Comment: “Death Cycle” is a unique reflection on time and history

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sunrise.I woke up Standing up, groaning and lying on the barren beach with an empty bottle at my feet, the spinning feeling reminds me of the worst hangover in my life; the kind of you asking yourself aloud, “Am I going to die?” Soon I found myself staggering through a dark corridor with a gun, and a familiar voice reassured me loudly Yes, Not only will I die, but they will kill me with great pleasure. At the end of the corridor, I was greeted by the promised world; this world is in constant celebration, but it is also cruelly constructed around my impending death. It didn’t take long for me to go into the wrong alley, where I stumbled arrogantly into a burst of gunfire and a crowd cursing my name cheerfully. Just before I was knocked down by the bullet, I heard a voice echoing in the loudspeaker: “I want to personally welcome you to your forever new first day.

So I played for the 17th hour Endless loop, The highly anticipated stealth shooter game released this week for PS5 and PC. I have lived at least a hundred times on this “first day”, and although I have become much stronger than my first few days of hangover on the shore, I am still vulnerable to minor mistakes and impatience. Back to the beginning.From advertising campaigns and New (exuberant) comment, Endless loop It’s a game about time loops. Its game elements are reminiscent of roguelike. Although it has some extra power, it often forces players to restart their journey.Although the early comments correctly celebrated the death of the game Very pleasant, This is Endless loopDeep thinking about time makes me the most involved. Unlike any other game I’ve played, Endless loop It provides players with an opportunity to rethink the present-not as a moment in a series of linear events, but as a time node, which is not only related to past troubles, but also to the fleeting possibility of salvation and even liberation Related to the future. Endless loop It seems to indicate that even in the most unlikely circumstances, there is always a chance to break completely, break the status quo like never before or feel permanent material conditions before then.

Of course, on the surface Endless loop It’s a game that triggers happiness, you guessed it, a cycle of death! As the protagonist Colt Vahn, you find yourself amnesia and trapped on the gloomy Blackreef island, which is spinning in a seemingly eternal time loop due to a mysterious environment.To complicate matters, you quickly realize that the island is guarded by fanatical but fun-loving eternalists whose mission is to defend the status quo and kill you for your efforts to break the cycle-this is a kind of “betrayal” “You didn’t know anything about it at first. However, the first time you tasted the taste of death, it came from Julianna Blake. She will continue to hunt you throughout the game, and you seem to treat her There are some Serious luggage. For those who are interested in ruining someone else’s day, you can even choose to invade other players’ games as Juliana and force them back to the dark shores of Black Lagoon in a challenging multiplayer mode.

However, playing as Colt, you might come up with a way in the first few hours to make death come a bit slower than the last time. Traveling across this incredibly hostile island, you will be forced to play with the game’s carefully crafted mixture of quiet sneaking and explosive sexual violence; a motivation that rewards as much as punishment and frustration. After several painful cycles on the island, Colt devoted himself to the task of ending the cycle; a job that at first felt completely impossible. In fact, the only way to end the time loop is to kill eight powerful visionaries in one day-important figures on which the time loop mysteriously depends. These goals are scattered across four regions, and players can visit at different times of the day. In order to develop a plan to effectively eliminate all these goals, you must investigate every visionary, identify their weaknesses, and try to make a plan to kill each of them seamlessly before night falls.

After the first few hours, the game pays more and more attention to time management and research. Colt’s room is locked in a bunker under the island, providing a respite from the endless violent avalanches on the ground, and it is also a base for investigating ways to escape from the island in order to obtain the so-called “normal” time. String. To a large extent, Colt has become the historian of today, digging through the debris of the cycle to find clues about how to break it, and why it happened in the first place. By studying the history of the cycle, that is now, Colt came across clues that bothered him: clues that suggested that he himself was involved in what was happening, and cycles that were deeper than people expected.

However Endless loopThe focus on revealing the meaning of circular history and non-linear timelines prompted me to think less about similar video games and more about similar philosophical texts. In particular, I found myself reaching for Walter Benjamin’s 1940 Papers on historical concepts, A short work, also deeply concerned about the possibility of a complete break from seemingly endless tragedies and violent shocks.Written in the eighth year of the author’s exile from Germany, nine months before he committed suicide after learning that he was about to be deported by the Spanish police back to Vichy France, allied with the Nazis, Benjamin’s paper It was conceived at a moment when the author’s death seemed more and more imminent. Although the text criticized the prevailing historical methods at the time, it also paid close attention to Benjamin’s concept of “Messianic Time”. Influenced by the author’s radical Marxist promises and his continued communication with Kabbalah and leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, on Jewish mysticism, Benjamin’s text proposes a view of time in which the past and the present are entangled, and Always being radically open can restore the tragedy of history. Rejecting the “homogeneous empty time” of capitalism, that is, the social relations of commodity production, the calendar day becomes meaningless. Benjamin hopes that he can “explode the historical continuum” and usher in a rare moment that will truly redeem the future.

During my game Endless loopColt’s search for a seemingly impossible exit from the painful cycle of time seems to echo Benjamin’s desire to break away from the deadly control of the African continent by fascism (and capitalism). Just like the “angels of history” mentioned in Benjamin’s ninth paper, he believes that time is not “a series of events” but “a disaster.” Colt’s investigation of Blackreef forces players to rethink the relationship between the two tragedies. Simple distinction. The urgency of the past and present. The only way for Colt to liberate himself from the cycle is to sit with the past and try to “patch together” things that are shattered in the repeated atrocities of the cycle.

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