Deadly Premonition Origins

I knew Deadly Premonition Origins had a bit of a wonky reputation, but I thought I'd be able to look past its flaws, especially since it's a murder mystery. However, the graphics were dated, the story was nonsensical, the characters were bizarre, the atmosphere was oppressive, the controls were janky, the combat was clunky, and the survival elements were annoying. The game was a mediocre mish-mash that I just did not enjoy playing.

However, a few hours in, everything clicked and I suddenly found myself having a blast.

This game is absolutely fantastic. Despite its flaws (and there is certainly no shortage of those), it still manages to be a memorable, wonderfully weird experience that's just plain fun, and what more can you want than that?

You play as FBI agent Francis "York" Morgan, who has been dispatched to the town of Greenvale to investigate the brutal murder of a young woman named Anna Graham. (No, her name pun never ends up being relevant, unfortunately.) Even though Greenvale is an ordinary small American town, the characters—including York—are anything but. For starters, you don't really play as York himself, but his split personality Zach, with whom York constantly converses. The characters are ridiculous enough to keep you laughing and guessing, yet there's enough normalcy to prevent the strangeness from losing its charm.

Although Deadly Premonition Origins is ostensibly a murder mystery, it plays out more like a pulp supernatural thriller. You do get to "investigate," but the plot doesn't follow any sort of logical path or chain of reasoning. York employs an investigative technique known as profiling, which essentially allows him to find a couple of stray pieces of evidence and then divine exactly what happened. Essentially, you just run through dungeons picking up all the shiny objects, and then York does all the heavy lifting for you. While Deadly Premonition Origins may not provide the same crime-solving joy as Ace Attorney or "crime-solving" "joy" as Danganronpa, the fact that it marches to the beat of its own drum prevents it from ever being predictable. As long as you accept it for what it is without demanding or expecting it to conform to the shape of a legitimate mystery, it'll get you engaged and guessing.

And, despite the incredibly bizarre narrative, the game still manages to coalesce into a riveting and emotionally satisfying conclusion.

I think a lot of people like to say Deadly Premonition Origins is the The Room of video games (and I'm guilty of having made that comparison myself), but that isn't quite fair. There's a distinct difference between the two works. The Room was a legitimate attempt at a serious drama that was so bad it instead became a hilarious comedy. But all the weirdness and humor in Deadly Premonition Origins is intentional. ...Okay, maybe not all of it (I'm not sure Swery65 appreciated the ramifications behind "FK"), but a lot. I simply don't believe that the skill displayed in the highlights of the game was a fluke. In other words, when you watch The Room you might be laughing at Tommy Wiseau, but when you play Deadly Premonition Origins, you'll be laughing with Swery65.

On the other hand, the gameplay is... not great. There's no way around that. Deadly Premonition Origins is an open-world survival horror game, but the base gameplay is clunky and lacks depth. You run (or, more often, drive) around the small town of Greenvale, interacting with the inhabitants and occasionally slaying some zombies.

Merely walking around is usually okay, but in a battle situation it gets a lot more hectic. It takes a moment to draw your weapon, and another moment to wield it. And you sheathe his weapon if you don't use it for a couple seconds. So it takes a few seconds to draw, wield, and use your weapon, which is plenty of time for an enemy to hit you if they're right next to you. The hitboxes of the melee weapons are a bit wonky, which can make it tough to actually land a blow with them.

But ranged weapons can auto-aim, so it's easy to simply snipe enemies from afar. The vast majority of the enemies in the game are the same base enemy, so you don't need any particular strategy. (There's one tricky enemy, but they're incredibly weak to melee damage, so you just need to wait for an opening and bash their head in.) So the constant sheathing and drawing of weapons makes combat clunky, and the fact that you're just killing the same base enemy over and over ago makes combat shallow.

Of course, combat is just one facet of the game; you spend a lot of time merely traversing Greenvale and interacting with its inhabitants. Greenvale is basically a full-scale small town, so you're going to have to spend a lot of time driving. The controls will likely result in you driving like a madman. They have a bunch of (literal) bells and whistles, like blinkers and windshield wipers, that do absolutely nothing. There is a quick-travel option that you can unlock by completing a certain side quest, which I (and pretty much everyone who has played this game) recommend you do as soon as possible. There are only a certain number of quick-travel points, too, so you'll still end up doing a fair amount of driving even after unlocking it.

Deadly Premonition Origins is technically a "survival" game, but the game throws so many resources at you it feels like a minor inconvenience. You have both a fatigue and hunger meter, which deplete over time. Hunger can be recovered with (gasp) food and fatigue with coffee or sleeping. Sleep recovers health but depletes hunger. However, in addition to all the food you find lying around, there are certain characters you can eat lunch with each day, fully satisfying your hunger for free. There's no penalty to "over"-sleeping, so you can sleep until lunchtime and then eat lunch in order to recover all your health, fatigue, and hunger for free, at the cost of some time and interrupting whatever you were doing. Your car uses gas—but every time you switch cars it'll start at a full tank, so you never need to actually refill the gas yourself. It's for reasons like these that most of the game systems end up being more minor time-wasters than legitimate obstacles or sources of pressure.

But they help get you into the world of Greenvale, and what a wonderful world it is. Despite the wonky gameplay, Deadly Premonition Origins excels in character and atmosphere. Greenvale is a full town. Every character has their own life and schedule that varies based on the weather. The game has fifty side quests, and nearly every single one either fleshes out a character or develops the setting. While some characters barely appear during the main story, when the side quests are taken into account, everyone has at least some time to shine. The strangeness of the characters both provides consisting humor and deepens the unsettling nature of Greenvale.

There is some wonkiness that isn't intentional, and that's due to translation errors. When the characters are being bizarre because the game is bizarre is one thing, but unnatural English makes the game seem sloppy. For a simple and incredibly common example, whenever you examine a door you can enter, you get the message "Looks like it wasn't locked," even though the natural English phrase would be "Looks like it isn't locked." I thought this was probably a result of a direct translation from the Japanese, but the Japanese script uses the present tense! For the most egregious translation error, the game fumbles its Arc Words during the climax. Every other time the Arc Words are uttered it's fine, but in the climax it uses a different, stilted and flawed formulation. What would otherwise be an emotionally compelling moment instead turns into a cheap eye-roll.

Despite all the poor design choices and setbacks, there actually is some game design in Deadly Premonition Origins that I really like. For instance, in boss battles, all boss attacks come in the form of QTEs. Normally people hate QTEs, but here they're used brilliantly. It's all due to the game's mediocre controls. If the boss battles didn't have QTE attacks and you were forced to actually dodge the attacks (while also mounting your own offense) it'd be incredibly frustrating. But QTEs serve as a backstop in case you fail to physically dodge the attack, giving you an out from the game's poor movement system. The game also avoids two of the most common reason people usually hate QTEs: these QTEs are telegraphed (by the boss' attack animations), and they don't lead to instant game-overs (since you only lost a portion of your health).

At the beginning of the review, I mentioned that at some point the game just clicked for me. I think it happened when I realized three things: that the game throws resources at you like there's no tomorrow, that the enemies are generally easy and without jumpscares, and that all the weirdness that I felt was getting in the way of the story actually was the story. Realizing the first two points let me stop worrying and just enjoy the third.

Deadly Premonition Origins is a fantastic story trapped within a heavily flawed game. It's bizarre, but oozes with atmosphere and style, and manages to be compelling and emotionally fulfilling despite its weirdness. It's a survival horror mystery that fails at all three genres, yet still somehow manages to end up as a masterpiece. Play it.