Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut (PC)

Developer:

Access Games

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Release Date:

2013  (original 2010)

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Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

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Good news! Super Adventures has finally returned to give you a new game post every week for the next two months. Unless you're reading this two months after it was posted, in which case I'm sorry but you just missed it. Go read Sci-Fi Adventures for a bit instead.

This week I'm playing Deadly Premonition, which is a game I bought for money just so I could write about it for you! Then I forgot all about it and left it sitting there in my Steam library unplayed for four years, but that just means it's even more retro now. It's also fairly notorious and I've heard a lot about it. Well, I've seen it mentioned a lot anyway; I've tried to avoid exposure to any actual info on the story or how it plays.

Though I did read on Wikipedia that it currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most critically polarising survival horror game, which is a really specific world record. Plus it also spoils that the game's a survival horror! I'd gotten the impression it was some kind of adventure game, a bit like Shenmue maybe. I checked Metacritic and the review scores do go all the way from 20 to 100, so now I'm curious what I'm going to think of it. I don't typically enjoy survival horror much, partly because I don't give a damn about horror or survival mechanics, but if survival horror fans dislike the game then maybe it's more my kind of thing? I am the world's biggest and only Resident Evil 5 fan after all.

I already like the rainy title screen, despite the annoyingly short guitar loop. I'm less keen on crashes though, so I've installed the DPFix patch by game fixing legend Durante in the hopes that it solves more problems than it causes. It does at least give me some graphics options to play with, but I've decided not to push the visuals too far above vanilla.

The game is pretty story driven and features a mystery, so I should warn you there'll be SPOILERS below as I go through the first few hours of the gameplay writing text under screenshots. Though I won't give away anything major, because explaining a detective's deductions in my own words seems like effort.

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Hey it's one of those bloody games that has an intro before the game menu! Not that it matters much in this case as the game's locked to 720p whatever you do unless you use the DPFix patch, which is clearly ridiculous. I mean I'm going to run it at 720p anyway, because I'm playing it on my retro monitor and I feel like it, but even in 2013 that wasn't great.

The intro begins with a pair of creepy twins with near identical haircuts and clothes going for a walk in the woods with their chuckling grandpa. They stop to play with a ladybird, he chuckles, they run off ahead, he chuckles.

Though he's less amused when they come across a dead woman crucified on a tree with her guts ripped open, especially as she seems to be someone he knows.

The intro's pulling double duty as the opening credits sequence, so the camera keeps panning across the body as the music plays, pulling right up to her topless torso at one point to watch a snake slithering up between her bare breasts. But it's okay as her hair's covering her nipples, so the twins are safe from any traumatic nudity.

By the time the song's finished the police have arrived to stand in front of the tree and stare at the body professionally, so the kids are able to go back to playing with a ladybird. But it soon flies off into the sky, taking the camera with it to give me an aerial view of the town nearby. Though the intro's not quite over yet, as first I have to sit through a minute long montage of various characters crying, accompanied by melancholy saxophone.

Okay okay, I get the point! It's not going to be a fun adventure filled with whimsy and goofy comedy!

Alright, now the intro's over I can finally change my graphics settings... and here they all are! I've got five options and one of them's ghosted out.

I wonder what 'Cruel Production' is. Oh, when I selected it a description popped up telling me that it changes the blood colour. Seems a bit late after all the shots of a women with her abdomen sliced open in the intro, but hey I'm not going to complain about options. Though why didn't they just call it 'Blood colour'? And why is it an on/off toggle? If I choose 'off' does the blood turn grey?

I'm playing the Director's Cut version (because it's all you can get on PC), so I've got an extra option screen here that lets me change the look of some of the characters and my car. The protagonist's different suits give him different bonuses, so I'll leave them alone for now. Emily's costumes on the other hand seem to be purely cosmetic, but I feel like if she wanted to dress up in a cat girl outfit she wouldn't need me to choose it for her, so I'm going to leave this at default as well. Plus it's just too obvious to show screenshots of her in the cat ears! Whoever she is.

One feature the game doesn't have is multiple save slots or profiles. If you want to start again from the beginning you've got to erase your current progress.  

I started a new game and the second intro began, featuring a little girl humming Amazing Grace as she goes to see a guy in a rocking chair with a really forced 'old man' voice. He's got a scary story for her, but an important one, presumably about women being brutally murdered and hung up on trees. Though before he starts he wants her to turn the TV on with the volume down... as always.

