Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2012-03-13
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★☆☆☆
A disappointing entry in the Silent Hill series, Downpour’s flaws stem from a few major design decisions.

Silent Hill Downpour is a disappointing game. It is clearly the worst Silent Hill game to date, and it was justly panned by the press. But what the press can’t agree on is what exactly is wrong with it. Some reviewers like the combat system, others hate it. Some reviewers abhorred the story, others found it interesting. The problems with the game are many, but there’s no consensus on which are the worst.

It’s not that Downpour is half-assed; it is clearly the product of a huge amount of effort. You can tell by looking at it; the art and story and design are deep enough that somebody must have thought about this game pretty hard. The developers clearly know the series; it’s not an exaggeration to describe the game as an amalgamation of previous Silent Hill mechanics and scenes. While there are bugs and other execution problems, it’s not glitches or poor programming that ruins the game. Rather, this is one of those rare games that takes a gamble on a Big Idea, a wholly different approach, and fails miserably. I suspect that the disagreement about which aspects of Downpour are rotten stem from a macro-level design problem, a single decision that caused ripple effects throughout the design of the game. Depending on where you look, you might see a ripple and identify it as a problem. But the real problem is larger, more basic, and its influence is pervasive.

Identifying this underlying flaw can be difficult. It’s hard to separate the symptoms of the disease from the affliction itself. I’d like to work backwards from some mundane execution issues until we discover Silent Hill Downpour’s core problem, the root of all of its other issues. Let us treat the shape of this game is a tree so that we can start at one of the leafs and attempt to make our way back to the trunk.

To that end, let’s start with a rather simple–but frustrating–user interface problem. One of the most annoying things about Silent Hill Downpour is that a “Press A to Pick Up” icon appears every few steps. Murphy, the protagonist, can barely cross the street without being prompted to pick something up. Sometimes he’s discovered an important item, but usually it’s a weapon which will be swapped for Murphy’s current weapon if he decides to collect it. The problem is that the same prompt is used for both items and weapons, which destroys your ability to ransack the area for important items and clues. You can cover a space looking for items, but mostly you’ll only find weapons that you do not want; if you are carrying around a shotgun you’re not about to drop it for a brick. Can you imagine an Adventure-style game that is filled with useless junk which you must sift through to find the one important item? Worse, you can’t actually see what it is that the game wants you to pick up; you must spin the camera up and around until you locate a glowing item on the ground. You do this every few feet. Take a few steps, look at the item pickup. Take a few more steps. Look at the item pickup. It is infuriating.

Let’s move a level up. Why are there crappy weapons strewn all over the ground? The answer is that weapons in Silent Hill Downpour degrade over time and will eventually break. A broken weapon leaves you defenseless, and even if you run away you’ll need to find another weapon before you can progress. But weapons break based on the way the player uses them, and thus the developers can’t control when the weapon will fall apart. Their solution was simply to blanket the game in weapons, thereby solving the problem of becoming defenseless at arbitrary times but simultaneously making it very difficult to find non-weapon items.

Another level up. Why do weapons break in the first place? Is it because they broke in Silent Hill: 0rigins? 0rigins also had weapons that would degrade, and left items around the world as a result. But 0rigins also allowed its protagonist to carry multiple items and swap between them quickly; it even had an indicator of how much more abuse a given weapon could take before breaking. Thus the player can spam the collect button to ransack an area without fear of losing their current weapon. Downpour has none of these things: it limits weapons to one firearm and one other item, there is no durability indicator, and items can’t be stored in the inventory as a backup. If breakable weapons had just been lifted from 0rigins, it seems like they would have gone ahead and lifted the whole 0rigins system. No, items need to break for some other reason.

We’re close to the trunk now. What would happen if weapons didn’t break? Well, you’d find the most powerful weapon (the fire axe, I think), and just carry that around through the whole game, thus rendering the entire weapon system moot. This was never a problem in earlier Silent Hill games because they were basically linear; the developers could easily schedule the release of new weapons to the player (not to mention new enemies) because they controlled the order in which items could be found. This way, previous games in the series used weapon pick-ups as a way to control the level of difficulty (and tension) across the length of the game. Downpour, on the other hand, is based on an open world design, where the player has much more freedom of movement than in previous games, and consequently weapons cannot be easily scheduled.

This is it. This is Downpour’s Big Idea: it is the first Silent Hill game to feature a large, open world for its town. Most other Silent Hill games have featured large outdoor areas, but they’ve never been really open; they’ve always been walled off at the edges so that the player is lead along a very specific path. The open world is a significant deviation from the series norm, and it is the core problem with the game’s design.

