not. It's all for the sake of the game."
No More Heroes 3 is what happens when you spend years and years building up the eventual return of a deified auteur director, spend years and years dissecting every little thing he has said about his work, his triumphs, his failures, and everything in between and spend years and years wondering why he would bring back a finished story twice and what he'd want to say with it.
The result is empty and hollow. A shadow of what came before. Fun but ultimately disappointing.
I'll get the boring takes out of the way first.
The combat in this game is incredible, I've always heard people kinda talk down the combat of the first game as utilitarian, only there to service the narrative and themes of the first game, and while I agree that the combat and gameplay loop is incredibly purposeful, I kinda disagree with that. While the first game never had technique or style of a Devil May Cry or a Bayonetta game, there’s something I find so fun about pushing simplistic combat systems to their limit and No More Heroes had that feeling in spades, landing combos, chuckin people, dark stepping, there’s little like it on the Wii and No More Heroes 3 polishes that up to such an insane level. It’s carved it’s own little sector knowing the limits of these systems but still offering challenging encounters on top of that, you only fight around a maximum of 5 people in small boxy combat arenas but the amount of mileage they get out of that is insane, there’s a healthy amount of enemies in the game and enough little quirks to make finding out how to style on enemies, letting the enemy attack, dodging at exactly the right time to get the darkstep and then slashing like a madman until your power meter borders on empty and then when the enemy is dazed throwing them to get the power filled automatically. It’s great stuff
And of course, every review is contractually obligated to mention that everything surrounding the game is next fucking level, The UI and sound design is fine tuned to the Nth degree. It’s a joy to flick through menus, start missions and jobs and just exist within the games superficial elements, the soundtrack is packed with fucking bangers as well
Where the game loses me, and where the true disappointment lies for me at least, is the narrative.
The narrative of the first No More Heroes means a lot to me, a game about a borderline irredeemable bastard navigating the world of labour both as having a job and as his hobby, the lines between work and play are blurred as Travis Touchdown works boring jobs like mowing lawns or cleaning graffiti so he can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Assassins Association so he can violently mutilate people as a fucked extension of his media obsessed home life, all for the vague promise that if he kills enough people to get to the top of the rankings, he’ll finally be able to sleep with someone. At the end of the day he comes out the other side with nothing but an empty bank account and blood on his hands as it turns out The UAA never existed, all a ploy to exploit his labour as a loser virgin. It’s a biting commentary on not only the medium but also the nature of work, how hobbies can be exploited for that gain and the very audience holding the controller at the other end. It’s a game that asks difficult questions to the player that aren’t solved simply with a resolution of beating the bad guy or killing your long lost siblings, with the end of the game actively making a joke out of the idea of a traditional resolution.
In the time since then, the series has continued though, with the frankly awful No More Heroes 2 completely retconning the ending of the first game and missing the point, to the admittedly refreshing Travis Strikes Again, a game about the creators first hand experience with the labour that got him to the position he is in now. That was Suda's first proper directors credit since that first game alongside Ren Yamazaki, after taking a backseat working on games like Lollipop Chainsaw and Killer is Dead, games with much less to say that really embraced the "woah wacky 4th wall breaking" reputation that Grasshoppers games got, while missing the heart and the bite that made those older games so powerful
And it's fairly obvious that this is the path No More Heroes 3 took.
the story goes through the paces much like 1 and 2, you climb up the ladder, killing enemies as you go up the rankings, this time around your fighting self proclaimed Superhero aliens, the game makes it incredibly clear that it knows about the modern media landscape, the game is presented as an old tokusatsu show being watched through Netflix, the game opens on Travis experiencing Nostalgia not through the games he loved himself but watching it through youtube and there are many references to the pop culture assimilation known as the MCU, all of these elements together could make for a very interesting narrative, the Kill the Past titles have experimented with connected stories for years, so why couldn't they tackle the current dominating force holding the title of definitive connected universe.
The problem comes from the fact that they do fuck all with any of this. There are flashes of interesting ideas that poke through the facade, occasionally a character from the series' past will show up, a particular highlight being when a boss is killed in a cutscene without a boss fight, meaning the UAA literally just shove in a mass produced Destroyman to fill the space as to not break the routine, I've already mentioned the references to modern media landscapes, the concept of old media being experienced through new mediums appears throughout, building to the fight with Henry, a rehash of the first game with similar convolution, ending with Travis being violently killed in the one place the games have hammered home is a point of safety in its own surreal way.
I was fully ready at this point for the real narrative weight to come in.
But it just doesn't, this moment only serves to do a lazy rehash of the ending of TSA and then have one of the most pathetic moments of the series, where Travis begs Takashi Miike (a famous film director that the game really wants you to know that they know) to make a No More Heroes movie, the rest of the game plods along ending just as predictably as you think, Travis kills the villains, all so we can make a shit joke about Smash Brothers and a joke sequel bait which was a lot funnier in the first game when the narrative was grounded in some form of hyper form of reality.
And, I get it, this is a different game than what came before, maybe they just wanted to make a funny little game, which would be fine if the dialogue wasn't this embarrassing. The thoughtful discussion of ideology and place in the world of the first game is replaced by constant meta gags about how you are in fact playing a video game right now, 90 percent of the jokes in the game are Travis telling us that he knows what a video game is, coupled with some absolutely awful sequences like the Rap Battle with Kimmy Love (the entire Kimmy chapter is grossly sexist btw).
Meta Humour is nothing new for any of Suda's games really but where the first game complemented actual conversations between characters with substance with 4th wall breaks to bridge the gap between the player and the game, putting you in the right mind to really understand what you were being presented with, in this game, the meta humour is the substance and the schtick gets old fast.
When all of that sets in, the cracks start to show, why bring back the original gameplay loop of jobs and minigames and paying the UAA to go kill people. if you have nothing to say about it, it all comes across as remarkably hollow
This game does all of the shit we dragged all the non Suda written and directed games over the coals for in its writing. What does this game have that something like Killer is Dead didn't? It's crowd pleasing gruel with nothing interesting to say.
I've heard the cries of some explaining that that is the point, that it's actually a gigabrained parody of sequels that do nothing interesting and reverse all the development of the previous game like something like No More Heroes 2, but even if I was to get over the hurdle that it's just not a very funny parody, what would that say about the message of the game?
Sequel bad? Franchise bad?
Is that all we really expect from games like this? These themes coming from the push towards making uninteresting sequels or continuations have been explored so much better in other games, like Danganronpa V3 or the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the point those games make using those themes are much more powerful than anything that appears in No More Heroes 3.
I'd feel weird rating this game because I do think the game is fun to play and it's got a killer visual style that shows that the people working at Grasshopper get it more than most, but as a sequel to one of the most interesting pieces of media to come from the Wii generation and an introspective look at where the creator has come from, No More Heroes 3 lacks anything that really made that first game so good. Part of the game being so fun to play while the other part making me feel this empty means I can only really give it a half rating. This is the most disappointed I've been with a sequel in a good while.
The worst thing I can say about this game is that it is not Punk.
TL;DR Suda51 shocks the gaming world once again by co-directing and writing the one thing no-one thought he would. A passable action game
"'Fraid not. It's all for the sake of the game."
No More Heroes 3 is what happens when you spend years and years building up the eventual return of a deified auteur director, spend years and years dissecting every little thing he has said about his work, his triumphs, his failures, and everything in between and spend years and years wondering why he would bring back a finished story twice and what he'd want to say with it.
The result is empty and hollow. A shadow of what came before. Fun but ultimately disappointing.
I'll get the boring takes out of the way first.
The combat in this game is incredible, I've always heard people kinda talk down the combat of the first game as utilitarian, only there to service the narrative and themes of the first game, and while I agree that the combat and gameplay loop is incredibly purposeful, I kinda disagree with that. While the first game never had technique or style of a Devil May Cry or a Bayonetta game, there’s something I find so fun about pushing simplistic combat systems to their limit and No More Heroes had that feeling in spades, landing combos, chuckin people, dark stepping, there’s little like it on the Wii and No More Heroes 3 polishes that up to such an insane level. It’s carved it’s own little sector knowing the limits of these systems but still offering challenging encounters on top of that, you only fight around a maximum of 5 people in small boxy combat arenas but the amount of mileage they get out of that is insane, there’s a healthy amount of enemies in the game and enough little quirks to make finding out how to style on enemies, letting the enemy attack, dodging at exactly the right time to get the darkstep and then slashing like a madman until your power meter borders on empty and then when the enemy is dazed throwing them to get the power filled automatically. It’s great stuff
And of course, every review is contractually obligated to mention that everything surrounding the game is next fucking level, The UI and sound design is fine tuned to the Nth degree. It’s a joy to flick through menus, start missions and jobs and just exist within the games superficial elements, the soundtrack is packed with fucking bangers as well
Where the game loses me, and where the true disappointment lies for me at least, is the narrative.
The narrative of the first No More Heroes means a lot to me, a game about a borderline irredeemable bastard navigating the world of labour both as having a job and as his hobby, the lines between work and play are blurred as Travis Touchdown works boring jobs like mowing lawns or cleaning graffiti so he can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Assassins Association so he can violently mutilate people as a fucked extension of his media obsessed home life, all for the vague promise that if he kills enough people to get to the top of the rankings, he’ll finally be able to sleep with someone. At the end of the day he comes out the other side with nothing but an empty bank account and blood on his hands as it turns out The UAA never existed, all a ploy to exploit his labour as a loser virgin. It’s a biting commentary on not only the medium but also the nature of work, how hobbies can be exploited for that gain and the very audience holding the controller at the other end. It’s a game that asks difficult questions to the player that aren’t solved simply with a resolution of beating the bad guy or killing your long lost siblings, with the end of the game actively making a joke out of the idea of a traditional resolution.