This framing story is another thing added for the Director's Cut as I guess the director (Hidetaka Suehiro, aka Swery65) figured he hadn't front-loaded the game with enough weirdness.

The man's story begins in a dream dimension, with red leaves/petals/feathers falling upwards, saxophone playing, and the twins from intro #1 dressed up as angels and whispering to each other. Maybe it'll make more sense as the game goes on. Right now I'm more interested in those gauges in the top left. Seems I have a heart meter and a heartbeat meter and I'm called York.

I've reached gameplay, though right now all I can do is walk around and either examine or interact with objects marked by the red and blue fizz. Thankfully York can walk around just fine as the movement controls aren't as clunky and dated as I expected. The original version apparently had traditional survival horror tank controls, but they fixed that for the Director's Cut. Though I'm going to check if I can get back to that options screen as I need to invert the camera's vertical axis before I go crazy.

Whoa, that doesn't look right, and I don't mean the fact it's like one of those menu screens from the 90s that went out of fashion when everyone got sick of trying to figure out what all the objects were supposed to represent. I mean it's way too dark, and I think it must be a bug as it looked fine for half a second when it first came on. Might be a bug in the game, might be something to do with DPFix. That twitching deer head ain't right either but I'm fairly sure that's working as intended.

Fortunately you cycle through the different parts of the menu using those icons at the bottom right so it's not as confusing as it looks. And I was able to invert my camera just fine, so that's good. Less good are the food and tiredness meters on that TV, but I'll have to see how much of a pain in my ass they become later.

I finished interacting with stuff, got a Francis York Morgan trading card (hey that's me!) and was told by the angels that "It will start soon." Then it switched to a cutscene of York in a car, in the rain, sharing his theory about Tom and Jerry's masochistic interdependency on a phone. Turns out that he's an FBI agent and he's currently driving to the country town from the intro to investigate the murder.

Well, some stuff happened and now York needs to walk the rest of the way. Fortunately he's not alone, as he's got his imaginary partner Zach with him... who is apparently who I'm really playing as? They've got a bit of interdependency going on as well, as it seems like Zach guides York's actions outside of cutscenes but York does all of the talking, even when there's no one else around to talk to. He likes to share what he's thinking.

The game told me to turn the flashlight on, so I pressed the button, and York began emitting a beam of light from nowhere. But that wasn't as weird as the giant spinning medal I found behind the car. Apparently picking it up got me some extra cash! So that's handy.

I also found a rusty pipe with 'Reach: Long, Speed: Medium, Strength: Medium, Durability: Low'. Oh no, not durability! I hate durability!

With these graphics you might be wondering if it was a PSP port, but no it was designed for the Xbox 360 from the start... mostly. Technically the game started development in 2009, but it reuses assets created for its previous incarnation Rainy Woods, which began back in the PlayStation 2 era.

Right now it's reminding me of a GameCube game, specifically Resident Evil 4. I really do feel like I've been here before, chasing some other weird local into a shed only for them to vanish by the time I get there. I found a trail of blood earlier leading to a dead dog so I don't expect the people I find around here in the woods to be friendly. Fortunately I have my steel pipe to protect me!

Resident Evil 4 (GameCube)

It's definitely prettier than a GameCube game, you can tell just by looking at the self-shadowing on York's shiny normal-mapped coat compared to Leon's coat in the screenshot above, but it's doing a good job of hiding it.

Inside the building I found a [Can of Pickles] and a generator, so I pocketed the pickles and turned on the power. The camera went outside for a bit to show me the door it opened, which was very considerate of it.

Then the woman appeared again. She's either some creepy horror movie monster or a cosplayer, and the way she's leaning over backwards to attack me makes me think it's the former.

Still, it would've been nice if York had shouted "Hey, are you a cosplayer?" before going straight into the pistol tutorial.

Seems that I have to hold left bumper to draw the weapon, press right trigger to lock on and then fire with the right bumper, which is a little awkward. Why not just use the controller's trigger as the pistol trigger? Resident Evil 4 is a bit weird about this as well to be fair, as in that you have to hold left trigger then press A to shoot.

