Instances of the "Groundhog Day" Loop in video games.
- In 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Nenji Ogata is put through this as a form of Virtual-Reality Interrogation, in which he must relive the same afternoon repeatedly until he finds a certain key within the simulation.
- Essentially, this is also the case for the entire 'world' on a much longer scale. The world shown in the game is a learning simulation, with the aim that after eighteen years the subjects of the simulation have grown up sufficient enough to leave and enter the real world. However, prior events outside the simulation cause an apocalypse after sixteen years and force the simulation to reset, leading to a sixteen-year-long loop. To the people who first travel over the gap between one loop and the next, it appears they've travelled sixteen years back in time, though they do later start referring to it as a loop. Towards the end of the game, it becomes apparent that the external equipment generating the simulation is on the verge of failure, making it a race to break out of the loop before it ends for good with the subjects still inside.
- The 7th Guest, after nearly all of the 6 guests that Stauf invited to his house murdered each other in an attempt to capture the seventh, a boy named Tad, and bring him to Stauf, one of them succeeded and thus the boy's soul was doomed to repeat the same night for eternity, along with the others. None of them remembered the loop being in effect, and this gave Stauf the upshot of letting the guests die AGAIN in more twisted and supernatural ways. Tad grew older and forgot who he was, but when the game takes place, he manages to break the cycle and save himself and his past self. This is at least one interpretation of the events that took place.
- This happens to Tasuku and Tsumugi in A3, due to the cursed doll (which looks like a cute blue cat plushie). It causes them constantly to rewind the 12th, the day before the decision whether they accept Reni's challenge or not. Tsumugi first starts noticing something's up when Homare reads him the same poem twice, and when he says that he just read the same darn poem the previous day, Azuma says he doesn't know what he's talking about. Soon it appears that Misumi is caught in the loop as well, but he is aware of it too and pleads them to end the loop by saying how they really feel to eachother (because everytime the loop starts, he loses his triangles he searched for).
- In the past, the doll trapped Reni and Yukio in the loop as well. Unlike the present day, where it was already known how to get out of the loop, Reni had to figure out the solution by himself: try making a different choice each time.
- In keeping with the major role time travel plays in Achron, in the epilogue we learn that the 13000 year time jump that occurred halfway through the campaign is just part of a large time loop, one which has been going on 76013 times by the end of the game, ending each time with Lachesis becoming the Coremind after having killed it in the future. Only Jormun/Echo knows about the loop, but he seems dead-set on keeping Lachesis stuck in it. It's also hinted that the Vecgir are only a product of that loop, and that they would otherwise not exist as a species.
- The Game Boy Advance game Astro Boy: Omega Factor invokes this when, during your first completion of the main story, you fail to prevent The End of the World as We Know It and wind up dead. However, the time-transcending creature known as Phoenix saves you, putting you back to the beginning of the game, and giving you the ability to jump freely through time to the various stages (once you've beaten them a second time, mind). Not everything is exactly the same, however, because the Big Bad is also time-traveling and attempting to sabotage your efforts. Your purpose is to reshape events so that the final doom does not occur. Of course, your foreknowledge leads to a number of amusing incidents when you recognize characters who haven't met you yet, or simply preempt what they're about to say.
- In Bastion, while never clearly stated, there are enough clues in the plot and the narration to indicate that the whole world is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop that leads to an inevitable apocalypse called the Calamity for as long as the Kid chooses to use the Restoration option of the Bastion at the end, which works as a Stable Time Loop, even though Rucks cannot find this out.
- The Binding of Isaac makes the Feburary 2nd daily run the exact same as yesterday's.
- In Bioshock Infinite, the first time Booker DeWitt meets the Lutece twins on the flying city of Columbia, he has already tried to get to Elizabeth Comstock/Anna DeWitt 122 times.
- In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, the first game of the BlazBlue franchise, it's revealed that all of the multiple endings are canon due to a hundred-year time loop, with each "ending" being one iteration of the loop. The cycle is eventually broken in the game's True End, and it is the villains' main goal over the course of the remainder of the series to ensure that the source of the loops, the Master Unit Amaterasu is destroyed to keep the loops from starting again.
- In Bravely Default, there is a variation: the characters don't technically travel through time, but through worlds: each time they awaken the crystals and open the Holy Pillar, they end up at the same point in time as when they started their journey (at the Caldisla inn following Norende's destruction), but in a different world.
