JULI, MADLY,DEEPLY

Jess Kinghorn chats Deathloop with Arkane Studios, and gets to know its latest leading lady

- Jess Kinghorn

You can be certain that there are no pacifists living on Black Reef. Home to artists, scientists, party animals, and murderers, it’s not a place beholden to any line of thinking that’s not operating at 100 miles an hour. The center of a man-made time loop, death is cheap for everybody – including the assassin Julianna Blake, who’s gunning for you at every turn.

Game director Dinga Bakaba reveals, “When you see the trailer, Colt and Julianna’s relationship seems to be the main thing, but interestingly it didn’t start with that – it started with the time loop and this kind of 1960s world before there was this rivalry.”

When you play as protagonist Colt, you can choose either to have Julianna as just another AI-controlled character or to allow another player online to drop into her shoes. You can take up the mantle yourself from very early on too. It’s an ambitious blend of single-player and multiplayer, to say the least.

BANG BANG…

Bakaba reflects on the dynamic, saying, “It’s a key part of the project and it’s so interesting that it just came out of a weird brainstorm about this one NPC and then someone said, ‘What if you could play them?’ And then someone said ‘Like The Crossing?’ and, yeah, we were all doomed. [Laughs] By that point, we were doomed! We went all-in almost immediately.”