Deadly Premonition

The console video game publishing world is no place for amateurs. Games cost tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money. I’m killing myself right this instant to get the training to enter this workforce – to have the opportunity to play it safe, polish every last feature to the point of MAXIMUM BLING. With all the focus on polish, on cutting out the fat in the design, on focus-tested playability, we’re no longer trying to bring new experiences to players.

Deadly Premonition, an under-budget, over-ambitious, technically compromised 360 title, proves just how badly needed an amateur spirit is in today’s market.

At first glance, Deadly Premonition feels like an old, funky pair of socks(sock-based comparisons are completely in vogue right now). Not funky like a candy-colored, individually-toed sock (Deadly Premonition is more of a beige-and-olive colored game, besides), but the kind of funky that hasn’t been washed and sports 3 unique odors. You’ve seen this game before. It uses the color palette of a PS1 / early PS2 game, with earthy, muted browns, greens, blues, and overdone bloom. The color palette alone was enough to give me a certain nostalgic throwback to that era, where games didn’t look so fussed over and felt stitched-together out of polygon popsicle sticks. It makes me wonder if you can use modern models and effects but still get the retro appeal simply through color palette and sound effects alone. It would seem possible: sound and color are the more subliminal aspects of games, and should be able to trigger emotional memories. Similar to the deep emotional hooks that scents have, sound and color are deeply tied to our multimedia memories. I have a certain fondness for the abstract world of primitive 3d and would like to see it recreated (and I’m inordinately fond of Shadowgate 64 precisely for the primitive, blunt atmosphere).

In spite of its look, Deadly Premonition puts it best face forward right away, introducing the main character through an odd discussion of a codependent abusive relationship…the show Tom and Jerry (this is while the game is showing you pictures of bloody murder scenes). Then his computer crashes and a large blinking red message reads “NOT WORK ERROR,” and he drives past squirrels that sound like monkeys, and we’re off into madness. Deadly Premonition is constantly hilarious, and almost half the time it’s intentional. The script is entirely mad, and the translation is worse. The sound design makes light of murder and gives sinister undertones to a discussion of food, and the animation is extensively wretched (funny!). So this humor is a big part of the game’s appeal, but how much of it is due to incompetence? In other words, yeah, the script is silly, but is the animation supposed to be as bad as it is? Is the Engrish translation a happy coincidence?

I’ll always argue that a developer is most likely aware of flaws in their product, and if I had to guess, I’d argue that the script evolved in reaction to the game’s sickly state. Deadly Premonition arrived at least a year late, and it looks like it was originally designed for the PS2. The game is incredibly over-scoped, with a huge open world and dozens of fetishistically rendered environments and bunches of gameplay features that any experienced producer would have put on the chopping block. In my theoretical narrative, the game was originally supposed to be a Twin Peaks simulator (it’s an adorably shameless ripoff), with large open environments, tons of simulation-like features, and tense gameplay. When they started realizing how short they would fall of this goal, they rewrote the script to be funny, ridiculous, and set out to make the most entertaining game possible. And aren’t games supposed to entertain? Modern games have a tendency to be humorless, dry, and laser-focused on their atmosphere. Any comedy in a game is so polished it feels forced (see: Uncharted). But when developers have fun, when they stop worrying about ‘product consistency’, they can put real humor into their games – like in the early days of the industry, or in today’s indie market, or in student projects. Playing Deadly Premonition, you can feel the devs cracking and making their pie-in-the-sky game outright loony.

Structurally, Deadly Premonition is split between action scenes that play out like Resident Evil 4 and open-world adventure. The action scenes are truly just awful. I really don’t need to waste words describe the multitude of design sins throughout; it’s clearly an area that the development team needs to study up on.

But the game in between is an engaging adventure. Nothing mechanically interesting is going on: you spend your time driving between places, talking to people, and delivering packages. But the structure it’s wrapped in makes it compelling. It has a day-night cycle and full NPC schedules. Much like Harvest Moon, or Zelda: Majora’s Mask, much of the game is in learning what people spend their time doing and planning out your time. It’s time-management; the same system that powers 4X strategy games and the sims; when your brain is engaged in planning, and goals are continually being sketched out such that you always have several items on your plate, you end up with an engaging product. This is the secret to Deadly Premonition’s engaging gameplay: smart structure. Because of its flaws, Deadly Premonition lays out in clear-cut terms that what hooks players in games like these is not the rewards they will get, but the process itself. When the reward system in Metroid works, it’s because the anticipation and the journey to the reward are what’s fun – the reward itself is immaterial. The player is not aware of this generally, but the developer needs to be.

The little touches matter, too. Deadly Premonition is full of things that don’t matter at all, that sane development studios have excised from their games years ago. But these things give a character to the game often lacking from more professional efforts. By their mistakes and peccadilloes, you get a feel for those that made the game – it humanizes it. All art is communication between human beings. So besides being a waste of money, what could be wrong with these things?

OFFICIAL LIST OF UNNECESSARY FEATURES IN DEADLY PREMONITION

  • You have to buy and consume food (can of pickles, anyone?)
  • You have to sleep, and can do so wherever there is an open cot (jail cells too)
  • Real-time beard growth!
  • Dry-clean your suits
  • Peek in the window of anyone’s house – and watch them make dinner, watch TV, sob to themselves
  • Search blood-filled toilets for pills
  • Open empty storage containers (because nothing engages the player like wasting their time)
  • Talk to an NPC while they are in a car and they will roll down the window (maybe it only seems amazing because of how bad the animation is in general)
  • Realistic nature trails that go nowhere but serve the same purpose they do in real life, offering aesthetic pleasure
  • Excruciatingly detailed interiors of diners, convenience stores, with readable text on products and wall graphics (full of Engrish, too)
  • Activate the left or right turn signal on your car, turn the wipers on, honk the horn, turn the lights on

I’d also argue that these features are important to the simulacrum of useless noise in a game that attempts to simulate reality. Heavy Rain’s greatest feat, I think, was in modeling real life by giving the player a bunch of worthless choices and a limited time. Rather than falling prey to the adventure game syndrome of everything you can interact with is important, Heavy Rain makes the player interpret what is important in the game world for themselves. It’s a decision-making muscle that isn’t usually activated in games. In Deadly Premonition, features exist in a scattershot manner that gives the player a general impression of simulation. It’s not an efficient way to do it, but the feeling of realism is transmitted regardless.

So much of what is considered to make a game good and fun is missing from Deadly Premonition, yet it is still compelling. So what is left? Humor, structure, and a very human desire for ‘realism’ through feature-creep. And it still works. Deadly Premonition offers lessons not on how to build a game (heavens, no), but on what any product can have if it drops some of the walls of its own fiction. So, games, stop taking yourselves so seriously! Lighten up, and acknowledge that you were created by fallible human beings! Let the players in on it – and it becomes a joke that players can’t wait to share.

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