We’ve reached the trunk of the design, the root of the game’s decision tree. From here we can see other branches leading to other problems caused by the decision to employ an open world. Let’s follow one down.

I believe that what the developers at Vatra wanted was to make the entire town of Silent Hill a large recursive unlocking space, where the player would criss-cross the map many times, collecting items and solving puzzles on the way, all while progressively widening the available space. Much like the Resident Evil mansion, you might need an item from one side of town to solve a puzzle on the other side of town. Only, the space is much, much larger than the compact Umbrella stronghold. Though you have a map, borders of the space must be traced manually because there are blockades and abysses in the way, not to mention back alleys and side-street shortcuts.

One level down. The size of Silent Hill required the developer to reuse art heavily–it’s just too big to be completely unique. The houses in Downpour’s Silent Hill all look very similar, and some of them even share identical layouts with identical rooms. This isn’t because the developers were lazy (no shipping game was made by lazy developers), but rather the result of a trade-off between the size of the town and the cost of creating high-end art. Consequently Silent Hill is really easy to get lost in; there are not enough identifiable landmarks to get a sense of whether or not you’ve visited this street before (not to mention the ever-present layer of fog that covers the landscape). While each room in Resident Evil’s mansion has a different color scheme, a unique camera perspective, and an identifiable theme, the streets of Downpour’s Silent Hill all look the same.

Another level down. Herein lies a major problem for the designers. If they want the player to criss-cross the landscape, but the landscape is very large and lacks variety, they run the risk of frustrating the player with item quests. Say you need a particular key from one side of town to unlock a particular door on the other side of town. In classic Silent Hill design, this door represents the next step in the story progression–you can’t move forward until you open it. But the key could be anywhere! Do you really want to spend hours running up and down similar-looking streets, trying to find something–anything–that you might have missed before, hoping that it will lead you to the key so that you can progress? No, of course you don’t–nobody does. That sort of item search-a-thon has destroyed games with much smaller problem spaces. In a game like Downpour, where the problem space is huge, it could be deadly.

We’re approaching the end of this branch. The designers of must have struggled with this problem, and the solution they settled on is two-fold. First, they made almost all of the item puzzles optional. If you explore the homes of Silent Hill you will run across puzzles, generally requiring you to go somewhere or collect items, often by backtracking, which you can choose to complete or ignore. Secondly, the designers placed all of the required missions upon a linear path through the town. If you ignore the side missions and just progress towards the next story point you can complete the game without ever backtracking, thus saving you from potential search-a-thon frustration. On paper this seems like a great solution: players do not need to solve every puzzle in order to progress (resolving the key-in-the-haystack problem), and the player himself can regulate how quickly he progresses through the game. People who b-line for the end will have a linear experience similar to classic Silent Hill, while those who embrace the open world are given a bunch of secondary goals for which they must solve interesting traversal challenges. High-five, problem solved!

The leaf problem. In practice the approach does not work as well as I assume the designers had hoped it would. Here the shadow of a single design decision–the idea to make Silent Hill an open world–looms over the entire game, affecting the very core of it in ways that probably were not obvious at the onset of development. The result of the optional side-missions, at least for me, was a complete lack of agency. The game keeps telling us that Murphy is just trying to get out of Silent Hill, trying to escape as quickly as possible. But then it expects us to, in the middle of our flight from danger and his past, drop everything and search the town for some paintings? He should put his escape on hiatus while he scatters the ashes of some stranger somewhere in order to get an item that he already has? Downpour also shies away from setting explicit destinations, so a lot of the time in Silent Hill is spent running around aimlessly, taking turns at random, hoping that something new to do will show up. And if we solve the puzzles, then what? There doesn’t seem to be any gameplay benefit to the side-quests; any weapons handed out will break eventually anyway, and other than an achievement and possibly a story anecdote, there’s no reward offered for traversing Silent Hill more than once. Even worse, at the end of the game the character is pulled out of the town abruptly and never has a chance to go back and complete missions that are half-solved. I ended the game with an inventory full of worthless items that I spent a lot of time discovering but never actually put to any use.

The idea that Silent Hill itself should be an open, explorable world must have sounded good at first. It must have seemed like a great way to differentiate the game from the rest of the series without straying too far from the core elements of Silent Hill. It is a lofty goal, a genuine Big Idea. But I think it hurts the game deeply, and that its aftershocks retard almost every other major system in the game. It is the trunk of the game, but its core is diseased and the sickness reaches all the way out to the leafs of the design. The open world is, in my mind, Silent Hill Downpour’s most significant design failure.