- Call of Duty: Zombies:
- Shangri-La has two scientists trapped in a loop.
- Mob of the Dead has four mobsters trying to escape Alcatraz while fighting zombies who, when taking off on their makeshift plane, crash into the Golden Gate bridge, where the only thing awaiting them are four electric chairs with "No One escapes alive" written in blood over them. Sitting in the chairs electrocutes them and brings them back to the same place where the map began, with the number of rounds, weapons and points conserved but with their memories of the previous loop seemingly erased. Justified as they're in Hell and completing the Easter Egg allows either just Weasel or none of them to break the circle.
- Confess My Love: The game keeps on repeating, with Willie trying every single day to win Liza's heart. This is a result of Willie's being dead.
- In the final Wrong End of Corpse Party Blood Covered, Satoshi finds himself about to relive the horror again, and is unable to keep it from starting.
- While not referenced in game, the manual of Dead by Daylight makes note that the Entity traps the survivors into repeating its game of escape again and again, whether they had lived or died in the previous attempt, for seemingly no other reason than its own amusement and collecting their soul piece by piece.
- Deathloop is about "two rival assassins caught in a time loop"; the Aeon Project causes time to rewind in exactly 24 hours, and nobody has perfect Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. The time loop itself is unstable, but eight of the island's inhabitants have turned themselves into living stabilizers. The catch is that they'll all resurrect at the end of the day and have isolated themselves on the ass-ends of the island, meaning you'll never be fast enough to hunt them down one-by-one, so your job is to investigate through the iterations and deduce a way to lure them to their multi-deaths in just 24 hours.
- It happens in Detention in-game. Ray has killed herself out of guilt for having sentenced her loved teacher and multiple classmates to get executed, dooming her to repeat her crime and her death again and again. It is implied though that this circle might have been broken when Wei comes back to school after getting released from prison.
- In Destiny 2: Forsaken, the Dreaming City ends up trapped in one of these due to the Ahamkara Riven. Ahamkara are called "wish-dragons," and after Riven is killed in the "Last Wish" raid, she unleashes her curse as part of the titular wish. Over a three-week period, anyone inside the Dreaming City will repeat the same actions over and over again, but everyone has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. The Guardians are the only ones who can act independently within the loop. The same three missions are performed over the three week loop, and culminates with the Guardians building enough power to enter the "Shattered Throne" dungeon, where they kill a Hive witch, Dûl Incaru, the Eternal Return, whose death triggers the loop's reset.
- According to The Truth to Power lore book (which is confusing and of dubious veracity), it is part of Savathûn's scheme to amass power, what she calls a "murder battery." Her daughter Dûl Incaru uses the loop to look for ways to break into the Awoken's homeworld, the Distributary, where time dilation is in effect and the Hive could amass a great amount of tribute very quickly. Meanwhile, the Guardians battle enemies within the loop to try to find a way to stop it, including killing Dûl Incaru, which also amasses tribute for her. Additionally, Savathûn claims she has "refinanced" her deal with her parasitic worm, feeding it with "imbaru" by deceiving her enemies; thus, every time the Guardians fail to understand how to break the loop, it also feeds her power.
- In Dissidia Final Fantasy, the cycle of war has been going on for a long time now. Every time the war reaches its end, Shinryu, who along with Cid of the Lufaine also watches over the cycles as a spectator, resets everything to the way it use to be, setting the stage for the war to begin again. The game is a bit vague on the specifics of how the loop actually works, but in general that's how it goes. Most of the villains have figured out the loop and are banking on trying to end it with their victory this time around. The heroes have no clue and just fight on hoping that if they beat Chaos the war will end and they can go home. Eventually the loop is broken and the heroes get to return home with the knowledge they broke the cycle. Word of God says that the next cycle will be the last. No, really, there's a conversation between Cid and Cosmos that the cycle ended with the 13th.
- One quest in Dragon Quest VII sends the heroes to a town that is stuck in an infinite time loop. The heroes themselves are not affected, and have to find the source of the curse. This is also a surprisingly effective justification for Broken Bridge — the bridge will be fixed tomorrow, but tomorrow won't happen until you fix this.
