The original Deadly Premonition really struck a chord with me. It really rustled my jimmies. One might say, it soaked my socks. I’ll admit, it tickled my toe-curler.

I mentioned what a horrendous year 2020 was for me in my review for Mafia: Definitive Edition, and the same thing goes for Deadly Premonition 2. What should have slammed my dunk got pushed to the side as I poured all my effort into putting one foot in front of the other. To be clear, 2020 was a bad year for a lot of people, but I was recovering from a traumatic situation, and then I lost my job of nine (nearly ten) years, so those plans for recovery hit the rocks with a terrific crash. And then, you know, COVID lockdowns. I don’t want to talk about it.

I played maybe 10 hours of Deadly Premonition 2 before I moved onto something that could twist my pepper grinder. Probably Cruelty Squad. But seeing as how I just finished Deadly Premonition for the jillionth time, I decided it was high time that I finally stick the beast and see if it’s as questionable as some folks say.

TWIST MY PEPPER GRINDER

I want to be upfront: For a lot of reasons, you need to play Deadly Premonition before this one. It’s not even for continuity reasons. Deadly Premonition 2 has a lot of issues, but unlike Deadly Premonition 1 where its bright points shine through the stink haze, the only way to get through the issues here is to already appreciate the first game.

Also, I’m going to spoil events from the first game in this review, because DP2 expects you to be well versed anyway. So, okay, you also need to play DP1 for continuity reasons.

Deadly Premonition 2 is cut into two parts that centre on Francis Morgan. The part that the story opens with is set in 2019 (ten years after DP1). Two FBI agents are visiting the apartment of Francis Zach Morgan. The past ten years were rough on him. Not only did the events in Greenvale shake his very being, he’s also dying from stage 4 brain cancer. He wasn’t entirely walking straight the last time we saw him, but now he’s completely shattered. Without York, he’s a husk of his former self, even while he has a “fairy” to satisfy his need for disassociation.

The body of a murder victim from one of Morgan’s previous investigations has suddenly appeared, perfectly preserved in a block of ice. At the time of the case, the body had gone missing from the makeshift morgue it had been stored at, and Morgan didn’t bother seeking it out or following up on it in any way. However, the reappearance raised some red flags for straight-laced agent Aaliyah Davis, so she suspects Morgan of… something. Possibly even being the perpetrator. And she’s ready to drill the information out of him if she needs to.

LET’S SEE A KICKFLIP

The game flips back and forth from that and a second scenario, which is the case the missing body is from. 2005, Le Carré, Louisiana. A younger Francis York Morgan, closer to what we recognize from Deadly Premonition, has his vacation interrupted by his own curiosity. Having heard of the murder while in nearby New Orleans, he sticks his nose into it.

He soon finds that the murder is linked to the red seeds central to the first game, which are being used to create a drug called Saint Rouge that has been causing problems around Louisiana. The bodies start piling up as he investigates, so it’s a lot like the first game. Narratively, anyway, it’s not much like the first game in terms of gameplay.

Okay, it’s superficially similar. It’s open-world in a small town where you can do sidequests, but the story itself is linear. You have to satisfy your hunger, sleep when you’re tired, change suits when the one you’re wearing gets dirty, and shave unless you like a bit of lip fuzz. The open-world part is also mostly compartmentalized from the combat, though this time, you can get into fights with the wildlife. There are a handful of mini-games you can take part in, and people to talk to.

It’s all made less impactful, however. I’m not even sure how to describe it. Like, York can live out of vending machines now, and the stores and restaurants seem less cozy. Also, the cars are gone. York rides around on a skateboard. The skateboard is mostly enjoyable, but it does detract from the feel of travel. Le Carre is a lot more compact than Greenvale, but there are still moments where you need to travel long distances to reach a point. Though, it does feel like the “realistic distance” philosophy from the first game got sidelined, which I do miss. Other characters drive cars, but their real-time 24 hour schedules don’t matter much in the overall context of the game.

I just keep thinking about how hot it must be riding around on a skateboard in Louisiana during the summer wearing a suit.

SUMMER FASHION

There’s a lot more open-world shit sprinkled in, and this comes at the cost of some of the characterization that made the first game so exceptional. There are fewer side quests, and most of the ones that are in it are horrendous. This is not a game I think I will ever finish every side quest in. It’s stuff like killing a certain number of enemies or locating doodads sprinkled throughout the world. But, like, worse than you might be imagining. Rather than kill five monsters, it’s kill 30 dogs or squirrels.