But the open world is just a gameplay system, and Silent Hill games are more than just systems. The series was not made famous by its level design or combat system or inventory screen. It was made famous by its narrative, its characters, and its emotional affect. It’s the content of Silent Hill games, rather than the core mechanics, that keep the audience interested. Though we may spend most of our time climbing the tree, our real goal is to reach a vantage point from which we can observe the surrounding landscape.

We can, if we choose, write off all of the mechanical problems discussed so far as unhappy side-effects of the open world design. Sure, there are annoying flaws and bugs to be found in the nuts and bolts of the game, but it is not unplayable. Perhaps this is one of those diamond-in-the-rough games, and if we look passed its dreary gameplay we might find a compelling narrative lurking. Let us, then, turn our attention to the surrounding landscape.

The ground is dry and spotted with weeds. The key to any successful narrative is pacing. Silent Hill Downpour certainly looks like a Silent Hill game, but it does not feel like one. There is a serious lack of cohesion in the pacing of the game, the structure of the story, and even the characters it involves. There are visual and narrative motifs that are painstakingly introduced and then apparently forgotten. Questions are raised and then discarded. Game mechanics are introduced, taught to the player, and then never once used again. The nozzle controlling the flow of the story only seems to have two settings: information overload or deathly silence.

Bits of trash are scattered everywhere. Here’s an example. The first two or three hours of Silent Hill Downpour play completely differently than the rest of the game. There are mechanics introduced (such as a yes/no question system with character morality implications) that are never revisited. The game spends quite a bit of time introducing crows as a foreshadowing motif, only to then forget them completely. There’s an otherworld transition involving fire that is replicated once more and then never used again. A ledge-grab sequence in the second hour is not used again until the very end of the game. Murphy spends some significant time in a cave with his lighter (rarely used thereafter) reading about its history (which has no subsequent bearing on anything), and fighting a monster type that we never really encounter again. The game teaches you how to throw weapons, a move deemed so valuable that the right trigger is dedicated to it, and this is a move you will perform once for the tutorial and then never again for the length of the game (except by accident, when you discard your weapon in the heat of battle and die as a result).

Downpour does this over and over again, although the worst offenses occur in the opening scenes. It’s as if these first segments were developed independently of the rest of the game–not only does it not feel like a Silent Hill game, it doesn’t feel like the rest of Silent Hill Downpour.

The road runs right off a cliff. Downpour’s most damning failure, I think, is the pacing. Since its inception the Silent Hill series has operated on a consistent rhythm. There’s a descent into the fog world, followed by some time in an indoor section that builds tension up to a breaking point. Just as the tempo reaches its crescendo the fog world is replaced by the otherworld and the level of tension is suddenly doubled. Rather than rising and falling, Silent Hill’s otherworld transition cranks the tempo up to maximum and then holds it there. The player is put under sustained stress as he traverses the otherworld until finally he is released back into the fog world, more dangerous now than before but a welcome respite from the oppression of the otherworld. Recent Silent Hill games have tweaked the formula slightly, but they have all maintained a rhythm to the progression. Beats in the narrative are followed by beats in the gameplay. The pattern of gradual increase of stress, followed by a long, constant stress, followed by release and relief has been used in every Silent Hill game to date.

A thick haze blankets the landscape. For all the bits of pervious Silent Hill games Downpour attempts to copy, it completely fails to reproduce the rhythm that makes the series feel familiar. Part of the problem is the open world, as the duration spent in that area can’t be easily controlled by the developers and thus it’s never clear exactly when the next story point is coming. Downpour does periodically route the player into an extended indoor area (a library, a church, etc), and these areas are where the game is the strongest. And the game has a few startling otherworld transitions as well (such as the Hansel and Gretel sequence). But for the most part, the otherworld transitions happen at random times, often in the middle of mundane, tension-free play. The first transition in the game happens much earlier than any other Silent Hill game to date, at least as best as I can recall: we’re thrown into the otherworld in the first 30 minutes, long before the game has had a chance to really get its hooks in us and ratchet up the tension. Then the otherworld vanishes for several hours, only to return after a tension-free cutscene. The timing is completely inconsistent; there are no discernible beats in the narrative and the transition points feel arbitrary.

The otherworld often involves a running sequence inspired by Shattered Memories (with shades of the red fog section of Silent Hill 3) and is initially a high-tension experience. But as with Shattered Memories, these sections lose their power when they become more difficult. Running through a maze is not very fun, and if you die and restart it is much less fun (and much less tension-inducing) the second (or third, or fifteenth) time around. After restarting a few times you’re thinking about the set of commands you’ll need to input to progress rather than the symbolic implications of the corridors Murphy passes through. Occasionally the game will drop Murphy off in a non-chase otherworld area, but these are not very effective either; the oppressive feel of every other Silent Hill otherworld is completely missing from Downpour’s.