The actual combat though is basically the same though, as once I have a pistol drawn York is rooted to the spot, and the camera pulls in to look over his shoulder and show what the laser sight is pointed at. Though in this I also have a crosshair that appears when I'm pointed at an enemy which closes in when I'm on target for a headshot, which is really helpful.

I took her down with a couple of shots, then put a few more bullets into the other two hanging around outside and got a free first aid kit from their dissolving bodies! Though I missed a few shots because they were swaying and I wasn't patient, so I think I'm running low on ammo now. There is an infinity sign on the gun but it's down where the durability meter usually is so I'm not optimistic.

Okay, this is weird.

When I met the zombie women a photograph labelled "Mysterious shadow" appeared on screen and then flew off into one of the three key icons down the bottom left of the screen. Now it seems that York's using it to do "profiling", which basically means a lot of fuzzy images flash up on screen to confuse me. Though I recognise that guy in that hat from the intro! He was one of the people who turned up at the crime scene.

Once that's over York puts his fingers to the side of his head like he's listening to an earpiece and asks Zach if he has a logical explanation for what just happened. Well I'm glad he's finally noticed that there's something weird going on in this game, though it doesn't seem like he'll be getting any good answers from Zach any time soon.

I continued through that door I opened by turning the power on, and found a phone and a lollipop! The lollipop fills up the hunger meter a little, so that's handy, but the phone's even better as it lets me save the game. It's a shame his mobile phone lost its signal really or else I could've saved any time I felt like.

Not much of a mystery where to go next, as the path is pretty straightforward.

The path branched so I took a left and found a second generator and another giant spinning medal. Some games try to make their items fit in with the world so that you're not continually reminded you're playing a video game, but Deadly Premonition don't give a damn.

That other generator in the shed only worked for a while before switching off, so I walked forward, smacked the guy with my trusty steel pipe and then used this generator to turn the power back on. I suppose I'm supposed to go to that cabin over there next, the one in front of me you can't see because of the fog. York won't climb over the fence to get to it though so I'll have to go around the long way.

I found a third generator in another shed! These people are just power mad. Well, expect for the person this axe belongs to, who's apparently just mad about the power. Seeing this triggered another one of York's profiling interludes which told me very little.

You'd think York would grab that nice sturdy axe to replace his beat up old pipe, but nope he took the fuse box instead. The description in the inventory says "Looks like nothing is broken. Since it's the same model, I think I can fix it." which makes no damn sense to me, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now.

Outside the third generator's shed there's another electrically locked door and to its left there's a locked up cabin. Hey that's the cabin I saw through the fog when I was over by generator #2.

Maybe there are tools in there I need to fix the generator, or maybe there are treasures in there for players who find a secret key, I don't know. All I know is that I've reached a dead end and I'm stuck.

I'm the green arrow by the two locked doors, that path that branches off at the bottom is where I found the second generator, and the phone icon on the right is where I found the phone and the lollipop. I guess I could use generator #2 to unlock the door by the phone again and then backtrack to the burning wreck of my car to see if I missed anything.

Well that didn't help much, though it's given me time to think of an even better idea. I could turn on generator #2 again and then sprint to the exit before the power switches back off! I mean that must be why I can see the cabin from there, right?

Damn, turns out that even at my fastest I'm always a second too slow to reach the door before the power turns off and the lock reactivates. Oh, hang on, the description on the locked cabin says I can just smack the lock off with a pipe. Duh. And inside the cabin is a generator which needs a new fuse box, so that was simple enough.

A little further on I ran into this guy while I was running past enemies. An 'evade' prompt flashed up on screen, which I missed because I wasn't expecting it, so now York has to roll out of the way of the axe instead. But the game's not registering my half-hearted L stick waggling and I'm not going to risk damaging my brand new Xbox One controller for Deadly Premonition! Though maybe I could switch to mouse and keyboard, and wreck one of them instead...

Actually it's not an issue yet as the game let me continue from the last door I unlocked (instead of the last save point), and second time around I hit the evade button fast enough to skip all the waggling and escape. Bloody QTEs, man.

And that's it, I'm out of the weird forest. The door sealed up behind me with weird magic glowing red vines, which turned out to be the last photograph clue I needed to finish the profiling. York seems almost as confused about all this as I am still, but he did expect to find trouble here. His coffee warned him about it.

