Games I Should Have Played: Deadly Premonition

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be looking at games I've had sitting on my shelf, silently mocking me for having not played them yet. Some are undoubtedly classics; some are probably just steaming shitpiles. But I'm going to find that out for myself, and hopefully have some fun in the process.

A few months ago, I dove into the first three hours of Deadly Premonition. It was hilarious. Here was a game that had the gumption to not only throw survival horror, but Grand Theft Auto-style open world mechanics, detective sleuthing, and, um, fishing and darts into one game. The music was often misplaced and mixed too loud, the script veered wildly from deadly serious to jaunty descriptions of serial killers pissing into the skulls of victims while cheery whistling music played. If there's one word to describe Deadly Premonition, it's "bonkers."

But here's the thing: those first three hours introduce you to the lunacy of the town of Greenvale and the budget graphics and the strange, if not entirely broken game mechanics. What they don't do is inform you that Deadly Premonition is totally engrossing, brilliantly designed, and joyous to play.

It'd be easy to see the range of opinions on Deadly Premonition and think that the culture of people who now revere this game is entirely ironic. And while I'm sure that's true of some people, I think it's absolutely the wrong approach to the game. Deadly Premonition should be treated as being unironically brilliant, instead of terrible, but cool to like.

The main reason for this is, unsurprisingly, not to be found in the gameplay mechanics, but in the writing. Agent Francis York Morgan is perhaps the best, most interesting video game character of the last five years, and the game is keenly interested in having you live his experiences. In a generation dominated by "set pieces," Deadly Premonition comes the closest that any game has since Shenmue in having a character live in a defined world. Partially this is due to the open world nature of the game, but it also has something to do with the fact that Deadly Premonition has the best execution of cutscenes I've seen in a long, long time. York is a skilled investigator, sure, but also a misanthrope with no social skills and just completely batshit crazy ideas, and the fact that the game lets you play as someone like that is immensely refreshing. And the fact that the murder mystery is legitimately mysterious, never letting you know too much about its bizarre ritual killings, is pretty great.

SWERY, the designer of the game (who I'll talk more about in a bit), also seems to understand a fundamental truth about effective characterization that so, so many developers (Rockstar included, even considering this game's great debt to their franchises) just simply do not, and that's that a character comes alive through details. The strange tapping on his collarbone, the way he touches his fingers to his temples when he's about to speak to his-seemingly imaginary friend "Zach" (who is actually the player, in a Contact kind of way), the way he rambles on about the minutiae of 80s B-movies, observations about Olivia Newton-John – it all adds up to create a complete picture of this character, and it's completely glorious.

Equally successful is the slightly off-balance characterization of the town of Greenvale itself, which is full of "eccentric" characters (to put it mildly) and a very skewed perception of small-town American life. With that being said, the game pulls off the David Lynch trick of exaggerating (sometimes quite literally, as objects such as beds or cars become twice their actual size without any explanation) the grotesque or strange about a town, examining the smallest details, and somehow arriving at a perception of "truth" that is more accurate than a more traditional or safe exploration would be.

You'll notice that I brought up David Lynch there – it's almost an obligatory thing for this game by this point. And while there's no doubt that much of the game is in debt specifically to Twin Peaks, and to a lesser degree Lost Highway and Wild at Heart, there's a fundamental difference between the way David Lynch approaches his material and the way that SWERY does.

Lynch is, for all of his weirdnesses, a classical formalist. Every detail and every shot and every sound effect is carefully orchestrated for maximum impact. SWERY, on the other hand, is operating under a pretty low budget, and many of the more out-there choices (at least from a game-construction perspective) seem to have been made out of necessity rather than artistic vision. That's why the game looks so bad (even if it does eventually come around to the other side and give the game a very defined aesthetic), plays so bad, and most of all, sounds so bad. The thing that's amazing about Deadly Premonition, though, is how little any of this matters. The game does the rarest thing in video games, which is nail the "cult" presentation without doing it through affectations. This is a cult game through and through, a "so bad it's amazing" experience. I didn't think it was possible, but here it is.

That's why, when the game sees fit to throw psychologically-manifested, backwards-walking, slow-talking, Silent Hill-ripping zombies at you, and the controls are nearly broken, it doesn't matter – the sections still work, after all, and the ideas behind them are far more interesting than most games' similar attempts at it are (many Silent Hill games included). The vehicles you drive are really slow, sure, but the world you live in is so interesting and so well-thought out that a mechanical annoyance here or there doesn't matter. You don't really participate in the investigation, but the writing is so interesting and hilarious that it doesn't matter.

Deadly Premonition is a great galvanizer for the question "what matters in video games?" Because from a conventional standpoint (see IGN's review of the game, for instance), this is a "bad game." But it's also pushing so many boundaries, too, and in a distinctly video game-y way. I'm not talking about the fact that you earn "points" for exploring, or that you have to eat year-old cans of pickles to stave off hunger – the game is delivering the kind of narrative that only a video game can successfully pull off.

Part of this is due to its open world nature. Want to follow an interesting lead? Follow their schedule and meet them at the diner for extra tips. The game also manages to, once again, do more for "realism" than so many overtly-realistic games do. Much of your investigation is tied to a schedule, which means you have to be in certain places at certain times – a really welcome feature which orders your interaction far more than the completely arbitrary "be here whenever, do whatever you want" systems of games like Oblivion. But on the other hand, this means you have to kill a lot of time, and the game absolutely nails the feeling of being an outsider in a small town. You can hang out at the bar, or drive around aimlessly, or go sleep in your hotel room, or eat until you feel like throwing up, or go fishing, or follow some suspects, or whatever else the game allows you to do. You're not just living the policeman's life, you're living York's life, and that's an amazing feat. Some might call it boring, but they'd be totally wrong, and just have absolutely no idea what a video game can or should be doing.

I'm not sure if this game would get better with more money behind it – it has an anarchic spirit that the best b-movies have, an outsider's perspective, and I truly don't think this game would seem as incredible if everything fit together perfectly. That's obviously not a tactic that most games can take successfully, but Deadly Premonition manages to pull it off. This is an incredible game, one you need to play if you appreciate good writing and innovative video game design. Though I have no idea why York's flashlight seems to shoot out of his chest.