[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote]
Through time, PC games handled by Japanese developers and/or publishers were known to either run like absolute ass, or require a whole lot of extra tweaks to reach optimal performance; Something that nowadays feels like an unwritten tradition as they still screw up the PC ports big time and leave them so modders can fix them in their stead.
Is that highly irresponsible and anti-consumer? Well... yes. But still, there was a light at the end of the tunnel and it was the fact that we could actually fix those giant messes. And as fixing those ports required having some knowledge about computers and various programs, I learned quite a lot in the process. Nowadays, I very rarely refund a game of Japan origin as I eventually find a way to get them to work...
... then I played Deadly Premonition and found out whatever I had faced beforehand is nothing compared to the technical horrors I would find in it.
[h2]Have you ever lost +15 hours of progress?...... WOULD YOU LIKE TO?[/h2]
Deadly Premonition is a collection of technical issues with a game attached to it. You might be able to run this and have it work with either minimal tinkering (like I did) or applying every fix there is, but it will still be utterly broken as a whole; To the point it can and [b]will[/b] get unplayable without getting help from the community.
The game crashes a lot, with some of them being random and others known to happen in specific places (like chapter 1's hospital or the entirety of chapter 9), and all of them have a chance to corrupt your save file or lock you in a crash loop which bricks it. There are times when doing simple tasks such as opening a menu can freeze the game. So, you are forced to save the game after any amount of progression and manually take a backup from the save files immediately afterwards as the game only has one save slot. Don't do that, and you risk losing all of your progress.
Unfortunately, that's not all! There are frame drops, micro stuttering, bizarre controller bindings and incompatibilities, sound playback issues, text/subtitle corruption and freezing on cutscenes, some of which you will not be able to fix at all! And there's a plethora of other issues and game breaking bugs that can happen if you use the widely recommended community fixes such as the game refusing to run, broken scripting, aiming restrictions, etc! This game is the final boss of bad PC ports,and will constantly try to break you and make you quit playing, like I did. And that's a shame because the game is truly unique.
[h3]wtf am i playing...?[/h3]
When it comes to detective work in entertainment mediums, you either expect it to be a completely serious crime drama, or a carefully curated experience which separates seriousness from humor and presents them whenever needed. Deadly Premonition does none of those and instead offers a complete and utter tonal whiplash.
You will see serious conversations/cutscenes that sidetrack into nonsense or movie references in an instant, like the main character (who is an FBI agent) suddenly simping for a piece of biscuit or casually talking about Tom and Jerry in middle of a murder investigation. You will see a Psycho Mantis mannabe who gives you cryptic messages. Some of the cutscenes get absurdly long for no reason. Some of the music tracks barely have any relation to the events they are accompanying and set the tone completely wrong. Some of the sound effects, like the trumpet sound which plays if you try to aim at other NPCs, feel completely out of place. The whole game feels like if someone saw some detective shows, went "yeah I can also do that" and got to work.
Therefore, this is a game that not everyone will enjoy playing it. If you are not used to games with weird concepts and narrations (like the stuff that Suda51 makes), or games that feature a Japanese developer's interpretation of a Western product/idea, you are going to hate this. However, there are also some stuff in the game that I think many would appreciate being there, even if they really don't fit a proper murder investigation.
The game features a day and night cycle with various weather conditions, and asks you to go to specific locations in specific timeframes to advance through the story. But it also allows you to not do that (for the majority of the game) and go wander around in the small town it takes place in, with the side effect of NPCs reacting to your delay and berating you for it. You can accept side missions, find items of interest (like trading cards and medals), peek inside buildings to see what's happening inside them, go fishing and even purchase goods like weapons or food items to manage York's hunger and tiredness levels. And since some of those side and main missions require you to be at the mission area at a specific hour, you are given the chance to either sleep or smoke to pass time.
But the one thing I really like is that the game rewards you for being attentive and behaving like an actual human investigator. The game gives you a set amount of money as York's daily wage, but you can also get additional money by doing specific activities ranging from daily routines (checking the weather) to proficiency in combat (killing enemies, landing headshots) and proper detective work (providing daily progress reports, observing the environment). There are also some optional cutscenes that will only trigger if you go around and observe everything.
[h2]If even Peter “Durante” Thoman cannot fix a game, what hope is there?[/h2]
Still, I cannot recommend you to get this game in good faith. I would be going against what I believe in if I did.
A game like this, that has such a unique presentation and so much emphasis on its story and narration, needs to immerse the player in its world; And immersion is impossible if one has to constantly live in fear of sudden game-breaking bugs, or be forced to replace their own personalized save file with someone else's and watch the missed cutscenes elsewhere if the need arises.
The atrocious state of this game's PC port has completely annihilated its chances of being seen and enjoyed; A fact that is easily proveable through its achievement completion rates and the massive 30% drop while going from the first story related achievement to the next, which is exactly when the first game breaking bug happens. People are straight up abandoning the game instead of trying to deal with its issues, which is completely understandable.
Sure, the game is unique. Sure, it looks like it's one hell of a ride. But if the port is so bad that the people responsible for it have abandoned it, the community is stumped with it, and even one of the best modders on this planet (who now has their own studio and ports Trails and YS games to PC) cannot manage to fix it without breaking other stuff, it does not deserve your time and money. If you really want to play this game, get the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo Switch version as those will run with much less hassle than what we have here.
[h2]TL;DR[/h2]
A collection of technical issues with a bizarre and unique game attached to it. Better get the console versions as it's nearly impossible to play this on PC without running into game breaking bugs.