- A mission in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion has a bunch of ghosts who failed to defend their castle due to various personal flaws or issues be condemned by Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, to re-live the battle that destroyed the castle, 24/7, until they can get it right and successfully repel the invaders. However, the twist is that they are unable to make the necessary changes, thus they have to "act" their parts, knowing all too well how it'll end, while being aware of the constant loop. The player has to go around the castle and do whatever he can to break the cycle by finding the cause of each character's failure (usually an item the character needs or that should be destroyed). The arrogant mage ran out of mana, so you have to make sure he gets a dagger that will let him replenish it, or a Varla Stone. One knight was too worried about his lover (actually a doll), so you have to either plant the doll on one of the invaders or destroy it to inspire him to fight out of valor or revenge (simply giving him the doll causes him to retreat to put it somewhere safe). The archer ran out of arrows because the quartermaster was a miserly bastard about giving out proper equipment, so you need to steal some arrows from his armory and give them to the archer. You then have to take the place of the Castle's count, who was too cowardly to join the battle himself, so that the last invader can be slain and the cycle can be broken.
- The indie adventure game Elsinore is a retelling of Hamlet which casts the player as Ophelia, who's in a time loop trying to change the events of the play.
- The main story of Ephemeral Fantasia. The hero is initially the only one known to be unaffected, but he gradually frees others (who become playable) from the cycle by changing the way events play out.
- Eternal City, also known as Forever 7 Days Capital, is an Action RPG slash Visual Novel in which after seven days of one part XCOM-style management, one part Action RPG, and one part Visual Novel, there will be an ending, and after that, the cycle will be reset, allowing the player to see or achieve different outcomes.
- In Eternal Poison, all five character storylines are revealed to be canon upon unlocking Duphaston's tale; the order in which the several iterations took place somewhat tangible with a bit of thinking. The time loop is also broken in Duphaston's story with the completed Librum Aurora, the death of Lenarshe, and the revival of Izel. The true ending culminates in a final battle between the five main leads and Izel.
- No time travel is involved, but near the end of the first Exmortis game, this is what happens if you refuse to follow Vlaew's request to "Become the Hand of Exmortis".
- The time loop in Final Fantasy might be this, maybe. Garland certainly seems to anticipate killing the Warriors of Light over, and over, and over again, so maybe it's just a conscious loop for him and the Light Warriors. As best as anyone can figure: The Four Fiends start to destroy the world, causing the Warriors of Light to start adventuring. The Warriors of Light kill Garland as an early part of their adventure. The Four Fiends send the near-death Garland back in time. Garland, back in the Temple Of Chaos (past), becomes Chaos. The Warriors of Light go back in time after defeating the Four Fiends, and die at Chaos's hand. Chaos sends the Four Fiends of the past forward in time to destroy the world. The Four Fiends start to destroy the world, causing the Warriors of Light to start adventuring. Loop repeats. During one of the cycles, the Warriors of Light become strong enough to defeat Chaos, bringing an end to the cycle. If Garland kills them in the present or the Warriors of Light kill Chaos in the past, the loop breaks. Only Garland appears to know this is the case. When the loop is broken, it erases itself, and no one remembers it.
- Flower, Sun and Rain involves one of these... however, the way the day plays out each time is so different that the main character initially doesn't realize it, and writes off the one repeating element as a bad dream. Though it ultimately turns out this isn't what's happening. It's something entirely different that superficially looks like this.
- Garbage Day is an indie open world sandbox game in which an incident at a small town's nuclear power plant causes a time loop. The protagonist has to investigate and find a way to break the loop... or he can just screw with or straight-up murder his neighbors.
- Genshin Impact: In the Archon Quest in Sumeru, A Morn a Thousand Roses Brings, the Traveler and Paimon are caught in a "Groundhog Day" loop which involves the Sabzeruz Festival and they and Nahida try to work out how it started and how to get out of it.
- Ghosts 'n Goblins in 1985 was the first video game (and one of the earliest examples in general) to use this trope as part of its plot. Upon reaching the final boss, if the player does not have the cross weapon, they will be prompted that it is needed to defeat the boss and restart at the beginning of level 5 and must repeat round 5 and 6 again. When the final boss is defeated for the first time, using the cross weapon, the player is informed that the battle was "a trap devised by Satan". The player is then forced to replay the entire game on a higher difficulty level before finally reaching the genuine final battle. This title is regarded as one of the most difficult Arcade Games of all time.
