Deadly Premonition

In this screenshot of the director's cut, York (center) stands in the rain near the police station, which is open. A map of the town relative to York's position is in the lower left, while his health and sleepiness/heartbeat bars are in the upper left corner; in the lower right corner is text that makes note of which weapon is equipped.

Deadly Premonition is a survival horror game set in an open world environment and played from an over-the shoulder third-person perspective. The game's objective is to guide the player character, FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan, as he investigates the identity of the Raincoat Killer, who is responsible for a murder in the rural town of Greenvale.[1] York receives in-game money for numerous actions—both for finishing levels and for minor events, such as shaving his beard or changing suits; he can also be fined for poor performance, such as wearing a filthy outfit, which attracts flies.[2][3] Additionally, he requires food and sleep at regular intervals, as indicated by the gauges measuring his hunger and neediness for sleep.[2] If his gauge for sleepiness reaches zero, he will become hungry far more quickly and his heartbeat gauge will increase much faster when running; if his gauge for hunger depletes, he will begin to lose health until he dies.[2] Sleeping restores his health and tiredness, while food and items used to ward off sleepiness, such as coffee, can be purchased from stores in Greenvale.[2]

York may explore Greenvale on foot, by car, or by using a special item which can be obtained by completing a sidequest.[1][3] Cars must be maintained, as they consume fuel, which York must purchase, and accumulate damage that eventually renders them useless unless York pays for their repair.[2] York often has a specific time frame for investigating sites and interviewing non-player characters; however, if he misses the timeslot, the player may simply try again during the next day without a penalty.[3] Places of business and entertainment venues in Greenvale have specific hours of operation and must be visited at the proper time to make use of their services. Non-player characters also have their own specific routines and travel around town as they go about their business.[3] It also features a dynamic weather system and day-night cycle which affects the responses of the non-player characters.[2] If York engages one at the right place and time of day, he or she may offer him a side-quest to perform for additional rewards.[3] In addition to side-quests, trading cards are scattered throughout the town, which the player can collect while exploring. York can also participate in mini-games, such as darts, racing through checkpoints, and fishing,[3] and may accelerate the passing of time by smoking cigarettes.[2]

Deadly Premonition contains several combat sequences, in which York encounters supernatural enemies while trapped in the Other World. York may battle them using melee weapons or firearms, or may choose to evade them by holding his breath.[4] Melee weapons will eventually break with continued use,[2] and York's pulse increases whenever he runs or holds his breath.[4] Periodically, York encounters the Raincoat Killer, which will activate either a quick time event, a chase sequence, or a hiding event necessary to escape the murderer.[3] During the Other World sequences, York's primary objective is to investigate crimes that took place there in the recent past. He collects photos of evidence to use to "profile" the scene and reconstruct events that took place with his deductive skills.[2] Furthermore, the Other World regularly affects the entire town, excepting the interior of buildings, from midnight to six in the morning.[2]

Hidetaka Suehiro, lead director and writer, in 2011

Deadly Premonition originates from Rainy Woods, a game that Access Games began work on in fall 2004.[22][23] A design document was produced in September 2004, followed by the project's start in March 2005.[23] The prototype was assessed in October, as was an alpha iteration in March 2006.[23] A trailer for Rainy Woods debuted in September 2007, promoting the title as a multi-platform game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles during the Tokyo Game Show;[23] it featured the "young and very cynical" FBI Special Agent David Young Henning as its protagonist.[6] Several video game journalists noted that the title shared strong similarities with the American supernatural television series Twin Peaks.[6][22][24] Rainy Woods was cancelled soon after its debut,[6] due to considerable "technological difficulties" with the two platforms' hardware, including memory allocation and lighting.[24]

In 2008, Suehiro began work on Deadly Premonition, which was intended to be a reboot of Rainy Woods, combining the assets from Rainy Woods with a new scenario and game design.[25] In March 2009, the project started, although it would face cancellation four times.[23][6] Access Games also began simultaneous development on Lord of Arcana, which would be released in October 2010.[25] The budget for the overall project, according to Suehiro, was "[n]ot very much".[23] Suehiro created a new protagonist, Francis York Morgan, with help from his friends in the United States,[6] and he and Kenji Gota, an independent film director, created York's dialogue with his split personality, Zach.[26] As Gota and Suehiro are good friends and often have conversations about film, Suehiro tried to imbue the dialogue with that atmosphere.[26] Additionally, they wrote the main plotline, while Suehiro wrote eighty percent of the sidequests and all of York's conversations with the nonplayer characters.[26] The character Zach was intended to involve the player emotionally in the game by providing the sense that York was directly addressing and conversing with the player in his asides.[27]

