April Fools’ Day is always ripe with companies poking fun at themselves, and the marketing campaign for Deathloop, Bethesda’s upcoming release, has joined in on the fun. A Twitter post shared on April 1 by the game’s official account teases a branded cereal, appropriately called Deathloops.
While it’s almost certain that this cereal will never hit shelves, it’s a light-hearted advertising ploy that fits in with the game’s bright and playful style. Slogans adorning the post, like ‘Break the Loop!’ and ‘Break the Fast!’ riff off both Deathloop’s time-hopping gameplay and the conventions of breakfast cereal marketing, making this as authentic a campaign as it gets. Those who saw this without checking the date may even have fallen into the trap – after all, it’s no less eccentric than Bethesda’s use of Vault-Boy cartoons in marketing for 2015’s Fallout 4.
Developed by Arkane Lyon, Deathloop is a cereal-free first-person shooter in the vein of its previous work on the Dishonored franchise, also a collaboration with Bethesda. The game follows Colt, an assassin who finds himself stranded, out of his own time, in Blackmore. His mission is simple: He’s forced to kill eight targets in twenty-four hours, with failure to do so resulting in the loop starting again. Think Groundhog Day, but with a lot more violence.
While the Deathloops cereal may not be real, expectations for the game certainly areDirector Dinga Bakaba labeling the PS5’s SSD a ‘blessing,’ allowing for ray-tracing, 4K graphics, and 60 frames-per-second output upon the game’s release. This comes after concerns around its future on PlayStation, with its publisher Bethesda recently merging with Microsoft. But if Bakaba’s claims are anything to go by, it seems Deathloop will be unmissable – even if we can’t get our hands on a bowl of their branded cereal.
