Deadly Premonition is the reason I got into games writing. I was an Amazon critic back in the day – one of the top-rated on the site at the time – and this was the game that made me want to take it more seriously. Never before had a game challenged me, pushed me, dared me to dig deeper. It was unlike anything I ever played, and remains as such to this day.
A decade later, it feels strange playing Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise. It feels strange because, as a whole, it’s had the opposite effect. Every miserable minute playing this unmitigated disaster of a “game” (I use the term loosely) makes me question my love for the entire medium. This release is the stuff of legends, the kind of thing that deserves to be mentioned alongside Superman 64 or E.T. in terms of quality.
Make no mistake – Deadly Premonition 2 is one of the absolute worst works of art I’ve had the displeasure of engaging with, and an abysmal trainwreck that’s broken right down to its very core.
Looking To The Past (And Stuck In It)
Deadly Premonition 2 is split between two time periods and locales – contemporary Boston and 2005 New Orleans. In both, series protagonist Frances York Morgan is embroiled in a mystery involving the ritual slaughter of a young woman who’s cut into pieces. In 2005, he’s investigating the murder, which takes up the bulk of the game. In the present, he’s under suspicion of being involved with them. As the game goes back and forth between time periods, the mystery unravels and we start getting a clearer picture of the sinister truth.
That core mystery is interesting, admittedly. But the way it’s carried out is nothing short of slipshod, dull, and infuriating. Players are either forced to trudge through repetitious fetch quests or kill time until something happens, or scroll through literal hours of flat dialogue until they’re permitted to proceed. Whatever interest I had in the plot gave way to tedium, as it fails to make the central story even remotely engaging after the first few hours. Even characters that I enjoyed, such as York’s junior sidekick Patricia, couldn’t keep me engaged throughout the plodding, dry story.
It’s also worth mentioning that this game is one of the most racist, sexist, and transphobic pieces of garbage I’ve ever had to sift through in this medium. Look – I love “offensive” media. I like the Postal games (rev up your callout posts now, folks!). I love sleazy 80s exploitation movies. My deep dives in hentai are well-documented. But Deadly Premonition 2 blows those out of the water.
Practically every black character in this game feels like an early 20th century stereotype, and its treatment of its female characters is myopic – and really, truly makes me question what its writers think of women. Those are badit’s worth calling out the trans woman in the game as a particularly noxious example. York continually deadnames and misgenders her after she explicitly tells him how much bigotry she’s endured. That’s bad enough, but the game then goes out of its way to paint her as a violent, misogynistic pervert. You know – the kind of thing that JK Rowling thinks we all are.
After The Missing, a game that made me feel more welcome in the world, this feels like a betrayal from an artist that I trusted. It’s the kind of harmful tripe that allows trans women to be murdered en masse. In a game that already sucks on every other level, it’s an extra kick in the teeth.
A Real Sinner’s Sandwich Of Gameplay
The mechanics certainly don’t help matters. If you’ve played Deadly Premonition, you probably know the basic game flow here. You’re given an open world and told to explore it, engage with the citizens, and get to the bottom of mysteries. There are “dungeons” of sorts – setpieces where survival horror combat is the focus.
Only, somehow, all of this is barely functional compared to the capable, well-oiled machine of the previous game. Hit detection with the guns makes no sense. Skateboarding around town not only destroys the framerate of the game (more on that in a second,) but is unwieldy and easy to lose control of. Progressing the game forces players to engage with busted minigames, time-killing fetch quests, and rote block-pushing puzzles. It fails to grasp what made the original game so compelling and doesn’t understand how to do esoteric open worlds like Shenmue and D2 do.
Which is to say nothing of the David Cage-like present-day sections. It’s genuinely painful to progress dialogue and examine crime scenes in this game, due to an agonizing mix of bad dialogue, slow text box progression, and molasses exploration mechanics. It’s like the developers looked at Quantic Dream games and found a way to make them suck even worse, which is really a feat.
The gameplay itself is compounded by technical issues too numerous to count. This game freezes when you go to a sprint, dips to single-digit frames on the skateboard, crashes after cutscenes, locks up when going into over-the-shoulder aiming, mysteriously clones characters in cutscenes, refuses to recognize button inputs at random, and so much more. Also, the erratic save system means that one of the many crashes you’ll experience could erase a bunch of progress and prevent you from progressing.
There’s “unpolished,” and there’s “pre-alpha build of a launch Xbox 360 video game.” It’s an embarrassment that anybody thought this was fit for publishing.
No Blessings Here
Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise is a broken game on multiple levels. Its narrative is broken, in that its interesting core mystery fails to engage due to the most agonizing delivery possible. Its ideologies are broken, as it seems to think trans people are evil, women are weak, and black people are sentient stereotypes. The rest of it – the abysmal gameplay, unacceptable performance, tendency to crash – is no better.
Deadly Premonition is an all-time favorite game still. Swery remains my favorite game director in the business. Few high profile developers in this mess of an industry, outside of perhaps Yoko Taro or Kenji Eno, have produced works that are so earnest in their intent, so ambitious in their scope, so bold in their execution. But Deadly Premonition 2 has undone a decade of goodwill, and made me question the intent behind every work of art its creator has produced. Because it’s a game that, ultimately, has hate in its heart.
You hear that, Zach? It’s the sound of my heart breaking.
Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise
A Switch copy of Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise was purchased by TheGamer for this review. Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise is available now for Nintendo Switch.
Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise