Murder, he wrote

Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka Suehiro is back with another whodunnit

Deadly Premonition creator Swery is back with another whodunnit

The collected works of Hidetaka Suehiro don’t exactly portray a man troubled by the confines of convention. Better known by his alias Swery65, Suehiro has mastered a craft of mystery games that are eccentric, mischievous and – whether by accident or design – sometimes thoroughly bewildering. With his next release, The Good Life, he is hoping to satisfy the cultural forefathers that established the whodunnit genre, after an unlikely journey deep into middle England.

Suehiro’s work, curiously, had previously taken him to Hitchin, a modest UK market town that’s all timber-framed buildings, ancient churches and chocolate-box side streets. “I was really interested in how they were upholding English traditions while changing and adapting to the new generation,” he says of his stay in the Hertfordshire town. It reminded him, too, of the kinds of places in which his favourite classic crime yarns were set.

“I’ve created several mysteries over my career, and I’ve read my share of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie,” he tells us. “They’re ‘Mystery 101’ to me. I suppose I always wanted to try and write a mystery story set in England at least once. I’ve always thought that maybe if I created a mystery set in England, then all the people who’ve previously created mysteries there would approve of me.”

It turns out, then, that even the most free-spirited creatives sometimes yearn for the respect of their cultural predecessors. It’s in that mindset that Suehiro set out to make The Good Life, which he’s seeking to finance through the profit-sharing crowdfunding platform Fig.

Yet none of that means the game will be conventional. Far from it, in fact. The Good Life tells of Naomi, an American photojournalist who becomes trapped by her debts in a twee little town in rural England. And in Swery’s imagined patch of English countryside, as night falls, the residents turn into cats. While this might suggest the eerie peculiarities of The Twilight Zone, or the ‘town with a secret’ focus of Ray Bradbury’s writing, would be among Suehiro’s influences, he points instead to the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and William Makepeace Thackeray, along with copious episodes of Miss Marple, as his significant points of inspiration. He says he’d always wondered about what the feline perspective on a human world felt like. Little wonder: he once lived in a house with a dozen cats. For now, the final expected shape of The Good Life remains, appropriately enough, a mystery – even to Suehiro and his recently formed studio, White Owls. There are absolutes, though, such as the game offering what Suehiro refers to as a ‘daily RPG’. “When some people hear the phrase ‘RPG’, they may think of things like levelling up, but I don’t intend to put levels or XP in this game – at least, not at this point,” he says. “Instead of gaining XP, the player will be able to pay off Naomi’s massive debt. As the amount goes down, the villagers’ behaviour will change, and Naomi will gain more daily money that she can use – that she doesn’t need to save for paying off the debt. Instead, players will be able to unlock new sources of income to earn money more efficiently, and upgrade their equipment.”

For anyone who feels ensnared by a career or bogged down by the daily administration of life – paying down debt is hardly a far-flung fantasy, if we’re honest – this might all come across as something of a turn-off. But Suehiro insists its implementation will be playful, even if he isn’t quite ready to specify just how it’s all going to fit together. “I’m positive that this is going to be fun,” he says. “For real. I’m just worried about someone stealing my ideas!”

Certainly, the protagonist’s career will be significant, with players taking and filing photographs for clients. She’ll also likely find herself with local work to do. And then there’s the mystery of those cats to crack. Beyond that, details are thin on the ground – but Suehiro has already given his ardent fanbase all they need by promising that the game will continue in the ‘spirit’ of Deadly Premonition.

Indeed, The Good Life may even be set in the same universe as his 2010 cult hit, even if Suehiro isn’t exactly sure how. “It’s hard to really define what the ‘spirit’ is,” he says, then pauses for a while. “I guess if I had to put it in words, I’d just say it’s ‘Swerism’. That’s the word we use in development.

“Embarrassing, huh? All the games I’ve made so far come from a shared universe. Lately, I’ve been calling it the ‘Sweryverse’, but only at my company, and it’s difficult to figure out how to define it in an official sense. But every game I’ve worked on – even the games I made while at SNK, and everything afterwards, including Deadly Premonition and D4, and The Good Life – they all operate in the same realm of logic. I’m positive of that.”

“I’ve created several mysteries over the course of my career, and I’ve read my share of Agatha Christie”