- Idle game Groundhog Life has a time loop of around 42 years, where the game significantly slows down once the limit is reached. The player is offered a chance to restart by replying "groundhog" to a mysterious text. This removes all skills the player had, but regaining those skills becomes easier based on the maximum level. The player will eventually learn what's requiring the loop to be needed.
- The main story of GrimGrimoire is also based on this trope. The same five days are repeated several times throughout the story, but only Lillet Blan seems to notice (and also seems to be the only one powerful enough to stop it). And then you find out that the loop has been going on much longer than you think...
- Hadean Lands uses this as a fundamental element of gameplay. You can restart a loop at any point with 'RESET', or by entering one of the dark doorways that are available around the map. Many puzzles require this — to do X you need information that you can only obtain by doing something that prevents you from doing X (due to finite resources, for example).
- Invoked by the main character of HetaOni; Italy traps the entire mansion of people in a "Groundhog Day" Loop by continuously rewinding time, with the hopes of eventually creating a time loop where everybody survives. Unfortunately, he proves horrifically inept at this, and instead spends the game watching the gristly results of his own inability to change fate.
- In I=MGCM, every time one or more heroines die and in some cases, are corrupted into demon(s) after they're slain by demons, the time resets into the moment before the unwinnable battle and all the heroines are alive and intact. However, it's revealed that Tobio's Mentor Mascot avatar Omnis' ability isn't rewinding the time. Technically it still has time-loop elements. But actually, Omnis uses his special ability to create new realities based on his possibilities he wants and then merges the universes where he previously screwed-up with new ones. All the heroines, both alive and dead, are merged with the copies from universes/realities he recently created, resulting their deaths undone. Unfortunately, the ones who are subsequently corrupted into demon after they died cannot be merged due to certain immunity or conditions. Instead, they're replaced by new copies from universes he recently created.
- In The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, one of the psychological patients you interview experiences several of these.
- Kindergarten and its sequel runs on this mechanic. The game takes place over the course of a single repeating Monday (Tuesday in the sequel) and the player can choose which character's route they want to spend the day following. If you manage to complete the route, the character gives you an item which is necessary to complete certain other characters' routes. After the day is over, everything resets, with the player keeping only the item, any Monstermon cards they've collected, any money they've earned or spent (in the first game), and any outfits they've collected (in the second game). This is just as well, considering by the end of most routes, at least one character will have been horribly killed in some way. However, the Omega Ending of the first game does carry over into the sequel (and some more minor developments that don't happen in that route). Interestingly, the final route of the sequel implies that not even the main character remembers the loops, as after you stab Ms. Applegate, something done in one of the routes of the first game, he'll just remark that it feels like it's not the first time he's done that.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The plot revolves around the fact that the moon will crash into Termina and destroy everything at dawn on the fourth day. Thus, Link uses the Song of Time to repeatedly turn the clock back to dawn of the first day, buying him time to free the guardians who can stop the moon and, in the meantime, solving puzzles by use of the daily schedules of the NPCs. Strangely, once you actually beat the game, everything you've done seems to have happened (everyone's problems are permanently fixed) despite it usually not being the case — there's not enough time to do everything in the game in a single pass, at least two sidequests are mutually exclusive to each other (i.e. completing one makes finishing the other impossible until you reset), and there are no duplicate Links running around, so one would assume events from the last cycle would be the only ones to persist. Possibly the Goddess of Time stitches all the best events together.
- Little Misfortune: Near the end of the game, when Misfortune refuses to go along with the narrator's game to find her Eternal Happiness, he performs one of these and replays the beginning of the game. But Misfortune realizes what he's doing and interrupts his narration, making him angry by going off-script. There's also implication that the entire game was a Groundhog Day Loop to begin with, meaning that Misfortune was in a Loop that was inside of its own Loop, reliving the day that she was said to die on.
- In Lord of Heroes, Emperor Kartis turns out to be a "Returner" who has lived the same lifetime over and over again in an attempt to prevent a devastating future calamity. Following their defeat at Kartis' hands, the Monarch of Avillon enters into their own loop and returns to the day the game's events began in order to re-do the whole conflict in hopes of defeating Kartis and finding a way to stop the calamity where he has failed. However, they are warned that they can only loop a limited number of times. At the end of the Monarch's second loop, they learn that Kartis has been looping indefinitely because of the interference of an outside force, which has doomed him to be trapped forever in a cycle of events he can't meaningfully change.
