It’s been a while since I’ve played Deadly Premonition. Funny story – I was actually one of the seemingly few, who were waiting for the game to get released way before it was named Deadly Premonition. Originally it was announced as “Rainy Woods” in 2007, was even more Twin Peaks influenced and for me, a huge survival horror fan with soft spot for that David Lynch series, it was enough to get excited. But then the game just kinda dropped off my radar until suddenly popping up in a Destructoid review by Jim Sterling in early 2010, who loved the hell out of it. I didn’t even recognize the game back that from the start, since it has changed the title and even the looks (and name) of the main protagonist (the original name went to the next Swery’s game – D4). But when I finally did I knew – I need this game in my life. I never had an Xbox 360, but my friend did, so he grabbed the game, lent me the console for few weeks and I found a new game to put in the list of absolute favorites. But it was flawed. It needed a remaster. Is The Director’s Cut here to do the job? I’m going to spoil it right away – it isn’t in the slightest.
As a quick rehash – original Deadly Premonition attempted to create an open world action adventure that mixes elements from survival horror, adventure games and character driven mystery drama series like Twin Peaks. It tried to build an virtual town populated with memorable characters, mixing in an incredible amount of gameplay mechanics to work with this. Not all of it worked, of course, the game was really buggy, some things were mistranslated, some things were not clear and some things were just plain badly designed. Like horrible QTE sequences with stick wiggling, that shouldn’t have been in the game at all. Game also didn’t look very pretty, but that wasn’t as much of an issue, as the rather ugly looking parts of the game turned out to look rather interesting and add to the overall weird “what if David Lynch was Japanese” charm of the game. And as seemingly unintentionally funny parts started to show their real face with themes explored becoming uncomfortably serious, the game would grow on you, showing how to create a truly memorable stories and characters that work through gameplay as well.
Ideally, a remaster of Deadly Premonition would cut or just redo the QTEs, rebalance some action bits, retranslate some text, fix glitches and preferably switch the engine so the world would feel more whole and complete. Director’s Cut wouldn’t work even as a “passable” substitute. All the old glitches are still in, accompanied by new ones. All the old mistakes and typos are still there, all the QTEs are still horrible. Instead, for some inexplicable reason, the Director’s Cut adds new ugly looking and voiced pre-rendered cutscene bits between chapters that seem to be there just to hype for a possible sequel. But they add nothing, break the actually good flow of the main game story, sometimes spoil bits of the story and just in general don’t need to be there.
The game does look a bit better, with some seemingly higher resolution textures here and there, some UI changes, removal of a purple filter and, I think, some new effects at times. Runs at a higher resolution than before too, but I’ll get back to this. And it also features an actually good update – the controls are now 3D analogue ones instead of tank controls. Something that even I thought was great, and I love me some tank controls. Although, the only parts where tank controls became an actual issue were the strange camera angles on some stairs, which were removed in this version anyway. The keyboard and mouse controls on PC version also work pretty alright and make shooting a more viable and useful option. Although, again, the difficulty of action bits was somewhat changed as well. There’s only one game difficulty now, instead of 3, and it’s easier than the original’s Normal (harder than Easy, though). I’ve even read that QTEs were made somewhat easier, which seemed true, but also didn’t mean they weren’t a huge pain anyways. Wiggling the stick (or mashing keyboard buttons) for 3-5 minutes straight is still painful and shouldn’t be there.
But I doubt the creators of this “updated” version really considered that. The visuals, after the removal of the colour filter and some changes, actually manage to look worse at times. And the game manages to run worse than the original too. Even the console versions are affected by slowdowns and crashes, in addition to game breaking bugs that weren’t fixed since the original release and widely known. But PC version is almost completely unplayable. It’s locked to 720p without using the Durante’s fix (just as with Dark Souls 1). But even with it, the game crashes all the time. There’s no 100% working way to make the game not crash even today, 3 years after it’s release on PC. There are ways to make it crash less, but… do I really need to explain why this is not good? The fact that a truly amazing but flawed game gets a re-release, something to enhance it’s longevity, to fix the rather simple mistakes, to make a definitive edition. And that re-release makes almost everything worse. How do you even do that?
Oh but they put in DLCs. Pointless DLCs that do nothing useful for the game. A house that hovers above ground in one part of Greenvale York can teleport into (no really, they didn’t program in the door opening for it from outside). And a bunch of skins for characters and the car, with bonuses that you’ll rarely ever need. Apart from “sexy” skins for Emily and a “Halloween” skin for Raincoat Killer, because… Because. Car wheels still clip through the road and make it uncontrollable, but hey – we can add sexy cat suit for Emily instead, that will fix everything. At least they’re included in the PC version for free – they actually asked money for those on consoles.
Is the game still great all these years after? Oh yeah, it still is fantastic. But… Playing it on this ticking time bomb version where you save at every opportunity because you know that it can crash at any moment, is just unpleasant. It’s not a way to enjoy the game about amazing town, full of amazing characters. A game about exploration, about immersing yourself in this amazing story. You cannot do that when the game literally kicks you out every hour or less.
So, the only thing I can say is – stay away from The Director’s Cut. The good way to experience the strangeness of Deadly Premonition is by getting the original version on Xbox 360 somehow, or, hell, just watching this amazing let’s play from Supergreatfriend. Yes, watching someone play the game would be truer to the original game spirit, than playing this horrible re-release. But if you absolutely must play The Director’s Cut, don’t do it on PC. PC version might as well not exist, for all you should care, because no matter what you do, it will stay unplayable.
It is s a real shame,
that Rising Star Games turned out to be so lame.
So says Mr. Stewart.
P.S. Bonus video review:
P.P.S. I also completely forgot to mention, but the intro cutscene of the game contains a copyright of freemake dot com re-encoder at the end of the video. In a game that costs actual money and has been out for three years. They couldn’t remove or re-encode the intro cutscene to not have that. Can you imagine that?