One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.
Welcome to the 20th installment of ‘Afraid and Alone’, a number special not only because it is a multiple of ten, but also because it means that this has now surpassed my old Infinity Train reviews to be my longest running column series on The Avocado. And what better way to celebrate than with one of the strangest games I’ve ever played?
Deadly Premonition is the brainchild of Hidetaka Suehiro, also known as Swery65. After previously working in game development at SNK and Deep Space, Swery65 helped co-found Access Games in 2002 and directed their first game, 2003’s stealth-heavy Spy Fiction. Although not terribly successful financially, the game caught the eye of publisher Marvelous Entertainment, who expressed interest in making a mystery-focused game with Swery65. Development on this project proved to be a brutal slog that lasted more than five years, complicated by a widening scale, multiple interlocking gameplay systems, issues with data and RAM management that spiraled into performance problems, difficulties with programming for next-gen hardware (specifically the XBox 360), and a physics system that made things hard to predict. The game was initially announced as Rainy Woods in 2007, but the developers then went silent for the next two years. While not fully confirmed, it has been heavily rumored that this silence was in part due to threatened litigation from the rights holders of Twin Peaks, a show that the game was highly inspired by. After several near-cancellations, the game eventually re-debuted as the open world survival horror Deadly Premonition, complete with many redesigned characters, and was launched in 2010 on the XBox 360. A PlayStation 3 port released in Japan shortly thereafter but was significantly delayed internationally. Reviews of the game were notably deeply polarized, with reviewers either loving it or hating it with little middle ground. Although not very commercially successful either, Deadly Premonition soon developed a cult following online that led to the release of a Director’s Cut on PS3 and PC in 2013. This was the version that I wound up playing.1
The game starts out…interestingly, to say the least, with FBI Agent Francis York Morgan (call him York, it’s what everybody calls him) lighting a cigarette, looking up gruesome crime scene photos on his laptop, and discussing the co-dependence of Tom and Jerry over the phone all while driving down the highway in the middle of a downpour. A figure in a rusty red raincoat appears directly in front of him, causing him to spin out down a hill and total his car. After fighting off some zombies (that he doesn’t really acknowledge for some reason), York makes it to the small town of Greenvale, Washington, where he is supposed to team up with the local authorities to investigate the grisly death of a young woman, Anna Graham. As connections to previous cases of York’s begin to be unveiled alongside the involvement of the mythical Raincoat Killer, the investigation spirals into something much larger than anyone in town expected.
Deadly Premonition is, without a doubt, the survival horror game I’ve played that is the most challenging to categorize as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Perhaps the biggest contributor to that conundrum is the enormous gulf between the developers’ ambitions and their very obvious time and financial constraints. This is deeply evident in Deadly Premonition’s gameplay. The game tries to be so many things at once – a zombie-filled survival horror experience, a detective-style mystery solver, a small-town life simulator, etc. – and doesn’t really manage to excel at any of them (although it is better at some than others). Rather, all those elements end up feeling quite tedious. It doesn’t help that the game throws a whole bunch of stats at the player to keep track of, such as health, stamina, ammunition, exhaustion, and hunger, as well as any damage to the car and the car’s fuel level.
The survival horror elements of the game, including combat, exist almost entirely inside of the ‘Otherworld’ segments. Unfortunately the design of these levels is some of the blandest I have encountered in the genre to date. Pretty much every single Otherworld area consists largely of sparsely-decorated hallways and mostly empty rooms presented in dull grays and browns (with the occasional pop of color from glowing red vines), with little in the way of puzzles to break up the monotony. Most of the time all there is to do as you explore is fight enemies.
Unfortunately, the combat in Deadly Premonition feels as bland and uninspired as the level design. A combination of a copious supply of ammo (the starting pistol even has infinite ammo), more powerful weapons that are easily attainable, slow-moving enemies, a lack of difficulty options (in most ports), and a potent lock-on feature renders most combat encounters trivial. I rarely felt like I needed to think through a combat situation or even consider trying to avoid them. It doesn’t help that enemy variety is severely lacking. Probably ninety-five percent of the enemies I encountered were the zombie-like Shadows, which were creepy at first with their jittery, glitchy-seeming movement but quickly became rote and tiresome. The developers do try to shake things up by giving some of the Shadows guns, but they take so long to fire that it’s pretty much pointless. There are a couple of other enemy types introduced later, but they are relatively rare (one only shows up at night in town and the other is only used in two hallways across the entire game). The boss fights are a lot more engaging but there are only three total and they are all clustered near the end of the game.
While I am willing to give a little slack to the combat, as from what I’ve gathered it was actually a late addition to the game, I am less charitable towards one of Deadly Premonition’s other Otherworld mechanics – the overuse of Quick Time Events, or QTEs (especially insta-kill ones). I made my disdain of QTEs clear in my Resident Evil 4 review, but Deadly Premonition is honestly much worse on that front. The QTEs are most common during the encounters with the Raincoat Killer, where they range from overly simple but heavily drawn out (i.e. York having to hold his breath while the Killer walks around the room agonizingly slowly searching for him) to bizarrely out of step with the main gameplay loop (i.e. chase sequences where you can only move by rapidly mashing buttons) to the absurdly frustrating (i.e. ‘fights’ that consist entirely of insta-kill QTEs that give you barely any time to react). These sequences were far and away some of my least favorite parts of the game, nearly causing me to rage-quit on at least two occasions and temporarily souring me on the entire game. I had thirteen total deaths by the end of the game, and none of them were from normal combat; all were due to QTEs.
Meanwhile, as with the combat the detective gameplay ends up coming across as pretty underbaked. Essentially, whenever you enter a key area it will be indicated that there are a certain number of ‘clues’ to find. Occasionally you’ll have to look a little hard for one, but most often they are either quite obvious (and indicated by a red glow) or are granted merely for progressing forward through the area. Each time a clue is uncovered, a QTE prompt is displayed to activate a cutscene showing what had occurred in this location with the added insight from the clue. The scene is pretty much the same for every clue in a given region, so I quickly found myself avoiding the button prompt until finding the last clue. And then York just straight up explains everything, with no need for the player to puzzle anything out for themself. It feels so underwhelming for a game that makes such a big deal out of its investigation and profiling mechanics, and I just wish there was something more to it. Make the clues more challenging to discover, for example, or include some mini game to require the player to put the clues together. As it is, it all just ends up feeling like set dressing rather than important gameplay.
The life simulation parts of the game are, to my surprise, the gameplay elements that end up faring the best. The developers tried their hardest to make Greenvale feel like an actual town, and I’d say they succeeded. In between missions you are able to explore the semi-open world of the town, talk to NPCs, and complete side quests. Greenvale is laid out much like you would expect in real life, with a small main street area of shops, bars, and a diner and residential areas spiraling outward from there. There is a gas station, a hospital, a hotel, a cemetery, a junkyard, and a power station, all things you would expect in an actual town. And it all feels much more to a realistic scale than I’ve seen in a lot of other games. I was honestly quite impressed in that regard. That’s not all, though – time passes according to an in-game clock, with each of the game’s many side characters following their own schedules accordingly. You might find one character hanging out in the park in the morning, then encounter them in the diner that afternoon. This isn’t a system that Deadly Premonition invented, as games have included something similar both before and since (Majora’s Mask came to my mind), but it’s not something I’ve ever really seen before in the survival horror space and it helps to give the game a unique flavor. The side quests that the characters offer – such as beating a high score in darts, finding a flower for the sheriff’s sick mother, collecting trading cards, etc. – are rarely very exciting (and the rewards are sometimes lackluster), but they do provide greater depth to Greenvale and its residents.
