Deadly Premonition

This clearly rips off the popular cult TV series Twin Peaks first and foremost, both having an idiosyncratic FBI Special Agent, an even more idiosyncratic town, a mysterious murder case, supernatural events and a mixture of comedy and tragedy.

Silent Hill and Resident Evil are minor inspirations, but most of all the former. Deadly Premonition, even with having the Director's Cut beaten, remains a clusterfuck of poor production values, sometimes feeling even more weak than early PS2 releases.

Despite some very tedious sections in the game such as constant loading screens, the fact how slow it goes when picking up items, tailing a car and driving around in general, it has a strange affection upon those who can withstand the broken story, the gibberish dialogue, the quirky characters and the VERY repetitive usage of about 5 songs at maximum.

This "so bad it's good" quality usually found at cinema is rarely seen in video games. Lip synchronizations are constantly off from the voice acting, animations are sometimes stuck or clip through walls, controls are clumsy and the game can randomly crash, thus showing us all the low budget and low design it received.

Deadly Premonition was for me only interesting to continue playing in order to see how the developer would tackle the direction of the plot, which in this case means the reveal of the Raincoat Killer and the motivation behind the individual.

This turned out to be different from Twin Peaks at the least. It wasn't as funny to play as I was expecting, especially after reading the convincing review written at Destructoid, but one thing that is for sure is that Deadly Premonition stands out, for better or worse, and won't be easily forgotten.

I wouldn't call this game a controversy, but I would definitely call it polarizing. So, if you like Twin Peaks in the first place, try it out. If not, you should stil try it out and see how far you can go with the designed torture which got released in the 6th generation of video gaming. Forget about the gameplay and story, focus on what you can gain out from this title individually.

Rating: 6.5