Deadly Premonition - Director's Cut PC Review
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- Time to beat: 20 hours
- Graphics: 1/5
- Voice Acting: 5/5
- Sound: 2/5
- Gameplay: 1/5
- Production quality: 1/5
- Artistic component: 3/5
- Replayability: 2/5
- Story: 3/5
- Overall: 2/5

Deadly Premonition (DP) is an action/adventure/detective/horror game. You control an FBI agent solving a mysterious case that will change his life and also the fate of a small, isolated town. I am sure you can get more details about that elsewhere, so let's get to the bottom.

First, what I liked about it. I think that atmosphere and setting are good. The game has its own (weird) style, has its own atmosphere. This is where I think Rising Star Games succeeded. What is helping here a lot, is a great voice acting. Actually I think it is probably the only strong technical aspect of the game. Also, the Profiling cutscenes are very good and there are some quite memorable scenes too.

What people seems to be reallly praising DP for is its story. I have to agree, that in the beginning it seemed quite intriguing and interesting to me. However, the more you go on, the better you see that it's just some random Japanese crap thrown at you in ever larger portions along the way. I don't have anything against Japanese games, for example I think that Divi-Dead was amazing, but here something just doesn't feel right. I can't believe people are comparing DP story-wise to stuff like Donnie Darko. It's just a different league. DP has a very decent story for a video game, but it's nowhere that deep or well executed. Actually it's much like a Resident Evil game with some weird twists added just for the sake of making it something "more" or something different. And I have to say, this fails miserably in my eyes. People who praise this should really try games like Pathologic. Now that is a great and unique story with some ideas never seen anywhere else. Meanwhile DP never surprises with anything new, it's just all the stuff that was done before and seen elsewhere.
So I repeat, the story in DP is probably it's strongest point, and it's good for a video game, but it's also way too much overrated and it's definitely not good enough to make it worthwhile playing this game.

Now, for the bad things. As a game DP falls completely flat. Production quality, except for voice acting and some artistic aspects, is mostly total garbage. Game is crashing often and some side quests cannot be finished (or even started). But it's not even about that. Graphics is horrible and buggy, I had some weird flickering of background objects all the time when being outside. Sound is of low quality too (try listening to car engine when driving around).

And probably the worst part now, the gameplay. Shooting is not satisfying, level design is mostly linear, open world between missions is boring, feels empty and exploration gets tedious very fast, puzzles are at best at Resident Evil's level of complexity and they are only there to fill the gaps between horrible action sections. Basically I wanted to push the game through only to see the main story. I gave up on side quests and exploration soon and I hated action parts, especially QTEs and badly implemented shooting sections. The only thing that might motivate anyone to struggle with this mess is the main story and collecting "trading" cards. I have to admit, I am type of completionist, but I couldn't get myself to suffer that much to look for all the collecitbles or to do side quests.

To sum it all. As a video game, Deadly Premonition is something I do not recommend. The story is quite interesting, but certainly not good enough to suffer poor and terribly executed gameplay.

Deadly Premonition doesn't try to pull off anything new. I'm not trying to sway your opinion on this, people have the right to their personal experiences with their books, music, movies and video games, and you're more than entitled to your own opinion of it. Then again, I'm also entitled to my own, that's why I'm writing this.

There's nothing wrong with your review of the technical aspects of the game, it is known to be a technical mess, prone to crashes and overall bugs -- even though I got lucky and experienced none of those. When it comes to the story, though, I have to disagree. Deadly Premonition never tried to be a pseudo-intellectual philosophic experience like Donnie Darko. It did try, however, to be a weird experience, like Twin Peaks. In fact, in case you didn't know this, Deadly Premonition started out as Twin Peaks: The Video Game, until there was some legal action and they had to do some changes, namely changing characters' names and appearance. If you think the game has weird parts because it's "Japanese-weird", I strongly recommend watching the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, or any David Lynch film (Twin Peaks was created and had many episodes directed by Lynch), to see westerners can be as weird -- or even weirder -- than Japanese. Still, I agree that the story doesn't fit very well with the gameplay parts, and it ends up feeling like little more of a Resident Evil 4 clone with Fatal Frame elements and some basic shooting, but I guess that's all they could do. In fact, Alan Wake, the other major game largely inspired by Twin Peaks, couldn't pull off a better solution for the "playing parts", ended up feeling like a Silent Hill clone -- though Alan Wake was inspired by the whole Stephen King mythos as much as Twin Peaks, whereas Deadly Premonition supposedly only drew inspiration from the latter.

My point is that if you think the game tried to emulate some pseudo movie like Donnie Darko (I seriously never heard anyone saying the story was Donnie Darko-good), then you'll probably think it's not that great. When you're a fan of Twin Peaks, like me (can't wait for the third season, with *all* episodes directed by Lynch himself!), and know Deadly Premonition is an homage to that series that stays true to the source material while changing some aspects of it so it can have its own personality, then there's no doubt Deadly Premonition excels, story- and character- and world-wise.

I wrote about Donnie Darko because I saw this:

http://www.d4gameplay.com/2013/04/deadly-premonition-2-what-the-players-want/
A quote: "Deadly Premonition was what The Shawshank Redemption and Donnie Darko were to the film industry "

I watched Donnie Darko and no, it's not a "pseudo-intellectual philosophic experience". Amongst other things, it's a movie about time travel, and in fact, the only movie I know that gets time travel right (unlike "Back to the Future" and others). We can argue about Donnie Darko, but probably it's pointless to do it here.

Unfortunately, I didn't see Twin Peaks, but now I actually don't think I am interested. What I saw in DP story-wise and setting-wise it's not my type of fun. Also I think I'll pass on Dark Dreams Don't Die. After reading reviews I conclude I would like it even less.

Don't skip out on one of the best and most influential TV shows ever made just because you played a zany low-budget Japanese game that took some influence from it and didn't care for the result. That'd be like skipping The Shining because American Horror Story: Hotel looks silly. The influences Twin Peaks had on Deadly Premonition are clear, but it's equally clear that DP is very, VERY much its own thing. They start in similar places and almost immediately veer off into two extremely different directions.

edit: and as an aside, no movie "gets time travel right," Donnie Darko included, because, even ignoring the broad consensus that time travel backwards isn't possible, there's very little agreement within the scientific community that does believe it's possible, which is why all the best movies about time travel ignore the mechanics and focus on its possibilities for character exploration and development (Donnie Darko included, actually, which is why I prefer the theatrical cut to the director's cut... Richard Kelly didn't know what he had, which his next two movies proved pretty conclusively). That said, if you want a movie that attempts to make time travel at least FEEL plausible, my recommendation is usually Primer.

Ok, I did watch Twin Peaks and I have to say... it's damn good. Now Deadly Premonition seems even more like garbage to me, it is clearly inspired by the TV series, but it's so lame, that I can't believe it's praised so much. But that Twin Peaks... great series.

Despite its obvious flaws, very few game worlds have thrilled me as much as deadly premonition. I'd even put it in the same category as Planescape: Torment, Baldur's gate, Undertale, Mass Effect, Dark Souls and Persona 3/4 in that respect.

Sure, its action segments are clunky (I admit that I just wrench or lightsword my way through these sections), the graphics were dated on release, the story eventually gets a bit tangled in its own feet and cranks the craziness to 11... but there are so many awesome scenes, the music is so great and it is just so fun to just drive around the town and listen to York talk about 80s movies that I can't help but love that game.

It is also so obvious that Swery wanted to make a Twin Peaks game that I can't even hold this against him, as its influences come off as very earnest.