There are still issues with even these parts of the game, however, and it largely comes down to how they impact the game’s pacing. And I’m not talking about the side quests – those are optional and can be ignored if desired. Main story beats often take place across the map from each other, requiring heavy use of a car. Which wouldn’t be as much of an issue except that the driving controls in Deadly Premonition are infamously clunky and frustrating. They manage to be both overly sensitive and highly slippery at the same time, which would cause me to constantly run into everything when traveling on anything other than a straight road and would both damage my car and slow me down significantly in the process. It made getting from plot point A to point B way more annoying and time consuming than it needed to be. It doesn’t help that the town’s layout is, as previously mentioned, pretty massive and spread out, and the in-game map is unusually difficult to use as well. (The map doesn’t allow you to zoom out far enough to actually get a good idea of how your starting point and destination are related, and to top it off the map rotates based on which direction York is facing which wreaked havoc with my spatial awareness.) Additionally, due to the whole scheduling system there are multiple times where the player has to wait several in-game hours before the next major story event can occur. There are ways to skip forward, but they come with their own drawbacks. York can sleep, but getting to a place where he can do that necessitates more driving (which in turn means more stopping for gas and repairs). Sleeping also increases hunger, which means potentially more detours to stock up on food. The player can have York smoke a cigarette to speed up time as well, but that increases both exhaustion and hunger, which means further consuming the player’s supply of food and coffee. (Not to mention that the cigarettes are a consumable as well.) If you’re into just exploring and filling time with side quests it isn’t too bad, but if you are trying to focus on the main story it can be a bit of a headache.
I will note that one side quest does grant you with a fast travel item, which does prove quite useful. Unfortunately there are several missions that don’t appear to allow its use, which is certainly frustrating.
I’ve been painting a mostly negative picture of the game so far, which begs the question of why I said that Deadly Premonition is so hard to categorize as good or bad. The answer is, oddly enough, vibes. Deadly Premonition has such a strange tone and atmosphere that I cannot recall encountering in a game before. I’ve never seen a full episode of Twin Peaks, but from the little that I have watched of the show I can definitely see the inspiration it held for Swery65. The way the game’s plot, full of twists and turns as it is, manages to mix together the mundane and the supernatural gives the game an unsettling and surreal feeling that leaves the player wondering whether York isn’t just imagining some of these events after all. This atmosphere is further brought to life by the game’s large cast of oddball characters, which includes, among others: a wealthy billionaire who wears a gas mask and only speaks in riddles through his assistant; a gravedigger who looks like a Tim Burton reject; an elderly woman who runs a massive hotel all by herself despite having no guests; a sheriff’s deputy who loves to lecture on the different types of squirrels; and a woman who carries a pot with her everywhere. Cutscenes are frequently awkward, stilted, and bizarre, but in a way that comes across as endearing rather than off-putting. There’s this hard-to-describe quality to the whole game that makes it one of the most unique games I have played in quite some time.
Seriously, watch this and tell me it’s not the pinnacle of video game cutscenes:
The characters and story aren’t always handled perfectly, however, even when taking the game’s weirdness into account. Deadly Premonition’s treatment of its female characters is a particular issue. Virtually every murder victim in the game is a woman, and their (sometimes mutilated) bodies are shown to the player in graphic, sexualized detail – often complete with barely concealed nudity – after each crime. Given that some of these victims were given little solid characterization before or after death, it’s hard not to feel as though the developers are using them as props for shock value. (This is an accusation I’ve also heard pointed toward other Swery games.) There are instances of implied sexual assault as well that left me feeling queasy and that again felt included mostly for their shock value. And then there are the smaller but still gross details, like how York repeatedly comments on how attractive the game’s most prominent female character, Deputy Emily Wyatt, is, often out loud and within her earshot. There are certainly a lot of games that treat their female characters worse than Deadly Premonition, but it’s hard for me to deny that this left a bad taste in my mouth.