- Lunarosse: At one point late in the game, Channing wakes up to find himself back at his house the day he was hired into the guild, caused by Corlia sticking him in a Lotus-Eater Machine and thinking he'd be happier if he never had his adventure. Going to bed causes the day to repeat. By finding the people in the town who shouldn't be there, Channing eventually learns what happened and is able to break out.
- Charon's game, Makoto Mobius, involves Watarou being stuck in one to save Makoto. Any time he fails, he gets sent back to the night of Makoto's death. It's implied that when Watarou escapes the loop by killing himself, the roles will be reversed where Makoto has to save Watarou by doing the exact same thing.
- Marathon: Infinity has the potential for getting stuck in a loop. The game is non-linear: Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, Time Travel, and monsters are involved, and thanks to their influence, the protagonist finds himself frequently being shipped off to different points in the story (and, sometimes, different realities) based on how he completes any given level. Cycles are one possible outcome: you can find yourself running through the same series of levels over and over again, trying to figure out what you have to do differently to get out. Note that this is only the most reasonable and most commonly accepted theory out of the many, many possible interpretations of just what the hell is going on in that game.
- In no-one has to die., the structure of the game is a variation of this trope, where the player iterates through copies of the same timeline, doing things differently on each one to get different endings. The final iteration is a Merged Reality containing the survivors of all the previous iterations that had a survivor, which only collectively know enough info to make this iteration go well enough that it will be the last. Even then, one of the survivors of the final iteration, where no one has to die, is still discontent with the outcome of the story, and goes into the time machine that links all the iterations of the multiple universes in hopes of fixing an event earlier in the timeline than the game directly included.
- In Omensight, the player is a being called The Harbinger, a being fabled to appear on the day the world will end. In fact, while the Harbinger is summoned because of the end of the world, they are on a mission to prevent it. Not having enough time to work out anything that is going on or even why the world was ending the first time around, their ally — The Witch — sets up a time loop. This allows the Harbinger to repeatedly go back to the start the day, making different choices and allying with different characters on either side of a war each time to slowly unlock the mystery of how the world ends, who caused the apocalypse and how to stop it.
- Outer Wilds:
- You spend the game stuck in a 22-minute time loop, which ends when your sun goes supernova, though if you die beforehand you reset the loop early. Thanks to some alien Phlebotinum, both you and your ship's computer retain all knowledge of each loop. You can fast-forward a few minutes by resting at a campfire, and you can eventually learn how to meditate and peacefully skip to the start of the next loop. In order to start the endgame sequence, you have to find the device causing this and retreive its power core. After that, dying means Game Over.
- It's eventually revealed that this was in fact being exploited by the alien Nomai. They wanted to find a specific location in space, but randomly firing probes to discover it would take an impractical amount of time. So they figured out how to send information 22 minutes back in time, and set up a system that would let them go through millions of iterations of firing a probe on a given trajectory, sending the results back in time to right before the firing, and then firing the probe on a new heading until they found their objective. You getting caught up in all this is what allows you to remember what you experience from previous loops.
- The ghosts in Oxenfree have been stuck in one for decades and claim to have seen the universe itself be destroyed and reformed many times over. This has given them control over space and time, at least on the island. In the end, the human protagonists are implied to get stuck in it as well, with Alex's narration of the events of the year following the party suddenly switching to wonder at what will happen at the party. This is made more noticeable with the New Game Plus.
- In Paper Mario: Color Splash, Dark Bloo Inn has been caught in a time loop of only a little over 3 hours, with only Mario and Huey being aware of it. The cause of the time loop is the ghosts of six Toads who died in the hotel, who will break the loop once Mario reunites them.
- Implied at the end of Penumbra: Requiem if Philip chooses to leave the incinerator room through the door. He ends up back on the boat, and if you look closely, it's the version shown from the out-of-body experience he had when the infection started. The ringing in his ears and the fade to white is most likely the start of an infinite loop of his entire adventure, with no chance of death. Or it could be simply Philip waking up.Red: Would you return to the world from which you came? Drown in the chitter-chatter? For Red's answer is no. Better to have a story and end it, than never to realize it has begun.
