Deadly Premonition is a strange game, both intentionally and unintentionally. To be blunt, it's not very good. The combat sections are boring and dragged out, combat itself feels like down syndrome RE4, the story is ridiculous, the animations are janky, the audio mixing is abysmal, the map design is painful, and the mission structure is not much better. But worst of all is the performance. In the current year it is near unplayable. The PC port is beyond broken, leaving you emulating either the PS3 or Switch versions, both which each have their own major issues. There simply is to good way to play it. And that hurts. Because despite everything said up until now, Deadly Premonition is a great game that I wholeheartedly recommend to a high degree. If you can’t intuit it from the title, it's a detective/mystery game so in that nature nearly anything about anything is libel to lessen the first experience. If you haven't played it yourself I strongly advise stopping to play it yourself, even with all the technical issues, because it's very good. So heronout assume spoilers.
Gameplay
The gameplay is split three; combat sections, story sections, and an open world. There's some overlap between the story gameplay and the open world gameplay, but very little combat and anything else.
That makes combat the easiest to talk about. Combat is not very good. Shooting and enemies design feels like a bootleg RE4, with little variety in approach to encounters regardless of the enemy or scenario. This is owing to the enemies being more or less all the same, but also in the environmental design being just corridors. There are a large amount of weapons, however nothing other than the starting pistol ever felt needed because you can just sit at the other end of the corridor and just pop heads. This lack of difficulty and repetition leads to the combat sections being a complete drag to actually play through. Occasionally the combat is interspersed with quick time event events, which I have talked about enough with other games. My opinion holds.
The open world is equally good as it is annoying. The biggest issue is that the actual map design is just too big. By like a factor of three. It takes ages to get anywhere, and the interspersing areas are often deliberately vacant for that small rural town feeling. This means that you have to drive to get anywhere and the driving is not great. You have to obey speed limits (slow) while the car has the worst turning radius I’ve ever seen. If you take a street, you could probably fit two cars nose to tail down the width of a single lane. The map design is fine, great even, but if you scaled all of it down to mirror the width of an actual street with regards to car size everything would have been so much nicer. Even the interior cells just feel way bigger than they should be to mimic reality and should be to facilitate gameplay. A large amount of the actual gameplay is just driving from location to location which exacerbates the issue. Another interesting thing about the open world is just how much care went into weird parts of it. NPCs all have a legitimate schedule that fits into the story narrative, there's tons of fun little side events and things to play around in. In isolation it's very fun to just bum around in, but it's also hard to do because of the aforementioned size, but also the story not giving you time to breathe. I can't go get flowers for Algernon, there's a murderer on the loose!
The actual non combat story sections are just a combination of being forced to drive to a location, and then poke around it and talk to people. The driving suffers from all the aforementioned issues, but it also does highlight why everything is so big. All throughout the trip everyones constantly talking and there just wouldn't be enough time if distances were not painfully long. The constant chats are why when it comes to the story section for the most part I don't mind the size. Alone York runs out of movie chats pretty quickly. This is normally followed by a combat section, into a detective section. The detective sections are insulting. They just highlight the evidence in bright red like its quad damage or something. At that point why bother, why not just give it to me. I wish it played more into the actual detective part of the game. Poking around crime scenes and figuring out who to interview is one of the best parts about detective games and Deadly Premonition just completely throws it out the window, barely even trying. In a similar way York makes every connection rather than you, who is just along for the ride, meaning a large amount can just be described as riding shotgun cutscene to cutscene. This is fine, it's a detective STORY not a DETECTIVE story and there's nothing wrong with it wanting to be that. It's not where my preferences lie, but it would be unfair to go too hard on it because of that. Occasionally there are puzzles. Calling them puzzles is a bit unfair, it's more like ‘put the square peg in the square hole’. The most insulting case was when you're given a riddle, and 5 seconds outside of the cutscene York just tells you the answer. It's not even a hard riddle, I had it figured out within seconds yet it still even robbed me of the satisfaction of that. Not only are they insultingly easy they are also mostly irrelevant and seemingly only exist to waste time and pad out the game.
