Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360, 2010) - Part 2

To start at the beginning, we have to go back to Twin Peaks, the cult TV show that aired for just two seasons in the early 90's.  The show is about an eccentric FBI agent attempting to solve the murder of a high-school girl in a small town in Washington.  It would be an understatement to call Deadly Premonition a tribute to Twin Peaks - the above plot summary would serve just as well for the video game.  In fact, the game goes out of its way to line up as many parallelisms as it possibly can.  To name one of the silliest and most unnecesary, the "Log Lady" from the show becomes the "Pot Lady," who, in a series of Crazy Taxi-esque mini-games, must be delivered to her house from somewhere across town before her pot gets cold.

All of this would only seem to add to the game's failings.  Deadly Premonition sometimes rips off Silent Hill, and sometimes GTA, so why not throw a 90's TV show into the mix?  Except that Twin Peaks is an incredible thing for a game to aspire to.  Trying to explain why the show is so excellent would require another blog post.  Suffice it to say that the show, like many Lynch creations, explores the dark and corrupt underbelly of American values, while simultaneously being a very exciting detective show, with new and bizarre clues to the mystery laid on thick in each episode.

The developers of Deadly Premonition don't have Lynch's mastery of form.  What they do have in common with Lynch is a love for the bizarre and surreal, and the game is a testament to all of the ways in which a game can creep us out, mostly by exploring the far away depths of the uncanny valley.

It's impossible to talk about Deadly Premonition without mentioning the cutscenes, which are impossible to describe without showing an example.

There's so much to point out here.  For example, note the way Polly is hunched over at the beginning.  That's a common Japanese depiction of the elderly.  It's fascinating to see the West filtered through Japanese tropes, which is part of what makes Earthbound so great.

Also, note the bizarre and over-stylized gestures, like the way Morgan smokes.  The developers gave Morgan a series of repeatable gestures like this that show up in nearly every cutscene.  That wouldn't be unusual if these actions weren't extremely poor facsimiles of a way that an actual human behaves.  I should mention that the cutscenes are (perhaps unintentionally) extremely funny - the way that Morgan smokes calmly, while the music blares so loudly that it's near impossible to hear Polly in the background, nearly brought Clare and me to tears - but they also make the game extremely creepy when it wants to be, much in the way that Silent Hill 2 uses the plastic appearance of the character models to highlight the general surrealness of the game.

Of course, there's also the hidden message in the coffee.  Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks also has a great love of coffee, and at times relies on supernatural clues (although the two are never mixed, as far as I can remember). 

But like Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition is often a fairly decent mystery - the "F K" clue is indeed a useful one.  One of the best-implemented features is the way that the myriad suspects all keep to their own schedules in the town of Greenvale, and you're free to spend as much time as you want following them around and spying on them.  This is not a new idea - Lure of the Temptress, the debut game from the Broken Sword developers, tried to do the same thing back in 1992.  But it is still incredibly ambitious, especially for a game ostensibly about shooting monsters.

Indeed, it's the sheer ambition on display that's most impressive about Deadly Premonition.  There's certainly nothing perfect about this game, but it seems clear - especially given the game's lukewarm reception - that there is and probably never will be a game quite like it again.