- This forms the premise of The Answer, the epilogue scenario of Updated Re-release Persona 3: FES. The main characters find themselves trapped inside their dorm house in a one-day time loop, endlessly reliving March the 31st. This is caused by (and representative of) the cast's inability to move on after the death of the Main Character of The Journey, who sacrificed himself to prevent The End of the World as We Know It.
- In Randal's Monday, the title character is cursed to repeat the same Monday until he fixes the events which resulted in his best friend's suicide. Thanks to Randal stealing Matt's ring, the same Monday repeats over and over... sort of. Inverted Trope, as Randal's actions cause the next Monday to adapt to what he did. The loop simply rewrites details and memories to make it seem like this was always the way things were to everyone else besides Randal and the Business Bum.
- Rematch
, a TADS text adventure, is based around this idea — the aim of the game is to find the one single command that will prevent you from being killed and break the time loop. Just be warned, it's a multipart command and some of it is randomized, so you will have to die many times before you can win. There are many IF games like this, in fact: Moebius and All Things Devours are two more. In some cases, they go on about "top secret devices" so the fact that you're facing a time loop puzzle is not immediately obvious. - In Returnal, the astronaut Selene has crashed on an alien world and is doomed to loop back to the crash after each and every death. The idea is quickly subverted, however. It doesn't take long for Selene and the player to encounter evidence that her actions leave lasting changes on Atropos. Then there is the fact that she will occasionally run into a corpse of one of her previous selves, still lying where she fell, though showing obvious signs of decay and exposure to the elements. Turns that whatever is happening on Atropos is not truly a "Groundhog Day" Loop. Selene might die and get resurrected over and over, but time on Atropos keeps on moving along independent of whatever is happening to her.
- RuneScape: The quest "The Needle Skips" sees a woman called Megan, with the help of a strange being named Gail, continuously travel back in time to experience the same 30 days before her terminally ill daughter's condition starts to worsen. On one of the loops, the daughter, Primrose, learns of the time travelling and secretly joins in resulting in her condition worsening again from Megan's perspective. After a few more loops, Primrose grows so weak that she faints. Believing her dead and Gail responsible, Megan stabs Gail who subsequently freezes time so that someone (the player) will learn what had happened and break the loop.
- In Secret Files 3, Nina dreams about following an Arab merchant to his buyer's home in Florence so she can find out what's in the amphora he's selling, but keeps losing his trail, resulting in time being repeatedly rewound so she can perform the necessary actions to track him one screen further.
- The basis for the The Sexy Brutale. The murderous events of a mask ball on a Saturday loop over and over again. Each day starting from noon, the staff murders the guests, who have no idea they are in danger, and time resets exactly on midnight. Lafcadio Boone is one of the few people aware of what is happening, and free to move through the mansion to a degree. He also gains the power to control time, although he is limited to resetting the day completely or jumping to certain points. He needs to save the guests one by one to find out just what is causing the loop and stop it. Lafcadio can't intervene directly with the murders, however, because none of the staff or guests can see him, and he can't interact with the guests until he saves them. Even then, time resets immediately afterwards and the loop continues without change to the events.
- Shadow of Destiny. The whole premise is that the main character is trying to change history so that he doesn't die; being killed results in living through the events prior to his death again until he gets it right and survives. Amusingly, in one part of the game it's possible to go through the same conversation for a third time, which results in the main character pre-empting what he knows the NPC he's talking with is about to say.
- The Silent Hill franchise:
- In Silent Hill: Downpour, one of the bad endings has this happen to Murphy.
- While the P.T. for Silent Hills likely wouldn't have had this in the full version, the teaser made excellent use of it by having the player loop through the same section of hallway repeatedly, with changes each time.
- Singularity has fun with this; the plot uses Stable Time Loop as a Red Herring very successfully, because one of those is going on too, it's just not as important, but the "Groundhog Day" Loop is the larger issue. It's implied to have been going on for quite a while, because you find messages scribbled on walls, written by some person (probably yourself) who has apparently been stuck in the loop for many cycles, each time trying to escape it. It seems that you do escape the loop in the end, but only by killing your past self before you can muck up the timeline in the first place, and not even that changes the timeline back.