In the time since then, the series has continued though, with the frankly awful No More Heroes 2 completely retconning the ending of the first game and missing the point, to the admittedly refreshing Travis Strikes Again, a game about the creators first hand experience with the labour that got him to the position he is in now. That was Suda's first proper directors credit since that first game alongside Ren Yamazaki, after taking a backseat working on games like Lollipop Chainsaw and Killer is Dead, games with much less to say that really embraced the "woah wacky 4th wall breaking" reputation that Grasshoppers games got, while missing the heart and the bite that made those older games so powerful
And it's fairly obvious that this is the path No More Heroes 3 took.
the story goes through the paces much like 1 and 2, you climb up the ladder, killing enemies as you go up the rankings, this time around your fighting self proclaimed Superhero aliens, the game makes it incredibly clear that it knows about the modern media landscape, the game is presented as an old tokusatsu show being watched through Netflix, the game opens on Travis experiencing Nostalgia not through the games he loved himself but watching it through youtube and there are many references to the pop culture assimilation known as the MCU, all of these elements together could make for a very interesting narrative, the Kill the Past titles have experimented with connected stories for years, so why couldn't they tackle the current dominating force holding the title of definitive connected universe.
The problem comes from the fact that they do fuck all with any of this. There are flashes of interesting ideas that poke through the facade, occasionally a character from the series' past will show up, a particular highlight being when a boss is killed in a cutscene without a boss fight, meaning the UAA literally just shove in a mass produced Destroyman to fill the space as to not break the routine, I've already mentioned the references to modern media landscapes, the concept of old media being experienced through new mediums appears throughout, building to the fight with Henry, a rehash of the first game with similar convolution, ending with Travis being violently killed in the one place the games have hammered home is a point of safety in its own surreal way.
I was fully ready at this point for the real narrative weight to come in.
But it just doesn't, this moment only serves to do a lazy rehash of the ending of TSA and then have one of the most pathetic moments of the series, where Travis begs Takashi Miike (a famous film director that the game really wants you to know that they know) to make a No More Heroes movie, the rest of the game plods along ending just as predictably as you think, Travis kills the villains, all so we can make a shit joke about Smash Brothers and a joke sequel bait which was a lot funnier in the first game when the narrative was grounded in some form of hyper form of reality.
And, I get it, this is a different game than what came before, maybe they just wanted to make a funny little game, which would be fine if the dialogue wasn't this embarrassing. The thoughtful discussion of ideology and place in the world of the first game is replaced by constant meta gags about how you are in fact playing a video game right now, 90 percent of the jokes in the game are Travis telling us that he knows what a video game is, coupled with some absolutely awful sequences like the Rap Battle with Kimmy Love (the entire Kimmy chapter is grossly sexist btw).
Meta Humour is nothing new for any of Suda's games really but where the first game complemented actual conversations between characters with substance with 4th wall breaks to bridge the gap between the player and the game, putting you in the right mind to really understand what you were being presented with, in this game, the meta humour is the substance and the schtick gets old fast.
When all of that sets in, the cracks start to show, why bring back the original gameplay loop of jobs and minigames and paying the UAA to go kill people. if you have nothing to say about it, it all comes across as remarkably hollow
This game does all of the shit we dragged all the non Suda written and directed games over the coals for in its writing. What does this game have that something like Killer is Dead didn't? It's crowd pleasing gruel with nothing interesting to say.
I've heard the cries of some explaining that that is the point, that it's actually a gigabrained parody of sequels that do nothing interesting and reverse all the development of the previous game like something like No More Heroes 2, but even if I was to get over the hurdle that it's just not a very funny parody, what would that say about the message of the game?
Sequel bad? Franchise bad?
Is that all we really expect from games like this? These themes coming from the push towards making uninteresting sequels or continuations have been explored so much better in other games, like Danganronpa V3 or the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the point those games make using those themes are much more powerful than anything that appears in No More Heroes 3.
I'd feel weird rating this game because I do think the game is fun to play and it's got a killer visual style that shows that the people working at Grasshopper get it more than most, but as a sequel to one of the most interesting pieces of media to come from the Wii generation and an introspective look at where the creator has come from, No More Heroes 3 lacks anything that really made that first game so good. Part of the game being so fun to play while the other part making me feel this empty means I can only really give it a half rating. This is the most disappointed I've been with a sequel in a good while.
The worst thing I can say about this game is that it is not Punk.
TL;DR Suda51 shocks the gaming world once again by co-directing and writing the one thing no-one thought he would. A passable action game