Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut
Sony PlayStation 3
Developer: Access Games
Publisher: Rising Star Games
Rated: M for Mature
Released: 2013
Completed: 12 June 2015
Before we get started, watch this:
Is that sufficiently stuck in your head? Good. You should whistle it while reading this entire review, because it will give you a good sense of how weird Deadly Premonition is.
Right from the title screen whose music stutters, Deadly Premonition seems like it will be a disaster. As soon as the opening cinematic begins, you'll get a glimpse of its PS2-quality graphics and you'll have premonitions of your own of hideous visuals, terrible audio, sloppy controls, and a lame story. But you'd only be partially correct.
Deadly Premonition currently holds the world record for being the most polarizing video game ever critiqued, which proves two things: 1. Anything can get into the Guinness Book of World Records if the category is obscure enough; and 2. A game should not be judged solely on its technical merits, but on its artistic intent as well.
Originally released on the Xbox 360 in 2010, this enhanced Director's Cut adds slightly improved graphics, a much better camera, and some minor but non-playable plot elements. It's also significantly easier than its frustrating predecessor, allowing the player to focus on the story and not its many broken elements.
Yes, Deadly Premonition is, in many ways, a fundamentally bad game. The graphics are absolutely awful for a game released in 2013, or even 2010 for that matter. Textures are indistinguishable blobs, the scenery flickers so bad with each camera pan that it could trigger seizures, character models are blocky, animate stiffly, and often clip through solid objects in the world, and absolutely nothing is round. Even the lane markers on the road are made of jagged angles instead of natural curves.
The music (see video above) often doesn't suit the tone of the game. That cheerful, catchy whistling tune accompanies discussions about grisly murders in a small town and a tale of a man who raped 800 people. Eight hundred people, just in case you thought that was a typo. Sound effects are almost as brutal as the graphics. Every door in town creaks the same, regardless of what it's made out of. Your footsteps on the rain-soaked streets make an obnoxious noise that resembles neither footsteps nor splashing water. Items appear with an ear-piercing shriek of violins. Only the guns sound halfway decent.
The control isn't entirely awful. One of the additions of the Director's Cut is a fully user-controlled camera, which is also more pulled back from the action than in the original release. You'll occasionally get hung up on minor objects. The cars in this world apparently weren't built to be capable of driving over even the slightest of inclines, however, and come to a dead stop the same as if you'd rammed into a concrete wall. This is especially problematic when the cars are as difficult to keep on the road as these in the first place, thanks to floaty physics. Several control decisions are puzzling as well, such as the addition of useless turn signals and windshield wipers, especially when it requires several button presses just to get to the map while driving. A one-button solution would have been far more intuitive and convenient.
So if Deadly Premonition has so much going against it, why would you be wrong for thinking it's a terrible game? It sure sounds like one, doesn't it? For all its flaws, and there are many I haven't even gotten into yet, the game is elevated by a spectacularly entertaining and engrossing story. It carried me through even the most tedious gameplay segments, dying to know what happens next. There are some pacing issues, especially near the climax, but this is one fantastic story brought to life by some surprisingly capable voice acting.
You play as Special Agent Francis York Morgan, but just call him York. That's what everyone calls him, and you'll know that because he repeats that phrase to everyone he encounters, coupled with shoving his FBI identification in their faces. York has been brought to the town of Greenvale by the news of a murder, and more importantly, evidence that seems to connect it with a series of killings he has been tracking in other locales.
York is one of the FBI's best criminal profilers, thanks to his intuition. Throughout the game, York will openly converse with Zach, his imaginary friend, about everything from the investigation to movies and music they love. Obviously the FBI's screening process has slackened when it comes to the mentally unstable - that is, if you consider a grown man talking to a voice in his head in full view of others unstable. Oh, he's also a serious foodie, and thinks his coffee gives him clues, so just a regular guy, really.
York is just one of the cast of eccentric, unforgettable characters that inhabit Greenvale. There's George, the gruff Sheriff, and his beautiful young deputy Emily. They're about as normal as things get. There's also a middle-aged father who runs a local grocery that is stuck in the "rockin' 80s." There's Thomas, a flamboyant, effeminate deputy, "Roaming" Sigourney, who carries a crockpot with her everywhere she goes and constantly worries about its temperature, and Harry, a mysterious rich old man who wears a gas mask made out of a human skull, and his servant Michael, who speaks in rhymes.
As crazy as all that sounds - and it is, believe me - it all works. The characters are all interesting in their own way, and I wanted to get to know each one as best I could. As York gets deeper into the investigation, and more victims start appearing, he begins to single suspects out. The story does a wonderful job of keeping you engaged, trying to work out who the killer could be. There's the obvious suspects, but they seem too obvious - unless the game is pulling a double-bluff because you'll write them off for that exact reason. Like any good murder mystery, it keeps you guessing right until the end with some clever plot twists. Some of them are fairly obvious, but others I didn't see coming, and I was never disappointed by any of them.