The weak otherworld, made even more impotent by the lack of build-up before its introduction, makes Downpour feel like a random jumble of scenes connected by long, monotonous open world sequences. The tight tension spring, so deftly coiled and released in previous games, is absent. It sometimes feels more like a slinky.

We climbed Silent Hill Downpour’s gnarled gameplay tree and are rewarded with a desolate scene; an inconsistent and untidy, even spatially suspect landscape. The angles do not align, the ground has giant fissures running through it. Neither the climb nor the view are rewarding; there is no glory in the challenge and no value in the prize. The careful gardening that made the early Silent Hill games so wonderful is nowhere to be found here. It’s like an alternate dimension Silent Hill game where things are really bad and nothing makes sense. Quite like a scene from Silent Hill itself, I guess.

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2010-05-14
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Great writing saves this psychological action thriller from its slightly-too-simple gameplay.

Alan Wake does not bill itself as a horror game. It’s a “psychological action thriller,” which is a label that very clearly describes what the game is about. There are supernatural elements, sure; the protagonist for which the game is named spends most of his time fighting The Taken, people who have been possessed and entirely consumed by an evil force called The Dark Presence. But it’s really not a horror game, and makes almost no concerted effort to scare. However, pending the creation of Chris’ Psychological Action Thriller Quest, I feel pretty comfortable including Alan Wake here; even if it’s not really a horror game, it’s in the company of friends.

It’s hard to write about Alan Wake without revealing parts of the story, which is very much worth experiencing in its original game form. In the interest of keeping this spoiler free, I’m going to talk about Alan Wake in terms of its successes and failures without a lot of actual examples.

The core game loop in Alan Wake is surprisingly similar to Obscure (though there’s no two-player mode, sigh). The central combat mechanic involves using a flashlight (which can be boosted for a short amount of time) to burn away a nebulous darkness that protects The Taken. Once the darkness is gone, you can take them down with regular pistols. This is very similar to Obscure, though the execution is much better than in Hydravision’s earlier example. A typical moment in Alan Wake will involve Wake running through a dark forest when he is suddenly jumped by a couple of scythe-wielding Taken. Guns are ineffective until the protective darkness has been burned away, so the moment-to-moment play consists of dodging away from attacks, keeping the light on each enemy, and then taking them down when they are vulnerable. There are a few other weapons occasionally at Wake’s disposal, such as flare guns and flashbangs, which are highly effective. But most of the game is just running around in the dark, getting jumped by guys, and shooting them.

And, as far as horror games go, that’s a pretty simple core loop. It’s very common for horror games to select simplified combat mechanics in exchange for improved narrative control, so Alan Wake is hardly alone here, but the effect of its simpleness is amplified because the main focus of the game is, unlike many other horror games, action. If you’ve seen reviews lamenting Wake as “repetitive,” it’s probably because people got tired of shooting guys in a dark forest after a while. I can see where they are coming from.

On the other hand, Alan Wake goes all out in its attempt to increase its interestingness along another axis: narrative. Unlike many of the other games on this site, Wake’s narrative is not one of these combination-of-confusing-details sort of thing; though the story itself is a little convoluted, it plays out in a very straightforward fashion. As I said in the opening, it’s almost impossible to talk about the story in Alan Wake without spoiling something, so I’ll just say that the story in Wake is pretty good. It’s got that Stephen King-esque taint-of-evil-hiding-in-rural-America style down pat, and throws in a fairly interesting twist to the whole thing (which, at the end of the game, left me wondering how it could all work out, like a time travel movie in which a character kills his father). Alan Wake’s narrative unfolds in two different, though not entirely orthogonal, directions: as cut scenes and game events which take place as you play, and as bits of manuscript that Wake finds throughout the levels. The way these two connect is pretty interesting; though lots of horror games have documents and manuscripts to find, none of them work quite in the same way as the ones in Wake.

In addition, the writing and dialog in Alan Wake is really good. In particular, Wake’s agent Barry steals the show. But even Wake himself is pretty interesting, and there are several other complicated (for a video game) characters that make their appearance. The manuscript pages themselves are excerpts from an unfinished novel of Wake’s, and remind me of the novel snippets in Deus Ex, although in this game the content is much more directly related to the events of the game. I think the narrative is easily the strongest part of Alan Wake.

Alan Wake is also one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen. The characters are a little weird (damn you, uncanny valley), but the environmental art is absolutely phenomenal. Seriously, I’m not really the type of gamer that cares about graphics, but Alan Wake is a really, really nice looking game.

