Ugh. I have been trying to like Deadly Premonition, but have finally given up on it. The game is riddled with crashes and inconvenient game design. This game is a dog, for the following reasons!

*It crashes far too often.

*The map is terrible, as it has a limited amount of zoom-out. You cannot see the majority or entirety of Green Vale on the map screen, so you have to look around in a very slow and limited way. Furthermore, there is no periphery marker for the player's location, nor can you mark specific destinations or people for navigation tracking.

*Characters and locations operate by a schedule system...without providing this schedule to the player. Majora's Mask did it better.

*Manual aiming of firearms is awful. You can't move the protagonist while aiming, and he has a very limited arc. If enemies are too high or too close, you cannot hit them. Your only option is to use the lock-on system to deal with certain foes. The enemies are boring, too.

*When replaying finished chapters, it is impossible to manually save. If the game crashes before you finish your replay, all of your side quests and loot would be lost. Why in the world did the developers remove the ability to save?!

*Character schedules are tied to weather. Considering that you can't control the weather or predict it, you have to do a lot of waiting and praying for rainfall.

*Driving vehicles or moving in general is clunky as heck. The sheriff's SUV is ridiculous, as it turns on a dime at any sort of speed. Certain spots can destroy your vehicle without warning, and some of the off-road paths can slow the car to a crawl.

*At a key point of the game, it isn't explained that your gun could be used to shoot nests out of trees.

*The graphics are terrible. Look, I am not someone who needs 4k resolution...but I would like the aesthetic and staging to look decent. All too often the characters enter the uncanny valley or have unnatural pauses that do not seem deliberate.

*Your inventory screen doesn't list how much free space it has. You only find out such details by using the Toolbox or by reaching full capacity.

*When you have the Radio, it can be used to warp you to locations that you have been to. However, the locations available are tied to your chapters and when you accessed the location. If you go to Milk Barn in chapter 12 and complete the chapter, it will be unlocked in all future chapters...but not previous ones. You have to go to earlier chapters to unlock access. Inconvenient, especially when progress can be lost to a crash.

*An number of murdered characters have side quests attached to them. This means that finishing their side quests may require replaying chapters in which you can't save your game. The developers could have circumvented this entirely by giving side quests to other characters. Or allowed manual saving for completed chapters.


TL;DR - Don't buy Deadly Premonition. Go for Alan Wake instead - that game is much more polished and delivers atmosphere much more effectively. Whatever potential Deadly Premonition had is hamstrung by unpleasant and fruitless gameplay.


There. I wanted to vent. These days, I am finding that I have a much lower tolerance for games that lack polish.

The potential of Deadly Premonition? It's so bad that it's good again! And it's a "cheesy horror b-movie" style game ;)

No, seriously, the game is really bad! The controls are horrible, the characers and animations look creepy (and that was not the intention of the devs) and gameplay can become frustrating very quickly. Combined with the very cheesy story you get gaming's answer to cheap horror movies from the 80s. That's exactly why I played Deadly Premonition, but I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. Play it if you want to laugh about hilariously bad horror, but don't touch it if you're a gamer and want to play a game.

I'd take Deadly Premonition over Alan Wake any day. Probably because I'm more of an adventure game fan than action game fan - for me, Deadly Premonition was almost a point and click adventure with some bad action and driving sequences which I wanted to rush through to get my adventure meat: exploring the town, talking to locals, following sidequests.
Alan, on the other hand, was a good action game but the adventuring was severely lacking: short 'day' to talk to people, long night to fight the zombies. Plus, I loved York as a character while Alan felt like a complete asshole to me :)

Pretty much. Sweary's new game D4 is also "so bad it's good" type of ordeal.

I guess that I am not much of a masochist when it comes to games. For me, "so bad it is good" is something that mostly applies to movies. After all, I can just sit back and laugh at the comedy of errors.

Anyhow, you guys might like Dead State and Inquisitor.

Pretty much spot on! The game is an exercise in frustration, but damn it is hilarious in how bad the plot is. Definitely goes full circle, so bad it's kinda good.

After finishing the game I also wanted to have a meeting with the developers and ask them: what the hell were you thinking?

Deadly Premonition has a few inspired moments and characterizations, along with enough quirks to give it a genuine identity that not many other games have (isn't that right, Zach?).

It ALSO was originally a PS2 game that got moved up to the 360 at the last minute, and was made for a vanishingly small budget despite its massive scope.

Yeah, the gameplay is bad. Even its defenders won't ever deny that. And the ports are buggy as all hell, although here it's worth mentioning that the 360 original actually runs just fine... again, they're a small Japanese company without much of a budget and no experience with other platforms. Not an excuse, just a reason, and I do feel it's worth pointing out that there DOES exist a version of this game that doesn't crash constantly.

But.

BUT.

It's got heart and ambition that far exceeds its budget. There are times when the zaniness clicks into place, the story comes into focus, and everything suddenly just WORKS. It's going for a very particular mood, and "horror" generally isn't it. Twin Peaks is really the closest point of comparison, which isn't surprising since the game started its life as an even more overt Twin Peaks ripoff.

But the action segments? Yeah, those are awful. Fans will tell you they're awful. Swery himself will tell you they're awful. They were tacked on late in development and it shows.