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Live, Die, Repeat — How Time Loops Took Over Video Games
Gaming has always involved players doing the same thing, over and over, but now designers are experimenting with circling time as a narrative device
There is tragedy in the Danish palace: the untimely deaths of the entire royal family, the king’s advisor and both of his children, and the prince’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But for Ophelia, the advisor’s daughter, death is not the end, as she awakens in her bedchamber four days in the past. With the knowledge of what is to come, she attempts to avert this Shakespearean tragedy. Again and again and again.
This is Elsinore, a new video game released this year from a team led by American writer Katie Chironis. She has described it as Groundhog Day meets Hamlet, though, she noted: “If they’re under age 35, they give me this blank stare because they don’t know what Groundhog Day is.”
“I thought about what it would look like if we were to empower a player to step into the role of somebody in Hamlet and say, ‘Hey, you think that this situation could have been avoided easily? Go ahead and try, see what happens.’”
Time-loop narratives, in which characters are forced to knowingly relive the same period of time, are so strongly associated with this 1993 movie that the exhaustive pop culture website TV Tropes calls them “Groundhog Day Loops.” The team behind Elsinore pulled the trope from anime, where it has been popular since the 1980s. But in the six years it has taken to develop the game, time loops have come around again in the West: the 2014 movie Edge of Tomorrow, this year’s TV series Russian Doll, and video games — over and over.
Many games already contain loops of repeated failure, albeit ones in which only the player — not the character they may be playing — retains the knowledge necessary to break the cycle. And as academics have pointed out, time loops are often a problem-solving process, so it’s unsurprising they should find their way into video games. But why are time-loop games so popular right now?