A central focus of the gameplay is freedom for the player, as Suehiro had wanted to create a game that players could progress at their own speed.[27] He had planned to incorporate two more mini-games involving chess and perfume,[24] and had considered having the player character's weight and hair length fluctuate.[27] Additionally, the combat sections of Deadly Premonition were added last in development,[27] after a publisher worried that the game would not sell well in the West without it.[22] Aspects of the game were initially more violent as well, as a way to express a fear of death; for example, the second victim was intended to be disemboweled while still living. However, the scenes were later toned down, as Suehiro felt that they were "too extreme".[21]

Suehiro's guiding concepts for the game's setting focused on "real time, real scale, and real life".[23] The developers traveled to the United States and noted the width measurements of the various billboards, railroad crossings, and roads to create a sense of realism for the town; the angles of the sun and weather patterns were also calculated. To add to that sense of realism, every street in Greenvale is named, and an hourly wage was decided on for a local diner. Additionally, the daily schedules of the non-player characters were created from their detailed background profiles.[23]

Areas of difficulties in the game's development were memory allocation, various lighting and shadow aspects, and their use of the physics engine PhysX.[23] According to Wataru Nishide, the lead level artist, and J's Kataoka, the lead programmer, the team's data management had been "sloppy" due to their initial amazement at the amount of RAM that the next-generation consoles provided.[23] The team found a balance between the practicalities of the available memory with the desired aesthetic of the outdoor sections of the game, which initially contained too many objects. The developers also had difficulties with balancing the game's lighting, desired aesthetics of the game's shadows and the processing rate. Furthermore, their use of PhysX proved to have mixed results; the developers enjoyed the "dynamic expression" that it gave the game's world, but had problems with the inability to "cheat" the "brutally honest" simulation and the resulting toll on the frame rate and processing.[23] The team also had to cut back on the number of objects run in the PhysX engine, which initially included hair, clothing, and fishing rods among others, to preserve the frame rate.[23]

Deadly Premonition was published for the Xbox 360 by Ignition Entertainment in North America, priced within the budget range, on February 23, 2010;[4] by Marvelous Entertainment in Japan on March 11,[29] and by Rising Star Games in Europe on October 29.[30] In Japan, the game was also simultaneously released for the PlayStation 3.[29] Additionally, Rising Star decided to forgo an Australian release, as a result of what it cited as "classification concerns".[31] In 2017, Deadly Premonition was made compatible with the Xbox One.[32] In 2019, it was released as Deadly Premonition: Origins on the Nintendo Switch.[33]

In North America, Deadly Premonition led sales of Xbox 360 games on Amazon.com for the week of April 9, 2010,[61] temporarily overtaking higher-profile releases such as Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Mass Effect 2, and Left 4 Dead 2.[62] 50,000 copies of Deadly Premonition were sold in North America during the first three months after its debut.[63] According to an interview with Suehiro in February 2013, the original release of the game has not been commercially successful.[63]

The original version of Deadly Premonition for Xbox 360 received a weighted average score of 68/100 from aggregator Metacritic, indicating "mixed or average" reception.[46] It is a critically polarizing game, with scores ranging from as low as 2 out of 10 from IGN US to as high as 10 out of 10 from Destructoid.[57][64] In the 2012 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition, Deadly Premonition holds the record as the "Most Critically Polarizing Survival Horror Game".[60]

The plot was positively received as eccentric and enjoyable.[7][52] A reviewer for Edge wrote: "The beauty of Deadly Premonition is that it's a straightforward whodunnit viewed through the cracked prism of an unreliable narrator, conjuring an atmosphere of suspicion and confusion throughout".[46] Destructoid's Jim Sterling appreciated the game's pop culture references, humor, and the dialogue, which they found to be hilarious and befuddling.[4] The characters were positively received by reviewers as memorable[52][65] and endearing.[54][65][3][52] According to IGN UK, the interaction with characters and uncovering the details of their fictional lives helped to create a sense of emotional engagement with them that lasted after the game ended.[54] York received a similar reception as "oddly endearing" despite his arrogance,[66] and "one of the most interesting gaming protagonists for years".[3]

