Deadly Premonition has been hailed as a work of art, holds the Guinness World Record for most polarizing reception of a horror game and just turned ten years on February 23. Thanks to its surreal world building and strange gameplay, Deadly Premonition has been compared to masterpieces of horror like Twin Peaks, but it's also been dismissed as pure garbage people have mistaken as brilliant.
Whatever the case, Deadly Premonition has a legacy that requires reflection and examination. When digging into the history and making behind the game, it's clear Deadly Premonition didn't emerge out of a vacuum or strange shadow, but rather a string of bad decisions made with good intentions.
Rainy Woods
Deadly Premonition started out in 2004 as Access Games's survival horror project Rainy Woods. The game underwent a long development cycle, starting off for the Playstation 2 and Xbox consoles before being pushed to the the PS2 and Xbox 360.
An early trailer for Rainy Woods shown at Tokyo Game Show in 2007 revealed an awkwardly edited, strange game. Many remarked that it resembled the cult television series Twin Peaks. In fact, some elements, like the strange lodge with little people inside, reminded people of the Black Lodge from the show. The trailer promised that Rainy Woods would release in 2008.
Rainy Woods was canceled shortly after. When asked about it, director Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro blamed criticism levied at the game, as well as the difficulty of simultaneously developing a game for both current and next gen consoles. The differences in hardware power and graphics made it hard for the team to ever really get started.
Rainy Woods, REBOOTED
Undaunted, Swery immediately started work on Deadly Premonition, which recycled various assets and ideas from Rainy Woods while altering the story so it would no longer seem like a rip-off of Twin Peaks. However, while Swery saw this as an entirely original game, Deadly Premonition (like Rainy Woods) was about an FBI agent investigating a murder in a quiet town plagued by supernatural forces and strange characters. In short, it was still Twin Peaks.
Furthermore, after the disastrous results of Rainy Woods, people weren't keen on working on a new project with Swery, so he need to convince others to work for him. It seems he accomplished this, though Swery's own statements have indicated that this was not a smooth process. In discussing staffing difficulties, he's said that "we had some who really took hold of it, who took the lead, but needed to drag a lot of others along with them to help reach completion."
The early game prioritized exploration and investigation, with full days simulated in game for the player to progress through the story. Players have described combat as frustrating, which is unsurprising as it was added late in development. Swery wanted to make the game feel real, and chose to add lots of strenuous mini-games that didn't factor into the narrative but added a sense of realism. This devotion to realism became so all-consuming that Swery traveled to the United States and studied billboards just so he could accurately recreate the ones in-game.
A major issue the team faced during development was trying to manage all of the various assets together. With so many "realistic" elements included, assembling all these separate mechanics and assets led to problems allocating game memory and space. According to lead level designer Wataru Nishide, "Deadly Premonition was our first stab at next-generation development, so we began the project astounded by the vast amount of RAM available...Astonishment gave rise to overconfidence, and eventually to the worst-case scenario: our data management became sloppy."
What Do We Make Of It?
Upon its release for the Xbox 360, Deadly Premonition was poorly received for various reasons such as its focus on realism and its lack of focus on conventional game mechanics like combat. Many just didn't know what to make of this bizarre game. All this is to say nothing about the inconsistent graphics, bewildering narrative and overt connections to Twin Peaks.
However, the idiosyncratic Deadly Premonition soon found a cult audience who adored the game for all its strange quirkiness. The title proved to be successful enough to warrant a director's cut re-release on the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Switch, as well as a sequel for the Switch. While many see it as a joke game that's hard to take seriously, in reality, Deadly Premonition is the result of many people who probably didn't know what they were doing working their hardest to produce something unforgettable and unique. In that way, Deadly Premonition is a work of art produced from absurdity.