How Deadly Premonition could have been a better horror game

I read an article recently entitled 10 ways horror games need to evolve and I eventually got to thinking about whether it could apply to Deadly Premonition. This game has become kind of a cult classic in a very short space of time, gaining a reasonable following despite having some fairly major flaws. It's unique oddball characters and setting are a big part of its appeal and it could be scary on occasions but it never felt like it lived up to the ideas it sparked in your mind. Comparing it to this list of suggestions for future horror games may help to figure out what it did right and what it could have improved.

1) Normality

While the strange characters and backwoods town of Greenvale may not seem all that normal to most, it's a pretty mundane setting compared to what's to come. There's no horror game staples like a secret lab under a mansion, no abandoned spacecraft, no cabin in the woods even. Compared to the bleak and unrelenting nature of Silent Hill, Greenvale is a pretty cheery place, which is compounded by the joyously infective whistled tune that plays a lot of the time. The people you meet are mostly a little eccentric but they are generally not evil or part of what is going on in the town. The game also allows you to perform plenty of mundane tasks in your daily routine like shaving, having breakfast (even if this is mostly to check for psychic messages in your coffee), changing suits and getting them cleaned. All of this helps to draw you into the game's world even if it doesn't have that much in common with your real life experiences.

2) Long Build-Up

The game does not stray from the pattern laid out by most horror games and introduces the horror elements very early on. You go from having a car crash to an 'other world' combat section straight away, largely as a tutorial for its awkward Resident Evil 4 style combat. If this section had still been a spooky walk through a dark forest but instead featured no combat it might have been quite an effective way of building up tension but then emerge from the forest in the early hours to find that there was nothing really to be scared of. The other world sections are pretty much integral to how you go about investigating crime scenes in the game but they could have done with less combat early on (more on that later). After the tutorial like section you also have a little more freedom to do other things before the next other world is triggered so this possibly allows for a slower build up but that depends on how the player approaches it.

3) Doubt

Deadly Premonition has doubt in spades to begin with but there is a point in the game where things start to be made explicitly clear and that is where the game started to fall down for me. I can't really think of any horror movies that are made better by having a thorough explanation. A friend of mine once said this about Ring 2 in comparison to the first one, where they start to bring in concepts of what has happened to the video tape in scientific terms. Once you start spelling things out that people have built up their own opinions of you are bound to leave them disappointed as they are forced to discard their own theories up until that point. You have to be pretty sure that your central revelation is going to be so good that it would seem better than anyone else's theories.

There were plenty of questions to ask throughout the game, whether the other world sections were all in Agent Francis York Morgan's head and whether you were actually playing the part of his silent split personality Zach. The other world sections managed to achieve this feeling of doubt without any kind of player character sanity meter, it was just the weirdness of the scenario and characters that lead you to think about it this way. It's then doubly annoying to see such a great concept pretty much thrown away by the end.

4) Minimal Combat

This in particular must be a sore point to the developer 'Swery', who has gone on record stating that they did not want to include combat, that they were pushed into it at the last minute as their publisher advised that a western audience wouldn't accept a character who doesn't fire a gun. The combat controls are clunky and awkward, meaning that no matter how much of an apprehensive atmosphere the setting has built up you are likely to be brought back out of it due to frustration. It can't even really be described as survival horror in the traditional sense of needing to carefully conserve your ammunition as your basic pistol has infinite ammo and is sufficient for most encounters. Hand held weapons take the opposite approach and will break after a very limited amount of uses, it will be a long time before you find an everlasting melee weapon, most of which are comedy side-quest rewards.

5) No Enemies

There are some good aspects to the enemies in this game, the basic zombies are kind of inventive and make you question what they are about as they often have disturbing dialogue like "Kill me" and "Don't want to die" even if these are delivered in a rather comical style on occasions. They also come at you while bending over backwards and rather than try to eat your brains they instead usually try to put their hand down your throat, again with no explanation why. The fact that they attempt to track you down by listening for your breathing is interesting and should have made for tense encounters too. They stop being interesting creatures though and become repetitive enemies due to the amount of them and how many bullets it takes to put them down. I would have much preferred for them to have gone down with a single well placed headshot, adding to the feel that you are literally shooting at shadows.