- It's implied that Siren 1 takes place in one of these, and the gameplay also bears this out — you can only fully complete a stage in at least two playthroughs, and a sequence of stages from the start to one of the endpoints is referred to as a "loop" by the game. In the true ending, the loop is seemingly broken and events resolved. In the remake Siren Blood Curse, it is more direct, with one character literally rewinding time. Only that character knows about it, but all other characters have deja vu's and in general realize that something is wrong. The game ends with one character ending up in a time loop hell where he will forever fight while another character sends a letter into the past to start the time loop again since he wasn't satisfied with how it ended, dooming everyone to forever be stuck.
- A twist on the common Interactive Fiction time loop puzzle is seen in Slouching Towards Bedlam. There is an in-game explanation for why your character has the unique ability to save, reset, and go through the day over and over. The game won't end until you stop playing it or take drastic action.
- The Spectrum Retreat has this on two different levels:
- Cooper and the manager both imply that prior to the former's phone call, every day at the Penrose was exactly the same for you, from the way you wake up and your interactions with the staff to the dish you eat for breakfast.
- The entire game is one, as the manager reveals Alex has reached the roof several times in the past, and each time he chose to return and wipe his memories. You can choose to continue the loop or break it.
- One of the central features of The Stanley Parable; the game has over twenty endings, each of which ultimately resets Stanley back to the beginning of the game, with subtle differences each time depending on what the player has done previously. Of course, in the end, though Stanley can superficially make different choices each time, he's ultimately part of a story where every path has been mapped out for him and has the same conclusion — the point of the parable being that You Can't Fight Fate.
- START AGAIN START AGAIN START AGAIN: a prologue: Siffrin the Traveler finds himself stuck in one for no immediately discernable reason, and strives to keep his companions unaware of his plight. How successful he is at this naturally depends upon the player's actions.
- In Stars And Time, the finalized version of the aforementioned prototype, has Siffrin and his friends on a mission to stop The King from freezing the nation of Vaugarde in time. Siffrin soon discovers he's stuck repeating the day of and before the final assault on the King via a Resurrection/Death Loop, and views it as a blessing that allows him to surpass impossible odds to defeat the King. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple; the story focuses on Siffrin's declining mental health over potentially hundreds of these loops while keeping his party in the dark, alongside the circumstances of its creation in the first place. It turns out that, at the very beginning of the game, Siffrin unknowingly wished to be able to remain with his friends even after their journey was over, and due to the Clap Your Hands If You Believe nature of Wish Craft in the setting, it came true via the time loop. He's able to break free by admitting to the party that he views them as family and wants to stick together, as they all felt the same way and struggled to admit it themselves. Once everything is out in the open, there's nothing stopping them from continuing to travel together, so wish granted!
- In Suikoden Tierkreis, the Order of the One True Way can not only predict the future, but promises eternal universal happiness in the One True Way. What is this One True Way? Each individual's favorite day repeated eternally.
- Sunless Skies: Perdurance is stuck in one as a reward to the people within it: the sons, daughters, and servants of courtiers Her Enduring Majesty is particularly fond of. Every day is the same, single perfect day, ending with the Half-Light Masque, and at the end it is spun anew and restarted exactly the same way with no one aging a single day, despite remembering everything. Most insist they're perfectly happy in there, but new visitors are brought in every now and then to keep it from getting stale and it's still a tedium for some of the folks inside, who think of it as a heavily reinforced Gilded Cage. And the only way out is for the courtier in question to fall out of favor.
- Most of the Super Robot Wars UX plot stems from being trapped in a time loop (based on the Demonbane and Linebarrels of Iron storylines). When the heroes successfully end the loop, they inadvertently trigger the apocalypse, which was what the time loop protected them against.
- The (Japan only) video game, Suzumiya Haruhi no Heiretsu, explores the Endless Eight arc in a similar way to the anime adaptation.
- The Talos Principle: Of a sort. If you collect all the main sigils, then Elohim offers you enlightenment by passing through a set of doors in World C. Doing this puts you right back to square one, where you have to complete all the puzzles again. In the sense of the story, the concept is that this program is effectively a giant genetic algorithm, continuing to take those versions of intelligence instances that have solved the puzzles but did not doubt Elohim by climbing the tower, and return them back to the start hoping they will be improved on subsequent iterations, all eventually to find one iteration that has the intelligence but also the self-awareness to survive in the real world to extend life on Earth. To the player, this would seem like repeating the same events over and over, but with awareness of what they did last time. The most important part to note about this particular ending is the words "Independence check........FAILED!", indicating that obedience to Elohim is not the sort of intelligence expected of the programs.