Where things start to go astray is the level design and combat loop. The combat loop, as I mentioned before, is pretty simple, but its simplicity isn’t a problem in and of itself. Rather, the way that enemies appear is a little problematic. Wake will often be running through a forest when suddenly it gets a little darker, and shadows seem to move quickly across the landscape. This is your cue that enemies are about, and you should expect to be attacked in the next minute or two. Since the game takes place in large, open areas, enemies will often approach Wake from the side or from behind. To deal with this problem, the game has a pretty cool effect where it slows time down, pans the camera out to reveal the approaching enemy, and plays a tension-increasing stinger sound, all at the same time. The result is that you see approaching enemies, even those behind you, in a way that gets your blood pumping.

This works really well at first, but once the enemies have been revealed game waits for a while before using the effect again. During a given fight, enemies tend to come from all directions, so it’s not uncommon to be attacked by guys that are behind you. It really sucks to get hit by somebody you can’t see, and that problem is aggravated by ranged enemies that throw blades at you. Even worse, Wake can take hits while he is already reacting to another hit, meaning that if you have bad luck and are hit by two or three guys at the same time, it’s basically instant death.

The levels are also quite large; the traversable space is sometimes so wide (especially in the forest) that it’s hard to tell which way you should be going. Alan Wake actually provides a really cool HUD to solve this (something I haven’t seen before, a sort of “this general direction” cursor), but during a fight it’s very easy to get disoriented. And since almost every level takes place at night, the darkness of the environment adds to the confusion.

But the large level design actually hurts Alan Wake in another, more important way: it makes exploring for the purposes of item collection a chore. I ranted about this a bit already, but the size of the levels conflicts with Alan Wake’s collection quests. Most importantly, it makes finding the manuscript pages, which is the key element that keeps the game interesting in the face of its somewhat simple game play, pretty unfun. It turns out that most (but not all!) of the pages are placed in places that you’ll naturally run across just by playing, but as a player there’s no way that you can be guaranteed to find every page unless you carefully search each area. I went over each level with a fine tooth comb because I really wanted to read all the manuscripts, and let me tell you, walking around it a super dark forest tracing the edges of the accessible space is not very fun (and, despite my best efforts, I still didn’t find every page). These levels were not made to be ransacked–they were made to be fairly linear passages for the player as he travels from one scene to the next. But because the placement of the manuscript pages (and, to a much lesser extent, the collectable coffee thermoses) is unpredictable, a player must choose to either sweep every level for hidden items or run straight through and live with a lot less story detail. It sucks that those two are in conflict and such a decision is even necessary.

And that’s really the only major misstep that Alan Wake makes. It’s not a complicated game (other than the graphics tech–sheesh), but it also hits the mark most of the time. I felt that confusion about the levels, the placement of collectables, and some of the combat mechanics damaged the game a bit, but on the other hand I enjoyed the interesting story, I liked the presentation format that it used, and I really liked the characters that it stars. There are no problems with controls or anything like that–Alan Wake doesn’t waste any time on pedestrian design flaws, but it does get bogged down with a few meta-flaws.

Still, it’s a very fun game and, despite being steeped in classic American horror, it’s pretty unique in this genre. Though simple, I think it’s the kind of thing that pretty much every horror fan will enjoy.

Also known as: Red Seeds Profile
Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2010-02-23
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★★
This fascinating translation of Twin Peaks to game form isn’t harmed by a few rough edges.

What follows is a long article about Deadly Premonition. I originally posed this as four separate posts on the front page, but here I’ve collected all four posts into a single document. This is tl;dr territory.

This isn’t really a review as much as a stream of consciousness; the game pushes a lot of buttons and rather than trying to enumerate them all, I think I’ll just meditate on the game a bit. That seems like the correct way to approach this particular game.

Before I get started, let me give a short mini-review for folks who don’t care what games mean. Deadly Premonition is Twin Peaks, in game form, as seen through Japanese eyes. Though wacky, it’s fairly low-tech; some of the mechanics are extremely rough, the game play systems feel at least a generation old, and it’s not going to win any awards for prettiness. But what Deadly Premonition lacks in technical polish it more than makes up for in storytelling, characters, and most importantly, its integration of game design and visual presentation. It’s worth playing for any of those pieces, and in combination the game is fascinating. Deadly Premonition is to Resident Evil 5 what Tetsuo the Iron Man is to Terminator 2. If you have any interest in games that experiment with story telling and mechanics, Deadly Premonition is more than worth your time.