Now that I'm out of the evil forest the sky has returned to a healthy colour and my clock's finally working. Would've been nice if my car was still working as well, but it seems I've got to walk the 515 yards to my objective on foot. Still, at least it's not being vague about where I should be going.

515 YARDS LATER

Hey I've met characters! I was a bit confused when the game started off all survival horror because I was expecting it to be more of an adventure, but I've ran into the cops from the intro and now they're having a conversation! I don't get to have any input into what gets said but it's nice to be back in civilisation. Not that York is all that impressed by them, secretly confiding in Zach that he expected the people living here would be primitive cavemen, but it seems like they're closer to the Middle Ages, with the sheriff acting like he's the king.

York's a bit of a dick sometimes really, though I like the way he only makes a half-hearted effort to hide the fact that he's talking to his imaginary sidekick right in front of them. In fact he asks Zach not to mention anything about the survival horror adventure he just did in case they think he's a psycho

Here's some trivia for you: Agent York is played by the guy who voiced the creepy cheeky carp in the classic Dreamcast game Seaman. Seems that Deadly Premonition was the last game the actor worked on though. Here's another fact: the game's been running at a steady 60 fps for the most part, but during cutscenes it drops to around 24. I guess they wanted it to look cinematic.

Hey I've finished the prologue... though if only I'd been 9 seconds faster. I got $200 payment for the prologue, plus $620 salary, which brings my funds up to $970. Not bad for an hour's work.

I could've probably finished it a lot quicker actually if I hadn't gotten stuck at that locked door in the forest. Plus I also wasted time jogging the wrong way up the road to see what'd happen (the game just told me to go back and do my investigation).

After all that time stuck in a forest I was eager to actually get to visit the town, but first I got a brief cutscene reminding me of what happened in the prologue, followed by another visit to the little girl and her grandpa to listen to them talk about his broken TV for a while. Then after that I found myself back in the red dimension from the start, but with the twins missing this time. So I helped myself to an unattended doughnut and left through a smoky door.

This brought me to a short tutorial teaching me how I can hold my breath to sneak past monsters, at the cost of my stamina gauge quickly filling up. Though I had to take my hand off the button to take this screenshot so he got detected and then brutally murdered. But it's just a dream so it's fine.

Oh by the way I've switched to playing with the mouse and keyboard. Not because I wanted to, the bloody game just stopped recognising my controller! I tried a few things to fix it, like changing the compatibility mode, but that just broke the game entirely. When I finally got it working again I decided not to push my luck and put the controller away. It seems to control fine with the keys though.

After completing the tutorial York woke up in a hotel room, wondering where he's seen the kid before. It's a bit of a creepy dream to keep having, but any dream you can walk away from with a doughnut is a good one I reckon.

Here I have access to a suitcase to change my suit and a toolbox to take items out of my stash and put them into my inventory. The weird thing about the suits in this is that they get dirty over time and then I have to send them to get dry cleaned for a few hours to avoid attracting swarms of flies. Fortunately I've been trapped in a dimension without time so my regular suit's still fine.

I am tempted to go out wearing this suit instead, but then I'd have to look at it. So no.

Hey the game's got an actual working mirror! My understanding is that mirrors are always going to be awkward to do until ray tracing becomes the standard, so it's nice to see that they went to the effort to put it in. Plus there's another mirror in the bathroom that I can have a shave at to earn some bonus money. Though this isn't a David Cage game so he won't take a shower.

Anyway none of this is what that next objective marker wants me to do, so I should leave my hotel room and figure out where it's at.

42 YARDS LATER

This is what York's after: ridiculously overpriced milky coffee. Though it's way more expensive without milk for whatever reason, so I guess it's the best deal I'll find.

[Coffee (Milk)] makes it harder to become sleepy for a short while and recovers a little tiredness, apparently. It's my hunger meter that needs filling right now though. Fortunately the hotel owner has cooked a meal for me.

Just what I was after: another cutscene stopping me from going out and exploring the game world! The game's pretty slow paced so far and the characters sure love to stop chat for a while. Though I do like the giant medal over there on the right next to the piano, spinning away during the whole scene.

I didn't know much about Deadly Premonition going in, but I got the impression that it was going to be funny. Either because of a terrible script and bad voice acting (like the first Resident Evil) or because it was genuinely a comedy. I think this table just removed all doubt, that and the Super Mario World music that's playing (here, have a Youtube link, listen for yourself). Though the way the hotel owner keeps mishearing and thinking I'm asking for the salt or pepper is a joke straight from caveman times.

