Back in the 2010s there was a rash of daughters in games. The generation of developers from the turn of the century were getting older, went the rationale, and having kids of their own, who emerged in games as key themes or motifs. Whatever the reason, there’s a bunch of daughters in mid-2010s video games: Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite (2013), Ellie in The Last of Us (2013), Clementine in The Walking Dead (2012), the princess Emily in Dishonored (2012), Ciri in The Witcher 3 (2015) – all these games were built around the father-daughter dynamic. A late entry to the genre is Julianna Blake, the key antagonist in Arkane Studio’s Deathloop (2021). Arkane Studio is the team behind the Dishonored series and Prey: Deathloop is their chaotic 1960s version of Groundhog Day. You play Colt Vahn, misfit and self-appointed debonair, who wakes up on a mysterious island stuck in a timeloop, built intentionally by a group of rich maniacs, who are settling in to enjoy an eternal party. You set out to break the loop, running around the island collecting clues to help you track down and murder the island’s nine founders. You fight your way through the maniacs, and eventually, if you play right, you can uncover enough to set up a Rube Goldberg sequence of events allowing you to wipe out all the founders in one day. It’s a little bit Dishonored, with magic teleporting powers, and a little bit Hitman, with a set of intricate maps that you unfurl over several playthroughs.

The game retains a steady structure across runs with two mechanics relating to forgetfulness and respawning. By the end of the day, if you haven’t murdered all the founders, the day resets and everyone comes back to life. Also, everyone (or almost everyone) forgets everything that’s happened the day before. It’s a true time loop: at the end of the day, you move back to the start of the day, voiding all the day’s events. Nobody died, because the day never happened. Also, nobody changes their behaviour, because nobody remembers anything – they all think they’re entering into their first day. It’s a bit convoluted, but the game uses these elements to explain how you can keep playing the same maps, with the founders doing the same thing. A game like Hitman, by comparison, has replay options without any narrative explanation – it just lets you replay the levels for fun. Deathloop builds its explanation into the fictional world. The day resets, and everyone forgets, so you can find the founders in the same places every day. Harriet always starts the morning giving a sermon in Karl’s Bay. Charlie runs a LARP game in Updaam at noon. With narrative explanation in tow, you make your way around an increasingly predictable environment, finding door codes and figuring out how to access secret areas, and line up two or three murders at a time. It’s a puzzle box, with one spanner in the works – Julianna Blake.

Blake is introduced as your key antagonist. The game opens with her murdering you, for no reason that you can understand, and she will periodically pop into any given level and try and kill you (the game also has a multiplayer option where other players can take on the Julianna Blake role, invading your game Dark Souls-style to hunt you down). You and Julianna are the two people who don’t forget. You both carry all your memories from day to day – and so she’ll often check in to mock your progress (or lack of progress), asking why you keep bothering to resist. She will often call you over the radio at the start of any given area, mostly to trash-talk and make fun of you – she’s generally just a nuisance. If you’re trying to sneak through an area, for instance, and she barrels through the door and starts blasting away, you’re – firstly at immediate risk of death, but also all of the other enemies in the level become aware of your location. Even if you kill her, you get swarmed by everyone you’ve just been sneaking past.

As the game winds its way, it emerges that Blake is actually your daughter. Colt, your character, started out as Head of Security for Aeon. After deciding to break the timeloop, he learned that he needs to kill all nine founders, including his daughter, Julianna, the group’s archivist. Every time that Colt is unsuccessful, the day resets, meaning everyone who died comes back to life. Julianna, then, found herself getting murdered over and over by her dad, seemingly out of nowhere. Because she carries memories across the loops, she starts to fight back, learning various skills and powers across different iterations – much like the player over the course of the game – leading to the state at the start of the game where she’s your equal, and in fact murdering you back. This is all sort of a major revelation near the end of the game – throughout the whole game you’ve been reacting against Julianna, fending her off and trying to end the loop while figuring out what her whole deal is – why she’s coming after you, why she hates you so much. That in turn mirrors the start of her journey. Before the start of the game, she was living her life as a happy little historian, and then her dad started murdering her. Your journey is her journey. Your incomprehension is hers. She didn’t understand, and neither do you.

That’s an interesting little wrinkle. Typically father-daughter games revolve around a protective, paternalistic relationship, and the growing indepedence of the child. In the first Dishonored game, you have to save Emily, but in the second game she’s all grown up and she has to save you. That’s the dynamic that these games typically explore: parents relinquishing the role of protector. Deathloop instead builds its dynamic around failure. It comes as a surprise that Julianna is your daughter: you haven’t been protecting her, and you didn’t even know that she was yours to protect. The idea of protection comes to you as a shock. After you’ve been killing each other for twenty-something hours of gameplay, you realise – oh, I should have been looking after her. It’s very close to something like the 2013 game The Novelist, which again explores parental failure and imperfection. The narrative reveal in Deathloop dovetails with the gameplay to create a sense of failure. Your actions take on a hue that they didn’t have before – which is so often our actual lived experience of hurting people. You say something or do something, you hurt someone’s feelings, and when they explain – oh, they saw it this way, they understood it as that – your actions take on a meaning that they didn’t have in the past. The narrative reveal mirrors the process of learning that you’ve caused pain. You look back and your actions mean something different. All that conflict and mayhem came from a place of hurt, from Colt’s failure as a parent. Again, the motif of protection is inverted. Colt failed to protect Julianna, failed to fulfil his role as a parent. Julianna had to learn how to protect herself, defending herself against a figure who should serve as that source of protection. It’s miserable. It’s a gruelling and tragic moment.

In short, rather than lionizing the parent (which is essentially just a variation on the classic power fantasy), Deathloop explores the feeling of an unsafe childhood. It throws you into a confusing, violent world where nothing makes sense and somebody’s angry at you for no discernable reason. You sit inside that violence, you come to terms with it – learn its patterns, its habits, unpick its inner logic – and once you understand it, you’re charged to take ownership of the ways in which you’ve reproduced it – or caused it, in the game’s cyclical logic. That violence is your violence, that failure your failure. As the player you begin in the role of a child, coming to terms with an unfamiliar world. By the end of the game, in your most empowered form, you take on the role of an adult – capable, well-equipped, able to navigate and overcome the challenges of the world around you. The player starts as a neglected child and then, on entering adulthood, realises they’ve been a neglectful parent. That transition is also marked by a reversal in Julianna’s role. Where she, from a gameplay perspective, functioned initially as the neglectful parent (empowered, vengeful, violent), the end of the game sees her revert into the wounded child. Colt and Julianna exchange places: she becomes his victim, and he understands what he did to make her that way. The neglectful adult is an unhealed child; the neglected child becomes a harmful adult. It’s only after he transforms into adulthood that Colt becomes capable of owning his mistakes and breaking the cycle. That’s when he gains awareness and the capacity for change. He cannot break the cycle until he knows what he did.