Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise Switch
Routinely mislabelled as ‘so bad it’s good’, Deadly Premonition remains one of videogames’ most fascinating enigmas. It is, in fact, both: wildly flawed, with archaic controls, poor graphics and some questionable design and narrative choices, it’s also ambitious and inventive with an absorbing, surreal mystery at its heart, and features one of the medium’s great protagonists. Brash, arrogant and deeply tactless, but with an infectious enthusiasm for his work and ’80s-slash-’90s cinema, FBI agent Francis York Morgan is Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro’s crowning achievement to date. Another game in his shoes would seem to be an appealing proposition, then. And yet, as Morgan notes (and the subtitle suggests), appearances can be deceptive.
Yet at first, we’re not actually playing as Morgan. Instead, we’re interrogating him: alongside bumbling assistant Simon Jones, smart young agent Aaliyah Davis arrives at Morgan’s Boston home to investigate his role in a case 15 years prior. Just as the original wore its Twin Peaks’ influence on its sleeve, it’s already clear Swery is borrowing from another TV crime drama. Though gaunt, hollow-eyed and cancer-ridden, Morgan’s gnomic responses and handlebar moustache are obvious nods to True Detective’s Rust Cohle. Indeed, it’s a surprise when he and the Nietzsche-quoting Davis are beaten to Cohle’s most famous maxim by a tutorial pop-up.
The first extended flashback to 2005 does seem to prove that time is a flat circle, as Morgan investigates another ritualistic murder case, apparently involving a powerful new drug. Now he’s in Le Carré, a small town just outside New Orleans. As he chats to a hotel chef over breakfast, noting that his arrival there was prompted by his love of Paul Schrader’s 1982 horror Cat People, it seems like business as usual for both Swery and Morgan; likewise, when he pauses his investigation of a crime scene to skim stones across a creek. The dialogue is silly, surreal and funny – usually deliberately so. He finds a likeable foil in Patricia Woods, a young local who pokes fun at Morgan’s personality quirks. It’s not too long until he’s hanging out at a local bar, where the barman – a jazz saxophonist at weekends – wears nothing but a white trilby, a pair of pristine briefs and cowboy boots.
Accents aside, while several of these characters could slot easily into the first game, the town isn’t a patch on Greenvale. It’s flat, bland and often feels lifeless: while you still need to pay attention to opening times of local establishments, you never get a sense of its rhythms or its inhabitants’ routines, with many characters tangential to the central plot. And while there was an element of smalltown stereotyping in the original, it’s rampant here. Le Carré is a hotbed of voodoo, incest and casual bigotry, while its treatment of a transgender character is troubling, too – a surprise, given Swery’s more empathetic work in puzzle-platformer The Missing – not to mention a diatribe from Morgan himself. One late-game narrative flourish feels similarly insensitive, as Swery and fellow writer Kenji Goda co-opt a real-world tragedy as a way to explain why the mystery was never fully resolved.
If such lapses in taste are pretty much par for the course, the technical problems here are far worse than in the first game. We find ourselves pining for the shoppingtrolley handling of Morgan’s car as he negotiates Le Carré’s streets by skateboard, the abysmal framerate dropping even further once we get a speed upgrade. Hiccups and temporary freezes are rife, on one occasion earning us a small fine as we fail to swerve a pedestrian. Performance improves slightly indoors, though entering and exiting buildings can mean a wait of between 30 seconds and just over a minute. Swery’s keenness to subvert open-world conventions, meanwhile, often amounts to egregiously wasting your time. The second act, in particular, sets you on a wild goose chase that has no bearing on the plot, requiring you to locate three food items, one of which isn’t available for several in-game days. At which point, we find ourselves recalling Morgan’s earlier complaint: “This case can go fuck itself.”
As can Deadly Premonition 2’ s combat-focused otherworld sections, which intrude less frequently here, but run to interminable length. Set in tedious, claustrophobic networks of corridors and boxy rooms, they pit Morgan against precisely three different enemy types that would be irritating were they not so laughably easy to defeat. Even with some dropping from the ceiling and others spawning behind you – preceded by a framerate drop that prevents you from responding immediately – you’re given so many boxes of bullets and health packs that it’s as hard to die as it is to run out of resources. Mercifully, they’re interrupted by bouts of ‘metaphysical profiling’, wherein Morgan revisits events from the past by interacting with a series of crime scene hotspots. It’s telling (and quietly damning) that A Blessing In Disguise is at its best when you’re barely playing it. The 2019 sections amount to little more than looking at items around Morgan’s apartment and questioning him about them; nevertheless, it plays out as a battle of wits, as Davis weeds out the truth through proper detective work rather than supernatural ability and good fortune.
Even so, Morgan remains the real draw here, whether he’s punching killer bees, following eerie Dalmatians or interrupting a villain by saying, “I hate to rain on your sensational parade of a monologue.” Yet despite a few delightful flashes of Swery strangeness, you sense its creator’s heart isn’t really in this. For all its faults, the first game was a piece of outsider art: a messy, budgetpriced curio made with passion and sincerity. This less ambitious, full-priced follow-up is a lesser experience in every sense. So bad it’s good? We wish. Alas, for the majority of its 20-plus hour runtime, A Blessing In Disguise only holds up the first half of the bargain.
If lapses in taste are pretty much par for the course, the technical problems are far worse than in the first game