Alright I'm finally free to do whatever I want! Though I found a police car outside the hotel with the keys on the bonnet so I figured I should probably drive down to the police station first. It's 10:05 now, I've apparently got to be there by 5pm, and I have no idea how fast time moves in this. Though I've become very aware that this car doesn't move very fast at all, especially if I'm behind a truck.

Oh crap, I got so caught up in York's monologue about DVD bonus features that I missed my turn! This is not a good thing, as the car takes forever to turn around, plus I'm burning through my fuel fast. You know what's good about GTA, Saints Row, The Saboteur, Sleeping Dogs, Mercenaries, Watch_Dogs and every other decent open world game? You don't need to worry about running out of petrol!

Mizzurna Falls (PSX)

This is all reminding me of a PlayStation game called Mizzurna Falls that I know nothing about, except for the fact that it's a Twin Peaks-inspired mystery set in an open world town, where the people have their own routines, the cars need petrol and you've got seven days to solve the mystery or you lose. In fact from the 10 minutes I played the game it seems you have to really race around like a lunatic to get to who you need to talk to in time.

I'm not sure how harsh Deadly Premonition is going to be, but I've got Mizzurna Falls in the back of my mind telling me it'd be best not to screw around too much until I have a better idea of what this game is.

Turns out this is the kind of game where you have to search every room in the police station for a set of squirrel-themed keys, then work out which one will get you to the files you need. It's also the kind of game with a sidequest to find the sheriff's beloved [Arnold], which turned out to be a dumbbell.

Plus I found a turkey sandwich trading card, which is cool. Gotta collect them all.

Anyway I had a chat to people and now we're all going to drive off down to the hospital for the autopsy on the murder victim. York actually convinced George and Emily here to let him be the one to drive, because he doesn't know where he's going in this town and it'll help him learn his way around. I guess you just can't say no to a guy with a stylish FBI raincoat that magically appears when it's raining.

The hospital closes at 9pm and it's still just 10:30am so I've got ages to get there, so I could go driving around, maybe grab some trading cards and do some shopping, but I'd feel bad about dragging Sheriff George and Emily around with me the whole time so I'll get this trip to the hospital over with first.

By the way, the in game map is terrible as it rotates to match the way I'm facing and this is as far as it'll zoom out. The game world is ten times wider than this! I have to scroll it down to my destination and remember all the turns I'll need to make along the way.

20 IN GAME MINUTES OF DRIVING AND A MONOLOGUE ABOUT TREMORS SEQUELS LATER

Well I reached the hospital and found the doctor's office, but he's not there and he's left me a chess puzzle to solve if I want to find him.

Okay, if the King passes the Rook and meets the Bishop that puts them both after the Rook, and it's a similar situation on the other side of the board, so the answer to the riddle must be Rook, King, Bishop, Pawn, Knight and Queen.

Nope, I lost. Man, I have to admit that the only joy I'm getting from this is from the thought of the doctor getting fired after this. Hang out, is the position of the pieces on the board the key? Do I have to work out how each of them would move?

Damn, that's still not right. Okay I'm going to go out and look for clues, and when that fails I'm going to check GameFAQs because I'm utterly lost here. Unless... this isn't a puzzle at all, it's just a test to see if I know what each chess piece is called!

ONE AUTOPSY LATER

Well the autopsy cutscene went pretty well (aside from the inappropriate spy music playing over it), as we learned a lot about happened to Anna, enough for York to officially take over the investigation himself. But when he stepped out of the room to light a cigarette he found himself back in the nightmare world full of red vines blocking the hallways and zombies trying to kill him. Plus he keeps catching glimpses of Anna running around in a red dress, looking very much alive.

Though at least the phones and vending machines still work. Plus there's a suitcase here so I can get my suit dry cleaned and then get some rest on one of the beds to sort out my tiredness meter.

Yep, those are definitely posters from a distorted nightmare realm.

I'm having a lot more luck fighting the zombies now that I've learned that I actually do have infinite pistol ammo, so there's no need for me to run into danger swinging a pipe. Plus I've noticed that enemies make a shattered glass sound when they've been defeated, so I know when to start putting bullets into another target and leave them to (eventually) fall down on their own.

