What’s with all the time loops?

What’s with all the Time Loops?

What’s with all the time loops? Whether it’s Deathloop, 12 Minutes, The Forgotten City, Lemnis Gate or Hades the genre of entertainment revolving around loops or time loops is all the rage lately. This ‘recursive genre’ lends itself to the video game format because the point of contemporary video games is to endlessly repeat a sequence until you have completed it, no matter how many times you fail or ‘die’. This is one of the apparent appeals vaunted by the rather unpleasant and gatekeepy fan community of Dark Souls insisting that this repeated loop of ‘try, die, try again’ is the pathway to “git gud” as if they were the first people to understand that practice makes perfect. But it is interesting then that films like Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, Tenet and even Doctor Strange have adopted this framework too over the years but less as a mechanical necessity but more as a way of exploring its psychological effects on the characters. What the genre almost always prompts at some point in the narrative is a descent into nihilism due to the character’s belief that their actions are meaningless resulting in either gross excess like over consumption of alcohol and drugs or a lack of respect for life itself resulting in either repeated suicide attempts or outright murder which is where a lot of these time loop…