Arkane's Deathloop is a stylish and slick shooter with a time-loop twist

Arkane Studios' new first-person shooter was unveiled last year with a stylish cinematic trailer, but during Sony's press conference today we finally got a real look at the game. Guess what? It's even more stylin'. The idea is that you are an assassin stuck in a time loop who has to kill eight targets to escape, but there's another assassin working against you. Each time you die, the loop resets.

Deathloop clearly takes inspiration from Dishonored, only with a nifty '70s veneer. You'll still teleport around, using wild super powers to throw enemies around or set up slick kills. But it's something worth seeing on your own, so check out the trailer above.

Fortunately, the PlayStation blog has a lot more details on Deathloop, which you can read about here. The idea behind Deathloop is that you wake up on an island each morning and have until midnight to kill eight targets and escape the timeloop, but how you approach that is entirely up to you. The whole island is yours to explore as you see fit, and I love that Arkane is taking the immersive sim to a whole new level by giving you one giant sandbox to play in.

What's awesome though is that there's a kind of Dark Souls-esque multiplayer mode at work, too. Though its entirely optional, other players can invade your world as the rival assassin to kill you and protect the integrity of the time loop. You can also choose to invade the world of another player, too. It's not clear how this system works exactly, but I love the idea of playing cat-and-mouse with another person.

Deathloop was shown today at Sony's big PS5 reveal show, but is confirmed to be coming to PC. You can check out its official website for more info.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.