The zombies like to walk out of dark patches on the walls, slowly shuffle around for a while and then dart or teleport closer to me, but I can usually get them while they're still at a distance. In fact I had no trouble clearing out the corridors, collecting the card keys and getting back to the hospital entrance. 

I figured I might do some exploring, but George and Ellie told me I had just six and a half hours to go speak to the witnesses and examine the area the body was found, so here I am chatting to twins and shooting clues out of trees instead. I also found infinite tins of pickles, which should come in handy next time I'm hungry.

Funny thing is, it seems like only about two hours have passed in game since I first left the hotel. I'm used to games with day/night cycles having really quick days, like Shenmue gives you an hour to get everything done each day, the PlayStation 2 GTA games cycle through 24 hours in just 24 minutes, and in Stardew Valley the day's over in quarter of an hour. Deadly Premonition, on the other hand, has time running three times as fast, so each day lasts 8 hours in the real world. Which means I probably could've taken my time and visited some shops before coming here.

Though George and Ellie are back in the car and the clues have given us another potential crime scene to investigate, so I should really get that done before I go exploring.

45 MINUTES OF SHOOTING ZOMBIES IN THE NIGHTMARE WORLD LATER

Okay I don't think I like this guy with the axe. The game's gone a bit picture-in-picture to show his point of view as he hunts me down and tries to find my hiding space. All I can do is watch him do his thing and hold my breath when he gets close. Well I suppose I could go out, but that likely wouldn't end well. Though I've just saved so it's not a huge problem even if he does catch me.

ONE CHASE SCENE LATER

Man I hate this guy now. I just had to do a QTE-driven escape scene, running down corridors by tapping left and right over and over, and now I've got a whole QTE routine to go through. QTEs are bad enough on a controller, but when it's saying stuff like 'press F', 'press shift', 'press left mouse button', that's a little much for my brain to process in the split second it's giving me to react.

Though I was stubborn enough to get through it in the end, which means I've finally ticked off the last thing on my list of stuff to get done today! Unfortunately it also jumped the clock forward to 9pm, so I guess I'll be doing my shopping tomorrow morning then. Also the game just crashed.

I started it back up and now there's a mouse pointer stuck in the middle of the screen that I can't get rid of. C'mon game, quit trying to piss me off while I'm trying to give you a fair chance!

After restarting to free myself of the rogue cursor I decided to do the smart thing and drive back to the hotel for a good night's sleep. But I went to bed a little early, so when I got up it was 4 am, the skies were red, and zombies had started crawling up out of the tarmac. Can't say I saw that coming, but I think it'll be fine as long as I don't run over too many while I'm exploring and cause my car to blow up.

I'm safe for the time being as I found a racing activity, which has set my car's fuel and durability to infinite for the duration. Shame it hasn't done anything about the speed. Plus it'd be nice if I could turn around a little faster, seeing as it keeps putting the next checkpoint down a road I already passed.

I failed miserably in the end, but that's fine as I'm sure I'll do better once I find the car shop and buy something faster. In fact it'd be nice to find any shop that's open.

I've managed to spot a few trading cards along the way with the help of the minimap at least and HOLY SHIT THAT'S A BIG DOG! What is even up with this town?

Well I can't run him over, so I guess I'll just... drive somewhere else then. I should really be looking for another payphone so I can save the game, and all cards I've found while exploring. Oh hang on, never mind, it's just crashed again.

SEVERAL ATTEMPTS LATER

Good news! I managed to keep the game running long enough so I that could accidentally drive into too many zombies and blow my car up. This respawned me back at the hospital at a sensible time in the morning, saving me from having to find somewhere to sleep for a few hours.

Now I can go hunting for cards in safety, plus all the shops are finally open! Well this shop's open at least, I haven't had any luck with any of the others. If they've got their opening times written anywhere I couldn't see them.

Damn, my eyes just made my way down to the price of this map. I could get 148 cups of coffee for that. Or save the game 2000 times. But hey I'm rich and I can't find anywhere else that's open so I might as well.

The map led me to another combat stage taking place in a number of identical circular foggy rooms, with increasingly tough opponents and presumably some treasure at the end of it.

After a few rooms I decided to have some fun and got out my steel bar for the first time in forever to get some one-hit kills. But the thing broke so quickly I was left unarmed in the middle of a group of zombies with shotguns and they took me down in seconds. I think there's a lesson to be learned there.

