DEADLY PREMONITION IS THE GAME YOU WERE BORN TO AVOID

I don’t know whose job it is to crack whip on the autistic gnomes in the engine room of the Japanese gamemaking industry, but lately, they’ve been slacking. Time was, all you needed was a chipped PlayStation to get access to some of the strangest and most wonderful bullshit imaginable: games that played like cheese dreams or waking up hungover in another dimension. The rate of batshit mentalism emanating from the Land of the Rising Sun has slowed of late, so thank god, then, for Deadly Premonition. Imagine Twin Peaks shot on a budget of $140 with a cast sourced entirely from a methadone clinic and you’ve nearly envisioned Deadly Premonition.

I’m not referring to Twin Peaks because I want to “talk your language,” nor because I wear Cheap Mondays and I wanna be jeans twins. In 2007, when the gaming press first clapped eyes on Access Games’ title (then called Rainy Woods) at the Tokyo Game Show, so many of them made comparisons to David Lynch’s famously fucked-up TV series that the publishers shat themselves and pretended it never existed. By the time the game finally came out in America last year, the more obvious “nods” to Twin Peaks had been removed, its name had been changed and it made even less sense than it did before.

That said, the plot continues to revolve around an FBI agent–Francis York Morgan–who turns up in a small, forbidding town populated with weirdos in order to investigate a murder. Despite the game’s title and the protagonist’s tendency to look for the future in his cup of coffee every morning like a particularly inept gypsy, Francis York Morgan lacks any of the premonitory power of Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper. Instead, he spends the majority of the game moving distractedly from place-to-place like a businessman looking for his keys.

At the start of the game, Morgan is driving. For reasons unknown, he tries to light two cigarettes at once, and promptly crashes his car into a ditch. As he’s dragging himself from the wreckage, he comes under attack from dozens of weird apparitions all trying to shove their fists down his throat. Having secured his escaped by stabbing or shooting all of these mystery fuckjobs, Francis is collected by town sheriff Harry Truman George Woodman.

This is when things start to get really strange, because it’s not Deadly Premonition’s out-and-out horror moments that creep you out so much as when it tries to recreate everyday, suburban life. To this end, the game breaks the fourth wall with dialogue between Morgan and an imaginary friend (i.e. you) who he refers to as “Zach”. The relationship between this pair goes far beyond blatant–but admittedly helpful–pointers like “That man! Remember him from the gas station, Zach?” For instance, whenever Morgan’s alone in the car, he’ll casually engage “Zach” in conversation about old movies. I spent half of this game driving around in circles, just to keep Morgan jabbering about Tremors or An American Werewolf in London or that one time he went to the VHS rental place and just couldn’t decide.

Outside of Morgan, everybody in the town is overloaded with tics, obsessions and opinions. The sheriff’s back is covered in scars which he is terribly ashamed of, and whenever he’s alone in his office he weightlifts obsessively with dumbbells that he’s named after girls he’s screwed. Harry Stewart, who the game refers to as a “mysterious capitalist”, is a wheelchair-bound millionaire who owns half the town and has an assistant who expresses Stewart’s wishes in rhyming couplets. Meantime, the entire game’s set to a deeply unsettling soundtrack of gay saxophone and shameless kazoo. Welcome to Deadly Premonition.

I’ll tell you straight up. This might just be the best game ever made. But why take it from me? Have a look for yourself.

QUINTIN SMITH