henke on 25/9/2011 at 17:36
Well, that's it. At just a few minutes short of 20 hours I have beaten this wonderful mess of a videogame and now I'm going to share my thoughts on it. Much of the following text I wrote during the past two weeks while I was playing it, so it might seem a bit schizo and disjointed, but that's only fitting for game that's as all over the place as this one.
Are you in the market for a Japanese survival horror game modelled on the storyline from Twin Peaks, with the gameplay of a poorly coded Resident Evil 4 clone and the graphics of a 2002 Playstation 2 title? Then Deadly Premonition is the game for you!
You play as Francis York Morgan. FBI Agent and major cinephile. Solving unsolvable murder-mysteries is his specialty, though he might occasionally get sidetracked and prattle on about "Xanadu" for minutes on end.
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http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/701/deadlypremonitionxbox36.jpgThat's the game's main villain: The Raincoat Killer. Looks like an overgrown Jawa, I know.[/CENTER]
This game clearly was made on a budget, yet instead of narrowing down the scope of the game to make everything look and play decently, the designers went the other way and tried to do as much as possible with as little resources as possible. For instance there is only one “door opening”-animation in the game, and it looks like this: York opens the door slightly and peers through to the other side, a bit nervously, before opening the door fully and walking through. An animation like this looks perfectly reasonable if you’re in one of the game’s haunted mansions or catacombs, but when York is, for instance, walking into the local diner with the same apprehensive animation it looks a bit out of place. There's also a shortage of music in the game, so it's not uncommon to hear one tune start over multiple times during the same cutscene.
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There's a clear quantity over quality design philosophy going on in much of the game. For instance the vehicles handle like shit but they
do have functional windshield-wipers and turn-signals, plus you’ll need to keep an eye on the fuel-gauge and make a swing by the local gas-station if you’re running low. If there's someone else in the car you can talk to them by pressing the A button. If York is by himself in the car pressing the A button will make him talk loudly about 80's sci-fi B-movies to himself(which reminds me I totally should check out "Deadly Spawn" from 1983, it sounded pretty good the way York described it). To be fair though, York doesn't really talk to himself, he talks to "Zach", his invisible friend who is always with him. In other words,
you, the player. York will talk to and ask advice from you all the way through the game, much to the confusion of other characters. Just like the cars in the game, York himself is equally high-maintenance. You’ll need to sleep to lower your sleepiness-bar, eat to lower your hunger-bar, use healthkits to restore health and not run too far lest you depleat your stamina-bar. If you don’t shave regularly you’ll grow a beard and if you wear the same clothes for too long they’ll stink and flies will start swarming around you. Luckily it seems the NPCs are too polite to point out that you smell like shit.
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The story, and the characters, are the game's great redeeming factor. The murder-mystery will have you guessing till the end. I thought I had the real killer figured out before the halfway-point, and my suspicions seemed to be getting more and more validated only the be pulled out from under my feet in the last act. And the ending, OH MY GOD the ending. There are so many questions being posed throughout the game that you think there's no way it'll explain all of it by the end. But it does! The end arrives and there are actually -
SHOCK! HORROR! - ANSWERS! Not some vague Lost or Alan Wake cop-out bullshit. It's like the designers actually thought the whole story through before they started building the mystery. I know this sounds like it should be obvious but it really isn't. Deadly Premonition does a better job at making sense of the mystery that preceedes it than anything I've played or seen lately. And a lot of the answers leave you smacking your forehead when they arrive wondering how you didn't see it sooner.
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You might've picked up by now that Deadly Premonition is a quite unique game. Though the story and setting borrows heavily from Twin Peaks this is about a million miles from Alan Wake. The action-portion of the gameplay is quite RE4-ish though there's so much more to this game than just the action. The crime-scene investigation and evidence-gathering parts reminded me of LA Noire, though oviously this game came out before that one. The crazy over-ambitious scope of the game is perhaps most closely mirrored in Shenmue 2. Though I had much more fun with this game than I ever did with that one.
There is so much stuff going on in this game I can't even mention all of it in this post. Like, there is a day/night cycle of course, but the devs even went beyond that and programmed daily routines for the 30-odd characters that make up the main cast of the story. They wake up in the morning, go about their affairs, go to work, go to a bar, go home. Try it, follow Nick when he goes to work at the diner every day and then to the bar in the evening. Or Kaysen who takes Isaac and Isayah for a walk in the park every day. Does the game really need this? Not really, but holyshit if the developers for this game happened to have an idea, by God
they followed it through to the end! I don't know how this game happened. I would LOVE to see a behind the scenes documentary. I can tell you what it feels like though. It feels like someone had an incredibly ambitious vision and a very limited budget, and instead of scaling the project down to something managable they slammed their fist in the table and declared "NO, dammit! I will MAKE MY GAME just the way I've imagined it!" A lot of love went into this game. And it's not perfect. It was always gonna be a cult-game. But it deserves to be played by more people.
This was a budget-priced game when it came out last year and it's even cheaper now so if you have a 360 go ahead and pick it up. Yeah sure RE4 was just re-released in a HD edition or whatever but you've already played that one. Get this delightful slice of wierdness instead, you won't regret it!
Holyshit I've written a lot about this. This might be the longest post I've made in my 10 years here. But a subject well worthy writing about. Searching TTLG I notice that only one or two of you have played this game. I guess it's possible that some of you have played it and just not mentioned it but that seems unlikely. A game like this you just can't stay silent about.
tl;dr? Just watch this: (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZSxoUsaCc)
Images uploaded with (
http://imageshack.us) ImageShack.us
Sulphur on 25/9/2011 at 17:51
Y'know, anything Twin Peaks is an insta-try for me. I'd dearly love to get my hands on the PS3 version, but of course that was only released in good ol' Nippon. I read the original EG review which made it sound super-interesting, and your write-up confirms there's some really special stuff going on in it.
It's a shame I don't own a 360, but... I barely use my PS3 any more these days either. But I'm probably going to make an exception for when that really tasty Ico/SotC collection comes out next week, which will distract me a goodly bit.
But, well. Sigh. One day, I shall play this game.
TTK12G3 on 25/9/2011 at 18:21
I played this game for a few hours before getting side-tracked. I am going to play it again, but it is so weird. I can almost swear that whoever made this game appears to have, at some point, seen human beings interact. They then proceeded to make a game based on that experience. The scary part is that your explanation about who Zach is makes perfect sense.
gunsmoke on 25/9/2011 at 19:38
I am so going to look for this. Thanks for the recommendation.
Aerothorn on 26/9/2011 at 00:16
This has been on my radar for a bit, and your description makes it sound as good as I could hope. Admittedly "distinctive and brilliant games with flawed mechanics" have been taking up a lot of my gaming time recently, and after crawling my way through Yakuza I may need a break. But it's on the wishlist.
catbarf on 26/9/2011 at 03:12
Is this that one where your character gives running verbal commentary as to your combat skills? 'Perfect', 'great shot', etc?
henke on 26/9/2011 at 07:34
That he does. It sounds like it might get grating fast but I didn't really notice it. The game contains a lot of elements which
should get grating but somehow doesn't. However, the worst offender might well be the (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xiv1VNL-ozw) "squealing saxophone" track that kicks in every time something vaguely mysterious happens in a cutscene. Which is to say: you'll be hearing it a lot.
242 on 26/9/2011 at 23:34
And PS3 got only Japanese version of this game :mad: :mad:
It seems the game is very close to what I thought Alan Wake was going to be. The closest game to Twin Peaks ambience I've ever seen.
EvaUnit02 on 27/9/2011 at 07:02
It's cool that someone actually put out a PAL release. I remember watching Noah Antwiler's Let's Play of this some time last year and being frustrated that all releases at the time were region-locked.
Judith on 27/9/2011 at 07:35
I love this game for its strange vibe, where all poorly implemented gameplay and dialogues can be seen as SH/TP parody, and the result is pretty hilarious (if you will get used to the controls, that is). The story on the other hand is pretty dark and will surprise you a few times, although I found the final parts disappointing and too obvious. Anyway, it's a weird kind of a flawed gem that is terrible and awesome at the same time. If you manage to live with the drawbacks, you'll love this game.