Differing accounts of how storytelling techniques create intensely 'immersive' experiences such as horror and identification-as well as how these experiences are valued-become legible across this set of critical contexts. The significant differences in what it means to 'look' at this figure can be analyzed in terms of wider storytelling techniques that stratify remediation between film and games. In comparing critical responses and developer commentary across these texts, we read the very different affective, aesthetic and socio-political readings of the titular alien character in each case. In this article we discuss videogame adaptations of the Alien series of films, in particular Alien: Colonial Marines (2013) and Alien: Isolation (2014). This paper therefore intends to offer a close analyse of their inclusion in Outer Wilds and Deathloop and determine what impact narrativizing repetition has on how videogame time loop’s function. Acknowledging them within the gameworld essentially narrativizes elements like repetition and failure that are frequently part of play but outside of a game’s storyworld. Every game with a save/load feature already contains time loops.

145) argues, “through character deaths, saved files, checkpoints, action replays, Let’s Play videos, walkthroughs, skippable cutscenes, lag, fluctuating framerates and countless other phenomena, time travel is a banal feature of videogame play”. I argue that time loops narrativize something that is already implicit across most videogames – repetition. While far from a new phenomenon in videogames, nor other media (David Bordwell 2002 Jan Simons 2008), recent years have seen the release of various titles like Outer Wilds, Deathloop, Twelve Minutes (Luis António 2021), The Sexy Brutale (Cavalier Game Studios 2017), Loop Hero (Four Quarters 2021), Returnal (Housemarque 2021) and more that place time loops as central to their experiences. This paper will offer a close analysis of time loops as a narrative device in two recent videogames, Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital 2019) and Deathloop (Arkane Studios 2021).

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