THE UNCANNY

The internet, particularly one specific blog about games, has made a big deal out of the ridiculousness of Deadly Premonition. The music doesn’t match the scenes, the characters and dialog are often nonsensical, and the whole thing has a decidedly strange sense of humor. It’s very easy to write this strangeness off as normal “Japanese insanity,” and in truth, there are a few aspects of the game that seem strange because of culture clash. But I think that chalking Deadly Premonition’s strangeness up to the cultural divide is a vast oversimplification; classifying it as weird just because it came from a foreign country does the game, and its designers, a disservice. Deadly Premonition is weird, but the odd, off-beat rhythm that it follows–something Freud calls ‘the uncanny’— is entirely intentional.

The way to think about Deadly Premonition is to consider it the game version of Twin Peaks, the fantastic TV show by David Lynch and Mark Frost. I went back and watched Twin Peaks while playing Deadly Premonition, and the similarities are unarguable; some characters and scenes have been directly lifted from the seminal show for use in this game. At one point I was having trouble remembering which events were unique to the game and which had occurred in the show’s plot as well. Replace the Log Lady with the Pot Lady, substitute the town of Greenvale for Twin Peaks itself, and insert Agent Francis ‘York’ Morgan in the role of Agent Dale Cooper, and you have created Deadly Premonition out of Twin Peaks. To say that one is influenced by the other is an understatement; though the stories do branch and change, for most intents and purposes, Deadly Premonition is Twin Peaks. The game even opens after each reload with a video summarizing recent events, mimicking the way Twin Peaks and other shows open with a short summary of the previous episode.

Both Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition star FBI agents who use unconventional means to locate their suspects. Agent Cooper throws rocks at a milk bottle while Agent York goes fishing for missing files. They both have a love of food, particularly coffee, and they both speak with a timbre that we, and the other characters in the game, find strange. Both are visiting rural American towns from the big city, both are investigating the murder of a young woman with a double life, and both are outsiders. They both use dreams to guide them, and find significance in bits of evidence that appears inconsequential to the police. Agent Cooper notices a picture of a suspect on a particular magazine page and Agent York gathers clues by reading words out of his morning coffee.

It is within this context that Deadly Premonition must be understood. The game is not a carbon copy of Twin Peaks, but it’s a very close relative, like The Magnificent Seven is to Seven Samurai.

And within the context of Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition’s strangeness doesn’t seem so out of place. Twin Peaks itself is very strange; there is much that goes unexplained, so many scenes that leave the viewer feeling more confused than ever. This is, after all, a production involving David Lynch, a director who’s never been particularly interested in handing the answers to his audience on a silver platter. No, the strangeness in Deadly Premonition is mostly intentional, as it is in Twin Peaks. Agent York sort of acts like a lunatic because that’s the sort of personality required to resolve the mystery with which he is tasked. Agent Cooper is able to track his ghostly killer because he is able to follow a path that leads away from the rational world and yet eventually arrives at the correct result. Deadly Premonition may be strange, but it’s strange for a reason, and that reason has a lot more to do with its story than just being from Japan.

That said, the sort of unbalanced, off-kilter, uncanny feeling that Deadly Premonition promotes is indeed at least partially the result of culture shock. As I’ve written here many times before, culture shock is an asset to horror because it makes us feel like we’ve lost control. Deadly Premonition does this intentionally as well, but as with many other Japanese games, its very foreignness helps it scare us. The town of Greenvale itself is perhaps the most obvious example of this effect. The town looks like a rural American town in the Pacific Northwest; it has been painstakingly reproduced in digital form by the developers, who visited parts of Oregon and Washington to do location research during Deadly Premonition’s development. As diligently as it’s been recreated, Greenvale feels, to my American eyes (and as somebody who grew up in Oregon), a little like something out of The Twilight Zone. It reminds me of Santa Destroy from No More Heros, another game by Japanese developers that attempts to recreate an American town (though that one appears to be in Southern California). Little things here and there are wrong; for example, not only does each street in Greenvale have a name, the street names change every block. Most streets in Japan do not have names, so perhaps the designers at Access Games misunderstood how street names are used in the US. Or perhaps it was intentional. So much is intentionally odd in this game that it’s hard to tell. Whatever the rationale, the result is that Deadly Premonition can be more engaging and upsetting than it has any right to be.

THREE KEY SUCCESSES

The August 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine has a lengthy post-mortem review of Deadly Premonition, written by SWERY (the game’s director) and several other staff of Access Games. The developers select five areas in which they feel Deadly Premonition was most successful: character building, story and world building, distinctive music, casting and voiceover work, and the team’s hardcore passion for the title. I think this is an extremely honest review (the “what went wrong” section is all about the technical aspects of the game that didn’t work out very well, which I mentioned at the start), and I agree with the developer’s selections. In particular, I think that they have hit the nail on the head by naming characters, story and world, and music as the three most important elements of Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is a mystery, and it revolves around its characters. The central character, Agent York, is highly eccentric; his eccentricity makes him a fun character to play, and gives the story a reason to exist. His approach is unwaveringly serious, whether he is describing the mechanics of the relationship between Tom and Jerry (yes, the cartoon) or inspecting the teeth of a corpse. He’s constantly smoking, something we rarely see in heros today, but for York smoking is a kind of meditation.