Story
Deadly Premonitions story is strange, both intentionally and unintentionally. This will include massive spoilers, so please heed my warning. Please play this game, reading ahead will ruin your experience. There's three mysteries within this story, the murders, the trees, and Zach. All three tie into each other but not always in the best of each way. Two of the tree are also easy to intuit nearly immediately if you're familiar with the genre, but as much as i want to complain about that, it is unfair as again detective STORY, it's about the journey(MO) not the destination(perp), and most people probably didn't spend their entire childhood reading Agatha Christie and playing weird Japanese PC98/DOS detective games. There are also underlying stories of love and trauma.
But prior to that, detectives plus the supernatural is kind of like ‘le being a magical girl is actually suffering’ in that it's probably been done more times than it hasn't. Barely a subversion. When combining the two elements, it has to be done carefully, because if it's not it can feel as if it's just a deus ex machina for the script writer. For the most part Deadly Premonition handles this well. For the most part rules are established early and upfront, and they are kept to. This is the most important thing. For the most part that is, it trips right at the finishing line but we’ll talk about that when we get to it. With supernatural and surrealism, it always has the portrayal of the contrast of reality with illusions. What is real? The best types to do this trope play into that, and prove a story that works but at the levels or real and surreal. Deadly Premonition is so close to achieving this. Take the seeds and the gas for example. They are an allegory for drugs. The seeds are methamphetamine, while the gas is bath salts. The properties of each mimic both. Have you seen a guy on meth get shot? They just shrug it off. This allows a real surreal. An actual underlying reality, a story about the effects of drugs on a small town, and the horrors of the unethical drug government experiments of the 1900s. All with a secondary story of overcoming trauma. And it balances all this incredibly well, all the way up until the final hour where it just trips and undoes all of this.
Starting with the primary mystery, the murders. This is the strongest of the three stories. It's the strongest case of blue herring I’ve ever seen, but regardless going through it discovering the motives, how, and why is all genuinely interesting and well thought out. Even paying close attention things are also foreshadowed very nicely and it never feels like the characters got swapped out with an evil version right when they get exposed (this happens a lot). A cute example is Becky pointing to them. There are moments where it does become painfully stupid. Not in the ‘why would you do that’ way others fall into, but more so the ‘Tom and Jerry shit’ kind of way. A little flare in murder is great but it can go too far, take the murder of Diane for example. I get why what happened happened, but it could've been handled a little less slapstick.
The trees. This is where the trip happens. Both kinds of trip. The whole Kayson thing feels more like it was done solely as a requirement for achieving the specific ends of a few certain plot points they wanted to achieve, like fulfilling the game's primary message of ‘At times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing someone that you love.’ and fulfilling the Zach arc with little care of how it acts in order to get to the place to fulfill it. Circling back to the supernatural discussion, Kaysons whole thing completely removes any reading of anything other than the literal not because of the boss fights, not even because of the trees, but solely for the reveal that he was part of the initial gassing. This implied that he is objectively supernatural owing to his lack of ageing like he's Judge Holden or something. Actually he does mirror the Judge a lot because they both seem to represent the Mephistophelian spirit of wanton destruction and violence, except the Judge has a philosophy behind him whereas Kayson doesn't. Or to bring it all back to the detective stuff, he doesn't have a valid MO. And that's the core of why it feels so bad. It's about the journey not the destination, the journey of figuring out the MO. You already know he's going to be involved like this from the get go, it's foreshadowed heavily, but at no point between the introduction until the reveal is the actual reason behind anything ever hinted at. I feel as it all should have been left with just the seeds stuff, leaving the trees as the final revel for the initial murderers, and integrate the ending for the primary characters into that instead, especially as a lot of the factors which play into the final hour are introduced within that hour after the primary mystery has been solved with the exception of a few allusions which aren't even that major or can’t also be attributed to the main murders storyline regardless.
