Acknowledging them within the gameworld essentially narrativizes elements like repetition and failure that are frequently part of play but outside of a game’s storyworld. Every game with a save/load feature already contains time loops. 145) argues, “through character deaths, saved files, checkpoints, action replays, Let’s Play videos, walkthroughs, skippable cutscenes, lag, fluctuating framerates and countless other phenomena, time travel is a banal feature of videogame play”.
I argue that time loops narrativize something that is already implicit across most videogames – repetition. While far from a new phenomenon in videogames, nor other media (David Bordwell 2002 Jan Simons 2008), recent years have seen the release of various titles like Outer Wilds, Deathloop, Twelve Minutes (Luis António 2021), The Sexy Brutale (Cavalier Game Studios 2017), Loop Hero (Four Quarters 2021), Returnal (Housemarque 2021) and more that place time loops as central to their experiences.
This paper will offer a close analysis of time loops as a narrative device in two recent videogames, Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital 2019) and Deathloop (Arkane Studios 2021).
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