One of the key elements of this game that propels it to such absolute quality is the way that York’s character is delivered to the player in the game. York talks to himself constantly, and these conversations serve to reveal much depth in his personality. Even better, the conversations appear to be with the player himself; York addresses you, the person holding the controller, in a way that few games have ever attempted (Metal Gear Solid 2 is the only somewhat similar title that I can think of). These moments of dialog are fantastic, but I particularly enjoyed the discussions York has with Zach (the name he uses to address the player, and eventually an important character himself) while driving. Greenvale is a large area, spread out over a five mile region, and it takes a while to drive around. While in the car, York speaks to the player about his past, his relationships with other characters, and old movies. Few games, let alone open world games, are able to work this much dialog in without stopping for cutscenes; according to the developers, York has over 3000 lines of dialog in Deadly Premonition, accounting for half of the total dialog in the game. Other games have used dialog this way before: Bioshock used reams of dialog to teach the player about key characters and the surrounding world, and Silent Hill 3’s world descriptions are all written in Heather’s voice, teaching us much about her personality. But Deadly Premonition does it better than those games. By the end of the game we feel not only great empathy for York and some of the other characters, but also that we understand his eccentric personality.

I also enjoyed the story in Deadly Premonition. Unlike another game I played recently, Deadly Premonition kept me guessing as to the real identity of the Raincoat Killer (though I did suss another, more important antagonist very early in the game). The story is interesting, and well told. It revolves around Agent York himself, and becomes intensely personal in its final act. It’s a fairly complicated tale, and one that requires a few stretches of the imagination, but it’s pretty interesting. And that’s the point.

The third success named by the developers is music, and I wholeheartedly agree. The soundtrack for Deadly Premonition goes with its content very well. Remembering that this game is directly descended from Twin Peaks, there are a few tracks that are clearly designed to fill the same ominous-yet-strangely-uplifting role that is filled by that show’s main title theme. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar, piano, jazz sax, and humming in the musical landscape–not what you might expect from a horror game. My favorite track has to be the Red Tree theme, which includes a “lunatic improvisational section” to describe the madness that grips the Raincoat Killer’s subconscious. It fits right into freaky Red Rooms, angel twins, old men in wheelchairs and gas masks, and all of the other uncanny imagery that the game throws at you.

PROBLEMS, REAL AND IMAGINED

Most of the technical issues with Deadly Premonition are not true problems, just systems that seem to be too simple compared to the modern state of the art. The textures and animation, for example, are pretty low quality. The aiming system is unwieldy, and for some infuriating reason the targeting reticle vanishes once you start to fire. The collision detection is pretty strict and angular. The movement of the enemies makes for challenging gameplay until a certain weapon is acquired, after which the combat is trivially easy (with the exception of one truly annoying enemy that took me five minutes to kill each time). The camera seems jumpy because it always aligns itself with the angle of the floor. These are the sorts of technical issues that crop up in Deadly Premonition; not really bugs so much as areas lacking in the polish we’ve come to expect from modern games. There’s nothing here that really gets in the way of the game play either–no fatal flaws or deal-breaking mechanics. Just technical roughness.

There is, however, a real problem that is worth mentioning. Deadly Premonition swings wildly between closed-off linear game play modes and open world, free form modes. Both are interesting in their own right, but the free form mode in particular has a lot of fascinating features, specifically, the way it manages time. The town of Greenvale is tied to a clock that controls when stores open, how characters move around, when the sun rises and sets, and there’s a huge amount of content here. You can sneak up to a character’s house and look in the window to see what they are up to at any given time. If they are home, they’ll be moving around, doing chores or watching TV. The town feels alive.

But the progression between these two modes is unpredictable. Most of the game is fixed and linear (though sometimes occurring within the open world), but at a few points the player finds himself with no immediate goal and is free to explore. The timing and frequency of these undirected sections is off. The first open world segment appears early in the game, before the player has had a change to grasp how the whole time-of-day system works yet. The player must be at a certain location at a certain time, and indeed, can choose to simply sleep in the hotel until that time approaches if they wish. I think most players are excited to get out and drive around.

