There's an interesting note that's been attached to the access we've been allowed to Deathloop – some five hours with the latest game from Dishonored and Prey developers Arkane Studios – that politely implies we look beyond the easy comparisons with the likes of Hitman and Dark Souls with its intricate clockwork maps, or of Majora's Mask, The Outer Wilds and Returnal with the ingenious time loop at its core (it even goes as far as to categorically state, should there be any lingering confusion, that no Deathloop is most certainly not a roguelike).
The thing is – and I'm sorry Arkane, I know you tried your best to dissuade me, but this is just what we do – I don't know how else you pin down this curious chimera of a game. Partly because so much of the pleasure of those first five hours is seeing how Deathloop assembles itself from all those disparate parts as its loop winds around itself, partly because by the time you've taken down a couple of the visionaries that are your marks and earnt some of their powers there's so much in play that it's something of a tangle. Mostly, though, it's because Deathloop's knotty enigma is one you should untangle yourself, because judging from the first five hours this really could be something special.
This is, though, a very different experience to those we've seen from Arkane in the past. Yes, after those five hours you may well be using your recently acquired superpowers to blink from rooftop to rooftop, perhaps opting to sneak past guards or simply snapping their necks like Dishonored, and yes there's some of that same pulpy kitsch from Prey – dialled up here to an enjoyably heady degree – but the balance, and the set-up, feels entirely different.
