(all images are downloaded from the Welcome to Greenvale website [greenvale.shshatteredmemories.com])
Deadly Premonition is one of my favorite games of all time. It's a bizarre and wonderful trip into the lumber areas of the Pacific Northwest, blending an American setting with Japanese sensibilities. The game's writer and director, SWERY, created a truly unique game. And I do mean truly unique.
The game was actually originally revealed at TGS 2007, under the title Rainy Woods, with a different protagonist: David Young Henning, who would later become the protagonist of SWERY's next game, D4. The game was destined to spend the next three or so years being reworked, since certain scenes in its trailer (namely, the appearance of two little people) bore a certain resemblance to Twin Peaks, and for legal reasons necessitated a reworking of the game.
I bring this up because many people say the game is a Twin Peaks rip-off, which I think is unfair and ignores how different the game is from Twin Peaks. While it undoubtedly draws heavily from Twin Peaks, with its Pacific Northwest setting, the story starting with the murder of a popular high-schooler, and a cast made up of idiosyncratic characters, the stories are fundamentally different, not only in how they play out but in how they're structured. Twin Peaks is self-consciously a soap opera, with its focus splitting between many characters and storylines which build up at least one cliffhanger every episode. Deadly Premonition, by contrast, is more a character study, its focus mostly limited to its protagonist: FBI Special Agent Francis Morgan.
One of the best parts of the Director's Cut is how it emphasizes the fact that the game's story is based around Morgan's perception of events more than the literal events themselves; while that idea was already present in the original game, the use of Morgan telling the game's events to his granddaughter as a framing device changes this from a subtext to part of the main text, making it much easier to pick up on, which, in turn, makes the game's biggest twist much more understandable than it may have been for people originally.
It also helps that Agent Morgan is one of the best protagonists in video games. He's a genuinely interesting, quirky character; "quirky" has sort of become a dirty word for protagonists, since it usually connotes a "wacky" character who tries way too hard to be weird, but that's really not the case here. The game's writing and acting is done in such a way that, even at his most off-putting, he feels human and understandable.
It helps that Agent Morgan has a wonderful supporting cast. At first appearance, the cast seems like a bizarre collection of archetypes and weirdos, but over time they develop into one of the most well-developed casts in video games. While I personally feel certain characters could have been handled better/with more sensitivity (Thomas), overall the characters are very well done. My personal favorites are Keith, the rock-loving cashier of The Milk Barn, the local convenience store, and Lilly, the store's owner and Keith's eternally-patient wife.
The game's at its best when you're interacting with these characters and learning more about parts of the world, whether it's the history of the town, its inhabitants, or Agent Morgan himself. The interactions between characters are incredibly engaging, and vary between hilarious and disturbing. Also interesting are the "profiling" sections, gameplay sections in which you gather evidence and see Agent Morgan mentally reconstruct the crime.
The game is at its weakest when it comes to combat; the combat was basically a last-minute addition (although the degree to which it was last-minute is usually overstated) and it shows. Also weak are the driving sequences, which are often very long and eventually York, who often times talks about movies, runs out of things to talk about while driving, meaning you have to wait until the next chapter to get anything more from him while driving.
However, despite its shortcomings, Deadly Premonition is overall a great game. It holds a special place in my heart for being the first game I experienced to make me realize how good the story and characters in a game can be, and I think that even now it's still severely underappreciated.
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