The list of enemy types in the game as a whole is very limited, other than the Raincoat Killer I remember the ceiling crawling shadows and not much else (according to websites there are also demon birds and dogs). The naked ceiling crawling woman should have really been the most creepy enemy in the game but the difficulty of your first encounter with one is likely to make you think of them more as an annoyance. They seemed like something worthy of having an origin story like the main ghosts in the Fatal Frame series but they isn't really much to find out about them and having them appear in countless locations kind of negates their uniqueness.

6) Open World

In the general sense of this description, Deadly Premonition is certainly the most open world horror game yet. However, the important pieces of the story are fairly linear, it would have been nice to have multiple leads to investigate at once, some of which would be possible to miss out. There is plenty of stuff that can be missed though due to the game's real time schedules for its characters but these mostly amount to sidequests that can provide some helpful items (and a bit more information on the characters themselves). I suppose in that sense it does at least help to give more of a feeling of the freedom of real life, which ties into the first point about normality. It would have been nice to be able to tail characters that you suspected to observe them doing more nefarious things than the mundane tasks they usually do, even if that could have lead to moving the story on quicker than expected.

7) Agency

I had to look up what agency means in this context, it's basically referring to how much you as a player are actually in control of and what is left up to cut scenes. Deadly Premonition does rely on quite a lot of cutscenes, even if their B-Movie quality is part of the games appeal. It does have some QTE style sections that let you take some control while temporarily avoiding the games clunky movement controls. These sections do feel quite tense and probably make the Raincoat Killer seem more of a threat than a simple cut scene would. The most tense experience of the game was finding a hiding space and having to hold your breath (in game) while the camera switches to the killers perspective and hope you are not found out. Perhaps a Kinect enabled game could take this further and make sure that you remain perfectly still in a similar situation.

8) Reflection

Here the article was talking about how games make you think about your own actions/opinions, which reminded me of my previous post on Limbo and Shadow of the Colossus. I can appreciate that this approach could be more disturbing than something which appears to be a clear yes/no decision you're forced to make. I thought that it would have been interesting to play the role of the killer outside of the short flashback section near the end of the game. I'm quite surprised in general that there hasn't been a horror game where you play the antagonist, you could perhaps say that Manhunt came kind of close to that idea.

Another idea is to have differences in what happens affected by more subtle means than a simple A, B or C dialogue choice. One idea I had for Deadly Premonition in particular was to have the outcome of the game affected by the game mechanics that just seemed like fun additions, for example how regularly you decide to shave could be taken as an approximation of your emotional state and which ending you end up with. Its open world nature and how many optional side quests you undertake could factor into this too.

9) Implications

I don't have any great ideas about how this game could have really affected someone's conciousness long after the game was finished. But the end of the game as it is, it feels about as far removed from reality as possible, negating any chance that you would be left with any long term fear in real life. One idea that I had, however implausible and cheap it might seem would be to have your character turn out to be the killer after all, kind of suggesting you can never fully know a person or even yourself. If you had been able to play the killer more then perhaps the computer could have partially controlled the character and you could either resist or just go along with it, feeling like the game itself was part of the horror.

10) Human Interaction

While Deadly Premonition doesn't really much new in terms of having the horror affecting human characters, their unique and memorable traits are effective in making you care about them. The fact that they all go about their daily routines regardless of what you do also makes them seem more human and they almost all have some kind of secrets to uncover about their life. That said, I didn't find the loss of many of them really affecting as most of the victims weren't particularly likeable, even if that sort of makes sense from a story point of view. The one death that you do care about makes its impact that much stronger though.

After covering all of these points though, the question is whether any of these changes would have changed the game from the oddball classic that it has become and if it would have had any impact on how it sold. For some fans of the game the appeal is partially that 'it is what it is' and is unapologetic about its flaws. I might even come across as hypocritical in wishing that it scared me more but defending Cabin in the Woods from the exact same criticism. I guess I see the difference as being how Cabin in the Woods clearly didn't really set out to be scary but Deadly Premonition felt that the developer was not fully aware of how effective some of the other sections would be and makes it feel like there wasn't a clear plan for the whole thing. I think only so much can be blamed on the publishers insistence that it should have combat etc. and some of it is down to Swery's "throw every idea at the wall and see what sticks" approach.

I'm not sure I would be that interested in a direct sequel to it as I think that a lot of what felt most interesting about it had been abandoned by the end of the game. I would however be very interested in more of a spiritual sequel that could take some of the concepts in a different direction, while creating a new cast of interesting characters. Perhaps we will get a chance to see that happen, depending on how well an English language PS3 release of it does.