Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360, 2010) - Part 1

This game has gotten pretty famous, and most people have probably made up their minds one way or the other about it.  Even so, I'm going to try to start at the beginning.

Here is the cover to Deadly Premonition, a game by the Japanese developer Access Games, who prior to this weren't known for much in the U.S., besides working on one of the Ace Combat games.  Looking at this, you would probably guess that Deadly Premonition is a survival horror game.  The game does indeed take many cues from the Silent Hill series: for example, the axe-wielding hooded man lurking in the corner is a kind of rip-off from "Pyramid Head".  He drags that axe as he walks around, throwing sparks everywhere, and is impregnable to bullets until the end of the game.

To satisfy our expectations, the following shot represents the first hour or so of the game quite well.

Here is a shot from the next hour (for sticklers, this is actually the PS3 version, but it's close enough):

What you see here is the main character from the first shot, the FBI agent Francis York Morgan, exploring the sleepy town of Greenvale, Washington in a police cruiser.  There are no monsters in this segment.  In fact, less than half of my playthrough of this game was spent in the "dark world" (the percentage could be much less for those intent on completing all sidequests.)

So what the hell kind of game is this?  If it's a survival horror game as the marketing would have us believe, then it's pretty mediocre and repetitive.  Probably 90% of the enemies take the form of a clownish zombie who bends over backwards, like in that first screenshot.  The combat is pretty simplistic stuff.  At least it doesn't give you much trouble on medium difficulty.

If we're going to call it an adventure game with a GTA-like facade (the closest facsimile, in my experience, is the overworld component of No More Heroes), then it's still pretty lacking, since there's way too much driving and way too little to do in the town of Greenvale.  The missions are almost invariably some form of point A to point B driving.

So any genre-based review of this game will be quite negative.  It will also be wrong, because this game is an amazing experience and an absolute must-play.  Why?  Well, I'll have to go back to the beginning once again.

(Part 2 to come)