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

Screenshot: Elsinore

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…