Going back to Deadly Premonition’s charm, though, it is, funnily enough, only enhanced by the game’s high quantity of jankiness. The graphics are obviously outdated, and not in a way that feels intentionally retro; Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 4 came out five and six years earlier respectively, and yet they both look better and more detailed than Deadly Premonition. Character animations are stiff and their faces often struggle to properly convey emotion. The game frequently makes use of what seem to be stock sound effects in strange ways, like how a pair of squirrels in an early cutscene sound like monkeys. (This actually reminds me of Silent Hill 4 and its weird use of stock sound effects.) Similarly, there seems to be just one vocal clip that is used in nearly every enemy’s death animation (“I don’t want to dieeeee…”). And then there are the strange glitches, like how whenever I hit another car while driving there was a good chance it would veer off the road before slowly sinking into the ground and disappearing. In any other game these would all be definite negatives, but given how goofy Deadly Premonition already is they only add to the experience.
And then, of course, there is the music. There are roughly three or four tracks that are recycled across the vast majority of cutscenes, often in ways that seem to hilariously clash with the tone of what is being shown. Something horrible will have happened to an important side character, and then shortly afterward a jaunty whistling tune will play, for example. Or a relatively lighthearted scene in a diner will be accompanied by an ominous melody. Not to mention that the tracks will frequently switch between each other mid-scene in a jarring manner. All of this is combined with awful sound mixing, which often results in the strangely offbeat music entirely drowning out the dialogue. It reaches the point where it would be incredibly difficult to understand what’s going on much of the time without the subtitles.
Unfortunately, Deadly Premonition’s jank sometimes goes a little too far. What do I mean by that? Well, the PC port of the Director’s Cut (as well as other ports, like the 2019 Switch one) is infamously broken. Constant crashes, audio glitches, stuttering, control issues – it runs the whole gamut. I was lucky that I was able to avoid most of these problems for the first half of the game by changing the compatibility mode and capping the frame rate, outside of occasional freezes when I opened the map. Things seemed to get quite a bit worse in the second half, however, with multiple crashes at seemingly random times (after a cutscene, when opening a door, after dying, etc.). The game never became unplayable, but the current state of Deadly Premonition’s performance leaves much to be desired and it’s very unfortunate that it has never been patched to fix its myriad issues.
Ultimately, Deadly Premonition has all the hallmarks of a game where the ambition of the developers far exceeded the time and resources available to them. Despite that, or more likely because of it, the game manages to create a wonderfully unique and quirky atmosphere with an expansive cast of strange characters to boot. Unfortunately, the overly tedious gameplay and performance issues pull the experience down significantly, to the point where I’d much rather watch someone else play the game than play it through again myself. As such, I have to rank this as my least favorite survival horror game so far. Still, though, I’m glad I gave it a shot at least once.
Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil (OG), Resident Evil 2 (OG), Resident Evil 4 Remake, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil Revelations, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Tormented Souls 2, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space 2, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Alone in the Dark (2024), Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Clock Tower: Rewind, White Day: A Labyrinth Called School, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Sorry We’re Closed, Fragile Reflection, Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2, You Will Die Here Tonight, My Friendly Neighborhood, Conscript, The Callisto Protocol, Penumbra: Overture, Penumbra: Black Plague, Penumbra: Requiem, Lamentum, Outlast, Outlast 2, Carnival Massacre, Late Homework, Routine, Alan Wake 2, White Night, Onimusha, Onimusha 2, Heavy Metal Death Can, Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Remothered: Broken Porcelain, NightCry, Nightmare of Decay, Ground Zero, White Night, Still Wakes the Deep, The Chant, Maid of Sker, DreadOut
My Current Survival Horror Ranking:
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (9.5/10)
- Resident Evil Remake (9.5/10)
- Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
- Signalis (9/10)
- Dead Space (2008) (9/10)
- Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
- Resident Evil Requiem (9/10)
- Cronos: The New Dawn (9/10)
- Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
- Crow Country (8.5/10)
- Fear the Spotlight (8.5/10)
- Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (8.5/10)
- Subversive Memories (8/10)
- Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (8/10)
- Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
- Silent Hill f (8/10)
- Resident Evil 3 Remake (7.5/10)
- Resident Evil 4 (7/10)
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent (7/10)
- Alone in the Dark (1992) (7/10)
- Deadly Premonition (5/10)
Up Next: Sorry We’re Closed
Header image courtesy of Steam.
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