The gameplay received a range of critical reaction, from competently done for a budget title[4] to horribly executed.[53] The gameplay of Deadly Premonition drew comparisons to that of Shenmue[3][50] and the Clock Tower series[67] while its combat was compared to that of Resident Evil 4.[4][50][54][65] According to 1UP's Frank Cifaldi, Deadly Premonition's combination of similar gameplay to Shenmue, The Last Express, Resident Evil 4, and the Grand Theft Auto series, proved to be "a 'jack of all trades, master of none' scenario",[50] a sentiment that Erik Brudvig of IGN US agreed with.[53] The controls also were criticized as detracting from the game's appeal.[7][52][67] The combat sections received mixed reactions. IGN UK's Matt Wales wrote that while the combat was simple, the atmosphere and profiling worked nicely.[54] According to Eurogamer's Chris Shilling, the sudden appearances of the Raincoat Killer made the sections frightening and the profiling made for some unsettling yet "relatively restrained" moments of horror, despite the "over-long and frequently clumsy" combat sequences.[3] Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot described the supernatural enemies as not particularly aggressive and boss battles as taking too long.[52]

Further criticism was directed at the game's music and visual quality. The graphics were frequently remarked upon as "terrible"[3][1][68] and low quality.[4][52][53] PALGN's Bev Chen, in contrast, felt that the quality of the graphics worked in the game's favor by adding a "bizarre charm".[1] Similarly, the game's soundtrack received criticism as sometimes thematically inappropriate, with serious scenes often containing a light-hearted jazz track;[3][4][68][1][56] conversely, some critics found the soundtrack memorable[7] and enjoyable, though repetitive in its selection.[54]

Nevertheless, the game has received a significant cult following.[62][69] This cult success was attributed to how the game's "wildly mixed critical reception and headline-making strangeness got people talking" by Will Herring of GamePro.[62] Citing the game as an example of "video games as art", David Jenkins of the Metro praised it for an "emotional range" encompassing survival horror and comedic farce.[68] G4TV named it one of the "Top 10 Games of 2010... So Far" in June 2010.[70] The game has received over a dozen other awards from various publications,[71] including "Best Cult Game" from Gamasutra,[57] "Most Surprisingly Good Game" from GameSpot,[58] and "Best Worst Game" from GamesRadar.[59]

Critics have noted multiple allusions to Twin Peaks; among them are "its well dressed FBI agent, rural Pacific Northwest setting, and a healthy dose of woodsy supernatural mythos".[72] Reviewers have remarked on similarities in Deadly Premonition's characters with those of Twin Peaks.[7][52][66] York has been commented on as sharing similarities with Twin Peak's protagonist Dale Cooper, notably a love of coffee and habitually addressing an unseen character; the first murder victim, Anna Graham, may be a homage to Laura Palmer, while her name may be a reference to both the character Annie and the actress who portrayed her, Heather Graham.[73] The Pot Lady, a side character who carries around a pot, may be a reference to the Log Lady, although they serve different narrative functions.[73] The Red Room of Deadly Premonition has some similarities with the Red Room of Twin Peaks, in that both are supernatural locations that the protagonist can access.[73] The A & G Diner might be a reference to the RR Diner of Twin Peaks, both of which are based on Twede's Cafe in North Bend, Washington.[73] The Great Deer Yard Hotel may be inspired by Twin Peaks's the Great Northern Hotel, which was based on the Salish Lodge in Snoqualmie Falls, Washington.[73] The character Emily has also been noted to visually resemble actress Naomi Watts, who starred in a film directed by David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, and later appeared in Twin Peaks: The Return.[72]

The director's cut for the PlayStation 3 received a weighted average of 70/100 from Metacritic, also indicating "mixed or average reviews".[47] Eurogamer's Oli Welsh wrote that the director's cut corrects some of the original flaws but others are left untouched, "just as you'd want it, really".[74] Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot remarked that, while the director's cut had not been "a dramatic overhaul", the game remained enjoyable and entertaining.[75] Conversely, the Official PlayStation Magazine's concluded that the retail price was too high to justify recommending the director's cut with all its flaws.[76] Critics praised the new controls as an improvement.[77][55][43] The graphics received more mixed reviews: Sterling wrote that "this new version at least looks better on modern televisions -- though your mileage may vary",[78] while other reviewers concluded that, even with improvements, the graphics still either barely met or fell beneath standards for a later PlayStation 2 game.[79][55][76] The inclusion of the minor narrative additions were generally enjoyed, although not viewed by critics as adding anything substantial to the plot.[77][79][55] Issues with the frame rate[77][79][55][78] and an "echo" effect with the voice acting were also noted in the port.[77][79]

A sequel called Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise for the Nintendo Switch[33] was released on July 10, 2020.[80] Set in 2019 in Boston, the plot focuses on Aaliyah Davis, an FBI agent who reopens an old investigation; her story intertwines with that of Francis York Morgan, fourteen years prior in the city of Le Carré, which is based on New Orleans.[33]

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