Review: SWERY’s Deadly Premonition 2 Is a Janky, Navel-Gazing Exercise

Everything about your quest feels dragged out to mask how little substance there is to Blessing in Disguise.

Deadly Premonition 2: Blessing in Disguise
Photo: Rising Star Games

Lise Clarkson’s body has been found after 14 years, her dismembered body parts pristinely reassembled and frozen in a block of ice, like something out of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Every bit as striking as this opening to Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise is the reveal that the prime suspect in Clarkson’s murder is none other than Francis Zach Morgan, the “metaphysical offender” who was at the center of 2010’s Deadly Premonition. But it quickly becomes clear that this game, both a sequel and prequel to the original, is largely unconcerned with taking Zach’s potential guilt seriously. It is, though, quite interested in waxing rhapsodically about the power of pizza, and having you bow down before creator and director Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro’s love of esoterica.

Indeed, Clarkson’s murder is just a bait and switch. You think you’re going to delve into the supernatural horrors surrounding her death, but instead you spend most of your time listening to characters quip about how a personal connection to the 1986 Sylvester Stallone film Cobra can help one to appreciate frozen pizza, or, in one of many fourth-wall-breaking moments, how by-the-book F.B.I agent Aaliyah Davis and her eccentric techie partner, Simon Jones, would be “the perfect stars for the latest video game.” These asides are endemic to Blessing in Disguise, the bread and butter of both the brief 2019 sequences and the remainder of the game, which transpires in 2005 in Le Carré, Louisiana and features Zach’s earlier self, Francis York Morgan. (If you haven’t played Deadly Premonition, this won’t make any sense, as A Blessing in Disguise can’t be bothered to bring newcomers up to speed.)

The game’s present-day timeline is little more than a non-interactive visual novel, as Aaliyah’s investigation is limited to her asking Zach about random objects, like a shrine of milk cartons, in his one-bedroom Boston apartment. The game never stops shunting the mystery to the side, but being restricted to Zach’s apartment at least keeps things somewhat focused, and because the action all transpires within a few hours, it at least has a feeling of immediacy. York’s 2005 case allows him to more freely, albeit sluggishly, roam through Le Carré, but he’s essentially going through the same rote click-to-investigate motions as Aaliyah, the difference being that the objects he interacts with are thousands of meters apart, a distance that he inexplicably chooses to cover on a skateboard he calls “my darling.” Like its predecessor, A Blessing in Disguise operates on a 24-hour schedule, and while you certainly feel the pull of time, you don’t feel the urgency to investigate the game’s various crimes, which take a back seat to your attempts to set high scores at barely functional minigames like rock-skipping and bowling.

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Everything about York’s quest feels dragged out to mask how little substance there is to Blessing in Disguise. The game’s 24-hour schedule forces you to spend a good chunk of each chapter literally wasting time by smoking cigarettes and camping out in the street, waiting to trigger events that only occur at dawn or during an establishment’s business hours. But as empty as it feels to use inventory items to force time to pass, that’s still preferable to the other activities the game offers up: hunting squirrels, dogs, gators, and bees; foraging for items in dumpsters, mailboxes, and fields; and shooting mysterious miniature UFOs out of the sky.

Throughout, the materials you collect, or the stat-boosting charms you craft from them, are somewhat necessary, but the disappointing rewards further spell the game’s irrelevance. There are “realistic” systems in place to account for York’s hunger, sleepiness, body odor, and sobriety, but they’re barely connected to the plot. (Which is to say nothing of how questionably realistic it is that otherworldly monsters tend to drop fresh cups of coffee when slain.) And the meaningless of the game’s busywork is compounded by the poor frame rate and low-texture graphics that would’ve seemed cut-rate even on an early-2000s console.

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Given the disconnect between the game’s various systems, it’s hard to view SWERY as anything more than an amateur auteur. He imitates others, but to what end? In the vein of Hideo Kojima, he suffuses his games with pop-cultural references but never shows poetic aspirations. He channels Suda51’s irreverence but not the satirical bite of No More Heroes. He even has Aaliyah indiscriminately quote Nietzsche, which would be a well-intentioned effort to guide players through a philosophical inquiry of crime and morality, if only these references connected in the slightest to the story at hand. Referencing hyperrealism and likening the way York’s hand transforms into a Psychogun as being like that scene from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome doesn’t make this game smart; it outs it as a spectacle of flimsy appropriation, which is evident even in the demonic “Pains” that York faces in the Other World, all inexplicably named after stock characters from commedia dell’arte.

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This is also a game that mistakes character development for quirky things happening to characters or being done by them. In one scene, a family’s patriarch forces his son-in-law to feed his own arm to an alligator—a cruel moment that’s never acknowledged again. In another, a character delivers a five-minute-long monologue detailing all of the work he’s put into the ritual he’s about to enact, only to anticlimactically set his knife down, having changed his mind mere moments later. Rather than have to address the effect of these decisions, Deadly Premonition 2 generally just kills off its characters, a particularly maddening move when it comes to the game’s transgender character, Lena, whose efforts to settle things with her family would have benefited from even a superficial grasp of her emotions.

And that’s how the game treats its main characters, as the side ones are either stereotyped and saddled with tics that invite our laughter more than our empathy. There’s a crawfisherman whose most memorable feature is his dwarfism, a bartender who stands out only on account of his tight white underpants, and the employees at the hotel you’re staying at who are all the same person, each one defined by a different, terrible accent.

Ironically, by the time A Blessing in Disguise finally gets around to introducing monsters into the mix, you may find yourself longing for the quirkiness of its shallow caricatures of people. Not only do three of the game’s four chapters end in identical red-misted corridors with no distinguishing features or puzzles, they also recycle the same three enemy archetypes: a creature with giant scissors who snips toward you, a giant chained to a doorway who releases lock-shaped explosive crabs from his bindings, and a half-naked woman who slinks toward you, summoning tentacles. These survival horror sequences are neither scary nor fun, and the most challenging thing about them, beyond their forcing you to try to auto-adjust your aim in order to account for the stuttering lag in the frame rate, is how you have to push past boredom. Consider, then, these sequences not so much a premonition but a warning born of experience: Turn back all who enter here, for there is nothing good awaiting within.

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This game was reviewed using a review code provided by Thunderful.

Score: 
 Developer: Toybox Inc., White Owls Inc.  Publisher: Rising Star Games  Platform: Switch  Release Date: July 10, 2020  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Use of Drugs, Violence  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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