Only, there’s not much to do at first; many of the shops open at odd times, and time in the open world mode progresses extremely slowly. Shenmue had a similar system and users complained enough that in Shenmue 2 they added a way for the player to accelerate time while they wait for a specific appointment. This first open world section seems to go on forever–I spent several hours of play driving around the city, running errands, finding items, and talking to characters. There are a few side missions that you can accomplish, but there’s no way to get anywhere close to beating all of them in this early section. Instead, the mode seems to drag on until finally, thankfully, the meeting time approaches and you can get on with the story. And as it turns out, that moment is the only time in the game where the player is given such freedom; every other open world segment is tied to a specific goal, or a short time limit. After spending so much time in the open world mode, I wasn’t excited to go back to it–I wanted to see the story progress, find the killer of the beautiful young girl. When I had a chance to do open world stuff again, I instead opted to beeline for the next obvious goal so that i could see what was going to happen next. Nothing forced me to do this, but since everything is tied to a clock, missing the next deadline would mean a whole ‘nother 24 hour cycle in the open world. That didn’t seem acceptable to me–I was hot on the trail of a serial killer and goddamn it, I’m going to catch him. There was just no time to waste.

I think that the long initial open world section, combined with the subsequent velocity of the plot, sucks a lot of the life out of Deadly Premonition’s dual mode design. I probably only experienced 1/5th of the total content available in the game (though it still took me close to 25 hours to complete) because I was more interested in advancing the story than driving around completing side missions. Perhaps that was the goal–to allow me to select the type of game play mode that I prefer–but it was still annoying.

But that’s the only real complaint I have with Deadly Premonition. The technical flaws were not a problem for me (though I do have a bone or two to pick with the aiming system and instant-failure quick timer events), and the rest of the content was so good that other minor flaws are easy to forgive. And really, when discussing the mechanical parts of the game design, Deadly Premonition gets much more right than it gets wrong.

THE OTHERWORLD

I really like how Deadly Premonition deals with the Otherworld, a label I am borrowing from the Silent Hill series to describe an alternate reality, infested with zombies and other malicious creatures, that mimics the look and layout of the real world but seems decrepit and decayed. In Silent Hill, the Otherworld is often a form of narrative beat, a way for the characters to pass into a yet-scarier version of the game, a way for the designers to ratchet the tension up another notch (or, in some cases, two or three notches, all at once). Deadly Premonition uses the same sort of game mode a different way: to separate straightforward reality from the world of hidden connections and meaning. Agent York’s descent into each Otherworld is more like a descent into the unconscious mind, where he’s able to find links between things that are not obvious in the real world. This is how York performs his investigation, by finding bits and pieces of seemingly unrelated clues and then linking them together in a way that makes the picture clear. He does this in his dreams, and sometimes the middle of a normal day. But in the Otherworld, York has the ability to physically explore this space. He calls the method “profiling.”

The Otherworld is not a safe place, however. Though York is able to use this nether region to draw conclusions from uncommon sources, he also makes himself vulnerable to the malicious entities that reside in that space. Perhaps, if we see the Otherworld strictly as York’s unconscious mind, we might conclude that these entities are of his own creation, based on what he knows about the case. I think it’s more likely that York is visiting a physical space, a sort of distorted mirror of the real world, where evil takes a different, more substantialform. This interpretation is reinforced late in the game, when other characters enter the Otherworld as well.

In terms of pure game mechanics, the Otherworld gives the designers a way to cleanly break between the open world and a more traditional indoor level design. This is a great place for zombies, gun combat, and exploration, which are all hard to do in an open world setting. The decision to switch not only game modes but also thematic modes when entering the Otherworld is, I think, pretty smart.

Deadly Premonition also uses the Otherworld to do something that is rare in video games: subtle foreshadowing. The game is the best example of foreshadowing that I’ve seen in quite a long time. One of the genius parts of Deadly Premonition is its use of color; the palette of the game slowly changes as Agent York gets deeper and deeper into the Otherworld, until finally the game simply smears a bright red haze over the entire frame. Silent Hill 2 used color to foreshadow, as did Condemned. But there are very, very few games that can make such a claim, and Deadly Premonition does it very well. Foreshadowing extends to level geometry as well; there’s a particular section near the end of the game in which the player must climb an incredibly long staircase (sort of the reverse of Silent Hill 2 and 4’s impossibly long staircases), all while very specific, crazy music plays in the background. The effect is pretty dramatic; the level of tension as the player reaches the door at the top of the stairs is very high.

FINISH IT UP, ZACH

This has been a long, unorganized stream of consciousness about a weird, delightful, scary game. If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot of food for thought in Deadly Premonition, which I think is a mark of high quality. Though many reviewers may have been turned off by a lack of superficial polish, I think that Deadly Premonition is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. It’s absolutely worth playing, thinking about, investigating, and examining. It is a rare gem.