Zach in isolation when ignoring the vehicle of that final plot point is amazing. The setup and the payoff is executed perfectly. The way York talking to Zach is introduced is so cavalier it jolts you into recognizing it, however the way it's written does an excellent job at essentially gaslighting you into assuming the relationship is one of man vs reader, where Zach is just the name positioned to the external force of the player to more so justify the actions of the player to York, and assumes pre-existing relationship for the role as character building. This is not the case and it makes the final reveal all so more impactful. The way its lampshaded also helps with this as it grounds it in the real world, allowing that final payoff to pay off, yet the way it's just tossed aside nearly every time it's brought up is so abrasive that it wraps around and makes it almost unnoticeable.
Emily and her relationship with York is underbaked. It just doesn't feel like it's expanded out enough to justify the changes in behavior or to justify the whole payoff. Where it goes and what it does with it isn’t bad, if anything the opposite, it's just that not enough time was actually used to set it up. There are cute little touches to indicate this relationship changes such as how Emily starts to emulate York's chest tapping, and it just makes me wish there were more.
There's also other general stuff via dialogue that contributes in such cute ways. For example, the lunch scenes can be genuinely funny and relaxing, all while being involved heavily with the characterizations and relationship changes throughout the story. Or the reveal that Micheal was behind the rhymes. Regardless of the intent of the scene, the mise en scene of display in each individual story environment is genuinely beautiful in a way that not only heightens scenes, but adds so much more to them. The sequel-bait right at the end is a bit distasteful however.
Audio
One of the biggest surprises was how recognizable the music was. I have never gone out of my way to listen to Deadly Premonitions soundtrack before this, yet nearly every single thing on it was familiar to me. That means people like to use it as BGMs in other stuff, and it's understandable why. Deadly Premonitions soundtrack is amazing. The acoustic guitars fit perfectly into the countryside theme. And while keeping spot on to environmental themes, it keeps it perfect with the emotional tones for each track. You try to find a more peaceful and comfy song that also exemplifies the wonder of life than that whistle song, you cannot.
Its integration into the gameplay is also super nice. Previously I have talked about how MGS does it subtly to amazing results. Deadly Premonition is almost entirely the opposite. The music is barely subtle, but its utilized that to heighten scenes in the exact same way MGS’ subtlety does. Take the less serious scenes with Polly, when ‘Life Is Beautiful’ hits it just becomes infinitely more comfy than if it weren't so overt in its presentation. Or for the opposite mood, chapter 20 when you're running through the streets after the ghost of Anna and the main theme just swells up through everything. It's this mix of beauty, haunting, chaotic, and relaxing that's just perfect.
The audio mixing on the other hand isn't that great. Sometimes the music is so loud you can barely hear anything else, others it's way too quiet. Sometimes a line is quiet then the next one will be very loud. York smokes louder than he speaks. If it were at least consistently bad you could get used to it, but it's not.
Act 2
The ultimate issue it faces is one that I assume was caused by budget and time constraints. That has been a continual feeling throughout the game, the sketchy audio mixing is but one of many indicators. It's not that there wasn't time to polish, there wasn't time to finish. Normally in that scenario, the start of the game is good then goes down linearly to end at the rocks. Deadly Premonition isn't like that. It feels like their philosophy was ‘fuck it, cut act 2’.
Act one is an 8 hour introduction. Act 3 is an 8 hour conclusion. The entire game is about 16 hours. The midway point is very jarring as if it finally feels like it's going to start letting you loose on the investigation but it's throwing you right into the beginning of the end. This theory of a missing middle also explains a lot of the core issues presented in its story and conclusion. Emily’s warming up to and liking of York is very jarring. Like it happens all over about one or two scenes, whereas if there was an act two, time would have been spent actually showing the development of this relationship. Another issue of Kaysons everything would also be solved as there would be time dedicated to him where you can sneak in little hints of an actual MO and develop him into an actual character. Even in the open world aspect of gameplay, the introduction conclusion setup means that events are always happening where time feels of the essence and it's hard to mentally justify bumming around exploring and doing side quests outside of ‘dude it's just a video game lmao’. It also justifies the reason behind a lot of the time wasting puzzles that occur to pad out the game.
Conclusion
I already like Deadly Premonition a lot, yet I can also already tell it's a game I'm going to like more the longer I go without actually playing it. The game has major issues in both its implementation and its core, and all those issues are bad enough to severely hamper the experience, but they're also not major enough that they won't get lost in the winds of memory.