 |
 York prepares to gun down one of Deadly Premonition’s ghoulish apparitions. |
There’s a point at which a crappy piece of entertainment gets so bad, it actually ricochets off rock bottom and shoots back up. Like William Hung’s She Bangs, or Ed Wood’s infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space. Awesomely, wonderfully, beautifully bad.
Deadly Premonition for the Xbox 360 is an ugly, clumsy and extremely weird game. But despite these flaws – or maybe because of them – it’s also kind of brilliant.
Somewhere inside this bizarre and drab-looking title is a relatively robust survival-horror game, blending elements of Silent Hill, Resident Evil and even Grand Theft Auto, with a dash of Twin Peaks sprinkled on top. But so much is blatantly wrong with it that you eventually have to embrace the game’s awfulness as part of its unique charm.
You play as FBI Agent Francis York Morgan – “please, just call me York. It’s what everyone calls me,” he says at every introduction – who is investigating the murder of a woman found gutted and tied to a tree in the small northwest town of Greenvale.
York is not your ordinary fed, though. He’s a chainsmoking whackjob who has lengthy conversations about ’80s pop culture with an imaginary friend named Zach who lives in his head. Not that many of Greenvale’s weird and wooden residents seem to notice.
Visually, Deadly Premonition is a hilarious mess and could easily pass as a last-generation, original Xbox game. The audio, in its own way, is even worse. There are three or four instrumental songs on the game’s soundtrack that seem to cycle in no particular order, so that you’re often listening to a jaunty and overly loud whistling tune or a smoky jazz number while investigating a horrific murder scene.
|
And the controls? Clunky as heck. When the game shifts into a nightmarish, Silent Hill-style alternate world populated with ghostly rejects from The Grudge who often walk towards you while bent over backwards, you can’t move and aim your weapons simultaneously. Driving across the sprawling environs of Greenvale is even worse, with cars handling like square-wheeled go-karts unburdened by the laws of physics.
It sounds like a game that should be avoided at all costs, but if you approach Deadly Premonition with the right frame of mind, it’s actually quite entertaining. The visuals are so ugly and the mechanics are so awkward and the dialogue is so bad, it’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny. And there are even some genuine scares to be had, particularly in the sequences where York is being chased by the axe-wielding Raincoat Killer, whose identity he must ultimately uncover.
At just $25, Deadly Premonition is a budget title in every sense of the word, and has some of the worst production values of any Xbox 360 game out there. Yet it’s hard to stop playing, just because you want to see what hilarious and terrible turn it’s going to take next.
Bottom line: A game so bad it’s almost good, Deadly Premonition’s unintentional laughs mixed with a few bona fide scares might make it a cult classic.