The actual story quests are pretty bad, too. Really bad. There’s one half-way through that I would have expected to be a side quest. It’s a fetch quest. York complains about the fact that it’s a bad fetch quest during the fetch quest. At one point you have to keep searching vending machines until you find one with what you need in it. Another requires you to wait possibly multiple days for a complete irrelevant reason. Same quest, two ridiculous objectives.

It might be trying to be subversive, but, listen, if you tell the player something commonly featured in games is dumb, and then make them do it anyway, you’re the worst part of this equation. The sum of all that dumb. It’s subversive if you tell a player that they need to collect 1000 of something, and then after they collect three have the quest giver fall in a volcano or something. Then you can call it dumb. But to call something dumb and then force the player to go through it is dumb. It’s fucking dumb.

METAPHYSICAL OFFENDER PROFILING

It’s a really weird thing, because, at a surface level, Deadly Premonition 2 feels more polished, but underneath, it’s a much bigger mess. It can feel more comfortable, but fewer things fit together, and less of it has the same love put into it.

The combat scenes are probably the best example of this. They’re much simpler. York is transported to a weird realm, and just has to get through a dungeon so he can perform his “Metaphysical Offender Profiling.” He only has one gun that can be customized in a number of ways (by collecting and crafting, of course), and combat is all very straightforward.

But every dungeon is the same, and there’s only three enemy types that come in two different colours. It feels better but is somehow more bland and repetitive, which encapsulates the whole game.

The story is, I feel, interesting and enjoyable. The interrogation scenes, however, are going to tax anyone who doesn’t already care about Francis Morgan. They are intensely long segments of just talking. It reminds me of Dark Dreams Don’t Die, one of Swery’s games between DP1 and DP2 (referenced in-game in a cheeky way). I never got through that one because the dialogue just went on and on, and it felt like a slog. I don’t shy away from detailed storytelling, but there’s a point where it gets ridiculous. 

I really enjoyed and even looked forward to the interrogation scenes in Deadly Premonition 2, but that’s because I think Francis Morgan is a deeply interesting character. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the 2019 segments as much without that appreciation already in place. A lot of the dialogue feels self-indulgent in how it will spill unique characteristics onto the characters. And despite that, the other characters in the room don’t walk away nearly as interesting as Morgan. You can’t just jam a baster into a character and squeeze and wind up with a complex character, but that sometimes feels what Swery and Goda are doing.

THE SUBJECT

I’ll touch on the issue of the trans character, just because that controversy is sort of inextricably linked to the game. In the original release, the character, Lena, was misgendered and dead-named frequently through the game, even by York who claimed to be tolerant of a person’s choices and went as far as chastising anyone who didn’t respect that. Without spoiling anything, the character in question is also not a great way to portray a social minority. Swery got a lot of backlash, which resulted in him apologizing and patching the game to remove or edit some of the problematic lines.

I only had the opportunity to see the edited content. I thought it was… fine. I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything had been changed had I not known of the issue. Honestly, when it came out, one of Deadly Premonition’s biggest proponents, Steph Sterling, seemed more disappointed than offended. Swery’s response seems to have wound up causing more pain than it solved from what I understand. It’s not a great look, but I don’t think it was intended as malicious to begin with. It’s just another part of the game that comes across as unfortunate rather than just awkward. And while I did find it uncomfortable, it was really not the biggest issue I had with the game. Not by a long shot.

With that aside, like the first game, Deadly Premonition 2 is an enjoyable, surreal, and surprisingly deep plot surrounded by a game that isn’t very good. The difference is, this time around, the game is starkly terrible with less charm. The first game’s issues seemed like ambition meeting the road of reality and getting dashed to pieces and then glued back together for a horrifying open-casket funeral. For the sequel, its problems just seem more like misguided design that resulted in an agonizing experience. Big difference in the result. Deadly Premonition had some design philosophies that I really connected with regardless of how fumbled they were. Those philosophies don’t exist here.

However, I love the character of Francis Morgan, and, as such, I love a lot of the insight into him that Deadly Premonition 2 gives (even though some of it isn’t particularly well-executed). He’s the most convincing reason to play this game at all, and it’s really great as a character exploration. That got me through to the end credits. And it could maybe get me through it again if I feel like reconnecting at some point. But the game itself is a bland, joyless slog. It’s almost unreal. And not in a good way.

5/10

This review was conducted using a cartridge copy of the game on Switch. It was paid for by the author.