Deadly Premonition was a funny old game, an earnestly idiosyncratic tribute to the sensibilities of its creators wrapped up in a Twin Peaks style murder mystery. Of course it's that last part that caused it to pop up somewhere on my radar in the early to mid part of the last decade, anything that even partly channels the weird sensibilities of Twin Peaks and David Lynch invariably gets my attention but back to the game. This is a murder mystery, a dream like odyssey through the unknown and a reckoning with oneself that I wasn't quite prepared for.
Short form social media wasn't all the rage just yet when this game was released, yet Deadly Premonition found a popular little online niche for itself that captured the imagination of much of the gaming public. A curiously beguiling mix of gaming oddity that shouldn't have worked as well as it should have. Indeed some would say it barely worked at all. As to why it worked for me, well I think there is something to be said about that ending...
General spoiler warning in effect for Deadly Premonition...
Before we get there however, a few mandatory notes about the game itself. Initially released on the Xbox 360 in 2010 as a reboot of Rainy Woods, a game that was announced and never released. From the start this game poses many questions like for instance, can you reboot a game that never happened? In any case its developer Access Games had a tall order on its hands here and looking at the end product I still feel their ambition was in the right place even if everything else wasn't quite where it needed to be to deliver on their vision for this game.
It starts with what I dare say is one of those iconic videos game openings. In a vaguely autumnal forest a pair of strange children walk and play alongside an elderly relative when they chance upon a dead body strung up in the foliage. It's all a bit sinister and ritualistic. The resolution on the tree textures is blurry, the music is unsettling and straight away you get a very clear idea of the tone the game is going for. In a very Twin Peaks fashion this prompts the arrival in town of FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan as he reflects on the facts of the case with his imaginary friend/voice in his head Zach. More on this later.
Now this game is technically survival horror an ond yes there are horror sections here but I don't think you can call it a horror game in the definitive sense. The open world you play in opens up the space to other possibilities. You stay in a hotel in town, you muse over your breakfast choices, you talk with the strange old lady who is definitely not the Log Lady. You interact with a wide range of quirky characters. You engage in nightmarish pursuits as the so-called 'Raincoat Killer' chases you down. You navigate the breakfast menu again. You navigate a haunting dreamscape. You shave. You talk to Zach and so on.
Hopefully at this point you're getting a sense of what made Deadly Premonition so unique at least as far video games go. This blend of elements was not new to pop culture but I am hard pressed to name any other game that took it to heart as well as this one did. The off kilter sense of the quirky and the macabre was really well realized and sticks with me still all these years later. There is ample warmth and heart to balance out the grotesque nightmares plaguing the town of Greenvale. Again yes Twin Peaks did it first but that doesn't mean the creators of this game didn't pull off a neat trick in capturing that potent blend of mood and atmosphere.
I am aware I haven't actually talked about the ending yet and leaving no fourth wall unbroken I will get there eventually. It's important to note what works so well for this game because a whole lot of it doesn't work very well at all. I am of course talking about the game from a technical perspective here as it was famously a janky piece of software even by the standards of fifteen years ago. The controls were sluggish, the combat was a chore, the frame rate chugged along despite some seriously pared back visuals. The driving sections are dull not to mention the numerous glitches throughout the game that threatened to make you turn it off for good long before you reach the end.
In short it was a barely functioning piece of software that succeeded in spite of itself. Even after the game broke out as a cult hit, these technical problems did not go away. Myself I played the PS3 version that came out a few years later. You might think that Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut might have patched away all of the aforementioned issues but you would be wrong. It really is a tribute to the power of the Internet and its ability to broadcast niche peculiarities to the wider world that this game got the foothold it did in the gaming subculture. This was a game that on the face of it could have very easily come and gone with barely a trace left to indicate it was ever here. Thankfully that didn't happen because I think this game definitely has something going for it that transcends both the technical limitations as well as it's heavy reliance on a certain TV show I may have mentioned already.
Over the course of the investigation we dive deeper into the head of our main character Francis York Morgan. A guy prone to monologuing his thoughts as he delves into the history of the town and the links between his current case and past events. He's a little eccentric but with a strong moral grounding. Very much an examplar of the affable good natured investigator trying to make sense of the insensible in an uncertain world. Very Agent Cooper at the surface but as the game progresses we realize he is harbouring some serious trauma bequeathed to him by the traumatic death of his parents in circumstances his mind shields from him. A fleeting vision of grisly circumstances involving his parents and the words of his father that some things cannot be allowed to exist in this world. As the game progresses we slowly build a picture of what this horror might be...
Until the ending that is. When the curtain is lifted and the murderer is revealed, York is faced with the same choice his father faced all those years ago. His mother was killed in the same bizarre way as the victims in the present, 'planted' with red seeds that bloom into red plants, subjecting the victim to an excruciating demise in the process. In the present York now sees it happening to his love interest and must confront the same dilemma that traumatized him as a child. A recurring fragment of memory reminds him of his father's words that some things simply cannot be allowed to be.
So a difficult choice is made and all the barriers York has put into place to protect himself from his childhood trauma fall by the wayside and for the first time York truly 'meets' Zach. For you see Zach wasn't a voice in his head and York wasn't the child in that childhood memory. The mastermind behind it all did the same thing to his mother but his dad couldn't bring himself to put her out of her misery so he offed himself in front of him. In this moment of bleakest sorrow, a small child named Zach creates a split personality, an alter-ego to protect himself from this horror called York, a mechanism by which he survived the horror and the tragedy. York was the shield that kept the horror at bay for as long as Zach needed him to, but in confronting the horror again Zach heals himself and finds he no longer needs York.
After the mastermind is confronted and defeated, we get what has to be one of my favourite endings to a video game. An unexpectedly emotional conclusion to a journey that was as intriguing as it could be frustrating. One final meeting between Zach and York in a forest of red trees alongside all the deceased characters we've met along the way. One man letting go of his trauma in a bittersweet and strangely poignant farewell to a part of himself that now needs to go (special note to the soundtrack here as it is pretty outstanding in this moment). The game doesn't go hard on the emotional beats leading up to this moment, instead leaning more on quirky small-town warmth for most of the games playtime. So when this moment hits, it hits hard.
What else is there left to say? Sometimes even when you think you've got a game all figured out it can still surprise you in the closing moments. Games usually start strong but don't finish as well as they begin. Here though Deadly Premonition pulled off a trick and made it's last impression both meaningful and emotionally resonant despite all the issues that threaten to drag down the rest of the experience. It's that rare special something that elevates a broken game to the status of an all-time great. Whilst I don't think I'll ever play it again, it's an ending that lingers with me in the best possible way.
Obligatory comment here about how the game spiritually rooted in Twin Peaks finally steps out of its shadow in the eleventh hour and goes in a direction that's very much its own.
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