It’s as hard to explain why I like Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut as it was when I tried to figure out what kept drawing me into the original release. When it first came out, the original release’s combat was clunky, the graphics looked like something from the beginning of the last generation, the music seemed like it was chosen at random, and the dialogue and plot were completely bewildering. In any other game this would have been more than enough to tank it, but the strange world of Deadly Premonition has such a charm to it that it all comes together. The faults add interesting facets to it, and it all works in its own unique way. Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut tries to make some of those flaws a bit more palatable, but there still isn’t all that much new about this version. If this is your first time visiting this world, though, you’re in for a treat. One you need a lot of patience to get to, but still a treat.
You are still going to have to work to get to the good parts, though, as the combat is improved but still lame. Every once in a while you slip into an alternate reality version of the world; one that is filled with weird ghost/zombie creatures. Combat with them has been improved a lot, though, as you can now ready your weapon with left trigger and fire with right trigger. That’s not exactly ground breaking, but considering you readied your weapon with right trigger and fired with the one of the face buttons before, it’s a big improvement. Also, you can actually turn the camera at will instead of just being able to turn it a bit and have it snap back. These items make combat a lot more tolerable, but it’s still the least interesting part of the game.
The issue here is that, while you have lots of different melee weapons and gear you can use, the monsters just don’t put up much resistance. You can replay the areas with harder enemies if you choose to go back through them, but otherwise the creatures don’t stand much chance against you. You start off with a handgun with infinite ammo, so there’s not much reason to choose the degradable melee weapons unless you want to make your life more difficult. Also, for whatever reason the game’s difficulty levels were removed, and this game feels like it defaults to the Easy difficulty of the original version. Since combat is still the worst part of the game I can see why they set it that way, though.
The graphics have been smoothed over compared to the previous release, too, although I’m not sure if that was a good idea all of the time. Yes, the old game looks pretty bad, but there were some points that were vague and muddied for a good reason. The killer’s face was obscured in the original release except for his eyes, but in this one it looks like he’s wearing some sort of gimp mask under his hood (although that might be MORE in keeping with the weird story). It did make the game easier on my eyes, but it wasn’t that big of an improvement. Just boot the game up and watch the trees in the opening cinematic if you don’t believe me.
Other than some cutscenes that don’t add much to the game and some Playstation Move support, that’s about it for the changes to the game. They don’t add up to much of anything that I felt the game needed, but I’m honestly happy for any excuse to take this game for another spin. I’ve replayed it every year or so, so this year I just waited for this one. Why would I annually play a game that I’ve admitted is ugly and plays poorly, though? This game is so much more than the sum of its parts; spending more time crafting its own unique experience rather than building itself up with all of the typical things a video game is built on.
The most interesting part of the game has to be the town itself and the inhabitants. It’s a small city by comparison to modern GTA games, probably on par with the original island in GTA III. What that does is make it accessible, though. The new version added a mini-map that you can increase or decrease in size at will, but you’ll still be calling up the main map screen most of the time to figure out where to go. That large map also won’t zoom out all that much, so you’re forced to pore over it if you want to plan your route. It can be aggravating for a while, but it actually starts to get comfortable in a hurry. The town isn’t that complicated, so you start learning your way around and just need to orient yourself with the map every once in a while. You get to know the place, something I haven’t been able to do since GTA III. It feels a lot better than following a GPS route on a map, and over time made me feel more immersed in the town.
It’s the people in the city who make it shine, though. There are dozens of weird characters living in the city, all of whom stand out in their own ways. The convenience store owner is a retired rocker, the gas station owner looks like an overweight reject from Tekken with a stripper wife, and there’s a woman running around town with a pot she’s worried is getting cold (Twin Peaks log lady, anyone?). If you’re rolling your eyes and thinking that the game is being quirky for its own sake, that’s what I thought too the first time. What it ends up doing is making everyone in the town memorable.
I can tell you almost every single inhabitant of the city. After playing through it again, I could probably tell you something about each one of them, where they live in town, and what their general behavior was during the day. Each character has a life of their own in the game, and goes about their day in specific ways. If you have to interrogate someone, you’re going to have to track them down around town. They might run a shop, but if it’s late at night you might have to find their home or wait until they reopen the shop the next day if they went to bed. The game indicates where they are on the map, which is a nice concession for players, but I found that for the most part I knew where everyone was going to be at any given time if I’d been interacting with them at all.
That’s perhaps the strangest and most engaging part of the game: feeling like I knew everyone in town. Through the game’s story and side quests, I felt like I learned a lot about the people of Greenvale. There were some people around the town that I genuinely began to like, and there were some more potent parts of the story where I learned to hate a few characters. The game was really good at surprising me with some of the skeletons in these people’s closets, implicating people in the murder that I never would have guessed. It does an excellent job of creating these silly characters who had their own charm and appeal, and then using those feelings against me later. It often did the opposite too, making me dislike characters only to show me the genuinely human reasons why they acted as they did.
Greenvale feels like a real place because of this. The people, as bizarre as they are, still show a lot of human characteristics that make them really believable. They’ve been exaggerated to help the player keep track of them, but they all have traits that make them interesting on their own. There’s also something that’s both chilling and satisfying in finding out the dark side of what appears to be a quaint, quiet town. There are a lot of unsettling secrets to be found in this place, and as annoying as some of the gameplay problems can be, these secrets and people will keep you coming back.
It’s downright odd to see NPCs in a game that I knew. Sure, a lot of games will have a handful of named characters moving around that I can recall, but this game was just filled with people that I knew on sight. I’d see a car driving by and notice the face of the grandfather of a set of twins, reminding me that I had a side quest I could look in on for him. I might step into the restaurant and see a couple of people I’d had trouble finding around town, or stumble upon someone I was surprised to see hanging around the bar at night. These characters stopped being bits of code for me, and the game took on this bizarre life that I’ve never experienced in a game before, open world or not.
You might have trouble enjoying that aspect of the game if you’re trying to reconcile why everyone in town is even listening to crazy old agent York. The player’s character is one of the weirdest people I’ve seen in a video game, and he single-handedly kept me from getting immersed in the game for the first couple of hours on my original playthrough. Now, while many of the game’s problems are a result of some gameplay and graphical shortcomings, there is nothing in the narrative or characters that wasn’t deliberate. Games are often flawed from limitations of the skills or funding of the developer’s staff, but you need to know that everything about Agent York is deliberate and meaningful.
Hidetaka Suehiro (otherwise known as Swery65), the game’s director, is trying to tell you some very interesting things about video games themselves through York’s character; something that might absolutely floor you on a second play through. York’s character has some complex things to say about gamers and their relationships with the game world and its story; things that make Metal Gear Solid 2 look straightforward by comparison. It’s an interesting commentary that I don’t really want to go into during a review for fear of spoilers, but trust me in that you should play through it for his character alone. Even if you just like strange storylines and don’t want to read much into them, this game is well worth it.
I didn’t much like Deadly Premonition when I first played it, but I couldn’t put it down. Seeing so much weird stuff in one place had this oddly hypnotic effect, and beyond that I still found I wanted to know who was guilty of the murder. Over time, a lot of the eccentricities of the game started to become clear, and I was astonished at how attached I’d gotten to the game and its world. When viewed as any other modern game it seems like it should be a terrible game, as its graphics and gameplay are decent at best, but it’s through those things that the game created a world that I never wanted to leave.
For those of you who’ve played it before, the fixes aren’t amazing but they do make Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut the definitive version of the game to play. For those who haven’t, this is a good excuse to see why so many people consider this game to be a classic. It may seem aggravating and silly at first, but this game starts to dig its claws in over time. There is an insane genius going on in this game, one that creates a world more lively and believable than anything else I’ve ever played. It will surprise you with its power to make you laugh and cry, if you’ll only make the effort to let it.
