I’m catching up on two of the best time loop games from 2021

Recently I’ve been playing Deathloop , Twelve Minutes and The Forgotten City : three time loop games all released in 2021.

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That year produced a bumper crop of time loop games, with games released one after another in the span of three months.

But while I’d first experienced — and since replayed — Twelve Minutes when it was first released in August 2021, The Forgotten City and Deathloop had been stuck in my backlog for a while, their critical acclaim placing them high on my priority list until I finally made time for them.

Time loops fascinate me because, in a way, the device is endemic to videogames.

If you can’t get past a certain segment in a game, you would play through it over and over again, the repetitions of these game loops a facsimile of these temporal cycles.

The key difference, at least in a time loop game, is the character’s growing knowledge of their circumstances, as they are driven to figure out why this seemingly inescapable reality is happening to them.

As such, time loop games become a nifty narrative puzzle, with new details fed to them in every cycle, while introducing wrinkles in gameplay that transform a typical game loop, be it exploration or point-and-click, into invigorating, investigative work.

What I’ve learned playing these games is that time loops are also a way to invite introspection.

While Twelve Minutes is a stylishly intimate nightmare of Freudian proportions, The Forgotten City reckons with the concept of immortality and morality, set in the days of the Roman Empire.

Then there’s Deathloop , in which the very people who stay on Blackreef Island wield the time loop anomaly as a device to be abused.

The games are all remarkably evocative from the very first loop, although some are eventually ensnared by the repetitive, sometimes verbose trappings of this narrative device.