For all the technical foibles and downright outdated graphics and sound, the voice acting is much better than you'd expect. Some of the performances are in line with the mediocrity of the rest of the game's presentation, but York himself is actually superbly acted, and he's a supremely likable character as a result. It truly serves the story to have capable, or at worst passable, voice acting.
The game has a very supernatural vibe to it. Many have likened it to David Lynch's Twin Peaks. From what little I know of the show, it seems an apt comparison, right down to Agent York's penchant for delicious coffee - a clear nod to the show's famously good beverage. It also borrows much from other video games, namely genre classics like Silent Hill and Resident Evil 4, with a decayed, twisted Other World similar to the former, and combat similar to the latter.
As stated earlier, the music is often out of place, making for some unintentional comedy, but there are also some genuinely frightening moments as well. Each murder scene is just gruesome enough, even with the lackluster graphics, that they'll raise the hairs on your neck. The way the ghostly enemies walk bent over backwards is bone-chilling, as are their eerie voices early on. Unfortunately, they repeat the same three or four lines over and over, so by the 200th time you hear them wail, "I see you!" it loses its impact.
I can't say enough good things about the game's plot, even though the final few chapters drag on far longer than was necessary. What holds the game back is just about everything in between.
Deadly Premonition attempts to be an open-world horror game - sort of Grand Theft Auto meets Silent Hill - but comes up short of either game. Many of the game's events occur at scripted times, requiring you to reach a marker within a window that can be anywhere from an hour to half a day. In your free time, you're allowed to explore, but the problem is there just isn't that much to see. For some reason, most of the businesses are closed, even in the middle of the day, unless you have a story-related reason to go there. Early on, it's explained that businesses and even the schools close when it rains - a superstition brought on by the legend of the Raincoat Killer from the 1950s - but even on sunny afternoons the bars were closed. How does a town survive economically if nothing is ever open?
Most of the buildings are just facades anyway. You're only able to enter a small handful of shops. In the meantime, you can drive around and look for human remains scattered on back roads, or collect trading cards floating around town. Or, more likely, you'll drive to where you need to be and stand around for a while until the game lets you proceed.
You see, Deadly Premonition has no wait feature. Though the clock is accelerated, it's not quite three times the speed of real-time, so one minute in the real world equals about two and a half in-game. York can nap if he can find a place to bed down, but the shortest length of time you can do so is three hours, so if you need to be somewhere in two hours you have no choice but to kill time. Several times during the game I simply set my controller on the floor and did other things. Once I even made and ate dinner, which I'm sure York would have appreciated given his enthusiasm for food, until the town's clock chimed to let me know another hour had passed.
Another issue is there seems to be no fast-travel system by default. You can unlock one, but without it you'll need to drive or walk all over. With distances over 4,000 yards, this can sometimes require five to ten real world minutes of excruciatingly tedious driving. You can occasionally chat with Zach about movies, and those chats are usually fun to listen to, but it doesn't make up for the fact that it's a huge time sink.
In another attempt to make the game feel more realistic, York must also eat and sleep at regular intervals. A meter in the pause menu will show his current hunger and exhaustion level, and both can be improved by eating random foods you'll find lying about. See that cherry pie in the rotting Other World version of the art gallery? No worries, go ahead and eat it. Coffee, cigarettes, and other stimulants will improve your alertness as well, and luckily York can carry all of these things around in his jacket - which must be changed periodically, or else it will start to stink and attract flies. You can also choose to shave when you find a sink. Failing to do so will cause visible facial hair to grow, but why are there sinks everywhere and why does York just happen to have his shaving kit with him at all times?
An even weirder question is why does York get a bonus for shaving, drinking coffee, changing clothes, and saving his game? As an FBI agent, you're paid handsomely for your work as well as seemingly most minor tasks, but money is largely irrelevant in the game. Later on you can buy some cool weapons for the local gunshop, but many of these can be found in the world with a little effort, while recovery items are so plentiful I just began ignoring them all after a certain point. It's like the developers had a list of ideas, but didn't have the time to fully implement them, and the result is a nuisance instead of an immersive feature.
The game is also rife with glitches. Clipping is one thing, but it's another thing entirely to see a town resident driving his Firebird around town while he sits on thin air outside of the car. Once, I opened a door in the police station and the room beyond had disappeared. I promptly fell through the negative space and had to reload my last save - of which you only get one, by the way. One save slot that you just have to keep overwriting. That's not a glitch, it's by design, and it's a poor design choice.
Even more rampant than the glitches is the slowdown. In a game that looks this ugly, with such low polygon counts and low-res textures, you'd think at least the framerate would be stable in lieu of graphical fidelity. Nope. The game chugs frequently and severely.
Yet, in spite of all its flaws, Deadly Premonition's phenomenal story kept me hooked. I couldn't put it down until the mystery had been solved, and I don't regret a single second of the time I spent with it. I can't ignore the multitude of problems, but I can overlook them when I'm as entertained as I was while playing this utterly weird, unique game. I wholeheartedly recommend you judge for yourself because, while the verdict is still out on the owls, that's some damn fine coffee in Greenvale.
Deadly Premonition was completed on a PlayStation 3 with no cheats.
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