- An even shorter one than usual form the premise of Twelve Minutes. The protagonist has ten to twelve minutes to interact with his apartment, wife, and their eventual assailant before the evening completely resets outside his Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory.
- The nature of Save Scumming and its similarities to a "Groundhog Day" Loop is an extensive theme in Undertale:
- The game is about a human child trapped in a world of monsters. As a human, they possess a power the monsters do not — Determination. Through sheer force of will, they are able to make "save points", which let them repeat things again and again until it goes the way they want. This makes them one of the most powerful beings in the entire game, since they can effectively use that Determination to ensure the happiest ending for all characters... or, murder them all, using their limitless lives to bypass all obstacles.
- One of the main villains of the game, Flowey, also used to have the power of Determination. At first, they used their powers to try and make all the characters happy, but soon became bored, and began pushing the time-streams to worse and worse extremes, until they literally ran out of anything new to do. Their entire plan is to harvest the power of every single soul in the underground so they can break through the Barrier and get to play in the human world, which has far more possibilities.
- In general, no one besides the player character and Flowey possesses memories of alternate time-lines. However, they do maintain impressions; for example, in subsequent play-throughs, characters will remark about things seeming "familiar". Sans is unable to remember alternate time-lines, but he DOES know that they exist. The understanding that everything he does can, and has, been instantly wiped out and changed has made him lazy and apathetic. The only thing that *really* kicks him into high gear is if the player goes for a Genocide run, attempting to kill every single character — an ending which permanently ends the loop, and taints all alternate time-lines.
- Warthogs, an adventure game where a Harry Potter expy has to roll back time repeatedly in order to pass his magic exams.
- The indie horror game the white chamber uses this as the plot, although it is not explained to the player until the very end. It turns out that the main character is something of a bitch and went around slaughtering all of the other crew on the ship, one by one. She is forced to walk the horror- and abomination-filled wreckage of the ship until she shows enough remorse and compassion to warrant her "redemption". If you do not get enough good points, the game ends with her starting over, again and again and again and again...
- A beneficial timeloop makes the finale of Wolcen possible. At the beginning of Act 4, the player is thrown into a Hopeless Boss Fight, but is pulled back in time a few weeks prior to the battle. They are then able to use the time before this battle to improve their character and fortify the town to try and succeed next time, with the timeloop continuing until they win. This is invoked further in the post-game content, where time resets again even if they win so the final encounter can be endlessly re-played, but given that the main game has a definitive conclusion following the victory, it can be assumed that the player character can leave the loop at any time after this.
- World of Warcraft has one of these for the last boss of End Time. As Deathwing destroys the world in the second Cataclysm, Nozdormu turns back time again and again trying to find a timeline where Azeroth remains intact. Nozdormu eventually goes insane and declares the "End Time", which is bleak and lifeless but intact, the best possible outcome, then tries to thwart the players' efforts to retrieve the Dragon Soul from the Well of Eternity to make a better one.
- Another timeloop is explored in the Deaths of Chromie scenario, in which you need to interfere with eight separate attempts on the life of a time-manipulating dragon within the span of 15 minutes. The aspect of using past knowledge of previous loops manifests in two ways — through permanently unlocking the ability to skip to the end of some of the encounters, and through the player learning of locations to obtain items that open further shortcuts or provide additional time to complete the challenge.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The game takes place in a world where time doesn’t flow properly. When people die, they are reborn and repurposed in a way that makes them doomed to re-live the exact same lives over and over again. For example, Joran is always destined to make friends, slow them down in battle, and then eventually die at a young age. Before they became Moebius, N and M were always destined to meet and fall in love, join Lost Numbers, and then die shortly afterwards. The main goal of the heroes is to break people free from the curse so that they can live their lives how they want.
- Though not an exact example, in Episode III of Xenosaga, Wilhelm's plan is revealed to involve preventing the impending collapse of the universe by enacting Eternal Recurrence, which would reset everything in the Lower Domain all the way back to the beginning of time, then repeating the process over and over. It's implied that not everything plays out in exactly the same way each time, since the post-game Database updates say that Wilhelm has successfully enacted Eternal Recurrence before, whereas in the game proper, Shion and co. reject his plan and stop him, electing to find a better way.