I'm kind of reluctant to turn the game off now that it's behaving itself and not crashing every ten minutes, but I think I will. It feels like the right time.


CONCLUSION

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I've never seen Twin Peaks, but I have played Thimbleweed Park and Alan Wake, and now after playing Deadly Premonition I kind of feel like I could construct a mental image of the series from the parts they have in common. But I'd rather think of other games I can compare Deadly Premonition to.

It's got a bit of the Grand Theft Auto games in there, with the way you spend ages driving around and listening to conversations on the way to the next mission, a bit of Shenmue in the way you're living a guy's life for a short time, a bit of Metal Gear Solid in its long conversations, plus a fair amount of Silent Hill and Resident Evil 4 obviously. You can find traces of many classic ancestors in its DNA (and a little bit of The Sniper 2's low budget wonkiness too), but one way Deadly Premonition surpasses all of them, is in how it continually finds new ways to break. The menu screen was way too dark, my controller stopped working, when I tried to fix that the game wouldn't start up anymore, when I gave up and used mouse and keyboard it put the cursor in the middle of the screen. Then it started crashing every few minutes. Of course any of these problems could've been caused by Durante's DPFix I installed to prevent the crashes, but from what I've read online I'm not the only one who's been having trouble with it.

The game's also ahead of its time in its use of retro visuals. Right now in 2019 we're getting new indie games designed to look like early PlayStation titles, but Deadly Premonition was mimicking GameCube graphics way back in 2010! I had no problem with the way it looks to be honest because at this point the game's comfortably retro itself and I wouldn't say it's unpleasant to look at, even with the muted colours. I could've done with more music though, as I kept noticing the same tunes turning up again and again, half of them fitting the mood well, the other half... well one of them really does sound like it's from Super Mario World.

Sadly the gameplay is as basic and dull as its graphics, with repetitive combat and long drives between locations. Not that I didn't find the fun in it, though I would've enjoyed it more if the mouse control was slicker; I struggled a bit more than I should've done to get the crosshair where I wanted it to be. But I didn't struggle to make progress and it's been much more generous with resources than a typical survival horror, so I found I was happy enough to stick with it to earn the next piece of the story. Well, the freedom to go explore and do some shopping was what I was really after, but I always ended up with a chunk of story and I rarely regretted it. The cutscenes are really the best part of the game.

I've heard some people describe Deadly Premonition as being so bad it's good and I see where they're coming from, but it's far from being The Room or Sharknado. It's a deliberately funny game with interesting characters, a lot of mysteries in its weirdness and a lot of weirdness in its mysteries. 'Offbeat', that's the word I'd use for it. Granted pretty much everyone I've met so far has turned out to be eccentric in some way, but they generally weren't obnoxious about it, and the unstoppable crime fighting team of Detective York and his possibly imaginary partner Zach won me over from the start. York's a loveable asshole with a heart of gold, half the IMDb in his brain, and a real enthusiasm for his job. He's a little too unflappable for the horror elements to really work (though he doesn't seem to like that guy in the raincoat much), but if the main character wants to go on a monologue about the many sequels to the movie Tremors instead of dwelling on the nightmares he's facing then I'm down for that. Plus he may or may not be psychic and/or insane and he clearly knows more than he's letting on. To be honest I found the mystery of what was going on with him to be more interesting than the murder mystery.

Which is why I'm a little sad that I won't be playing it any further. I do want to, but the game don't bloody work! Not for me anyway. I burned through the last of my patience and enthusiasm trying and utterly failing to figure out how to buy a new car and a gun in between the crashes, but I wouldn't be against trying it again on the PS3. I'm not going to miss those QTEs though. Or that bloody map. Or the way the spinning model of the item you just picked up always hangs around on screen for far too long. The gameplay interrupting animations take too long in general.

I could carry on listing the issues I had with the game, but I'd rather end this by recommending it. If you're into classic survival horror games for the goofy characters and the memorable moments, this could be what you're after. If you can get it to run.

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Thanks for reading! Or just scrolling through the screenshots, whatever you did to get down here is fine as long as you got something out of it along the way.

If you want to share your thoughts about Deadly Premonition or have a guess at what the next game will be then that comment box down there's what you're looking for.