Within the first 5 seconds of freedom this game gave me, I immediately picked up the kitchen knife and used it in probably the worst way possible. The game didn’t stop me and it also didn't seem to care, and neither did I. But that was probably the worst way possible to start this game, because as it dragged on for hours the main thought in my head was, “We were cooking on the first route” which should have ended the game. Instead I was trapped in a torture chamber of nonsensical solutions and horrible dialogue delivery, with an ending that wasn’t even interesting enough to be worth the painful drawl. The image of Daisy Ridley’s weird polygonal feet are scarred into my brain forever.

While I find the trial and error bit of gameplay to be rather neat, it’s done in such an excruciatingly painful way here. Every do-over lacks the ability to skip the cinematics so you’ll feel your body rapidly age with every scene you’re forced to watch on repeat. The lack of options your character gets to work with are frustrating and unrealistic. The characters shamble around like zombies and there’s zero way to speed up the process to get back to a later segment in the timeline aside from some line skips. I guess had they implemented such a silly concept then the game would quite literally be 12 minutes long. Instead, you sit through hours of trying out the smallest changes, only to awkwardly miss-click something and have to redo the whole process again. With every make-out session your wife assaults you with unprompted at the beginning of every loop, the more reptilian I felt while playing this game. How icky it made me feel while I slowly became an iguana.

You’d think a game that allows you to stab the shit out of your wife in the first five seconds would have literally anything to say about violence or impatience or domestic abuse or literally anything? Maybe it’d point a finger at me and go, “You’re part of the problem!!” and question my immediate conclusion to stretch the game's choices to it’s most inhumane limits. Nope. It meant nothing, like it was just something cool you could do for the sake of it. Violence is actually the only way to siphon any useful information from any of the characters, in fact the peaceful communicative solutions don’t even open up until after you’ve murdered so it’s not like it’s not encouraged. But, it literally doesn’t acknowledge this as something awful nor does it affect your character in any real way. The game does not care, so why should you? Allowing me to start the game with the ability to do this really set itself up for failure. It never challenged my thought process, so I just simply progressed with not giving a shit. It's almost like game interactivity has a way of affecting the player if it's implemented in a meaningful way instead of just existing for "artistic" shock value.

At the end of the day, does it even matter? I went through all this effort just to land on a conclusion that I said out loud as a joke. When the twist happened and that joke ended up being the reality, oh fuck off. This is it. It’s just a game that let me murder my wife in the first 5 seconds of it and nothing else. Riveting stuff, guys.

How they got James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe, and Daisy Ridley involved in this is insanely hilarious. They sound like they’re phoning it in the whole time, like they don’t even believe in this game’s bullshit themselves. It’s artistic, I’ll give it that. But, am I buying it? No. I ate chocolate mousse while a man screamed at my wife and hogtied her to the floor right in front of me. Neat.

When I was a kid, being home alone at night terrified me. I would jump at even the slightest unexpected noise and need to turn several lights on just to make the short journey from my room to the bathroom, the familiar halls of my small duplex suddenly becoming frightening and dangerous to me. I knew there were no monsters in any closets or under any beds, no ghosts haunting the place, but my scared little kid brain couldn’t help but ask… what if?

Anatomy brought that old childhood fear back in a way no horror game I’ve ever played has done, doing so much with so little to create an intensely chilling atmosphere. Exploring this dark, shadowy home with nothing to keep you company besides the tapes found within its rooms, hypersensitive to any and all sounds, the trepidation about what, if anything, is hiding around each corner and behind each door. Just like when I was a kid, I know there’s no monster waiting to jump out of a closet and get me, but I still can’t stop thinking “what if?”

Whether or not you like Deadly Premonition doesn’t matter. It’s completely understandable to dislike it, I’m certainly not as crazy about it as others are. The important thing is to engage with it sincerely, something you aren’t doing if you describe it as “so bad it’s good.” For all of its flaws, Deadly Premonition is a game with genuine charm created with sincerity by talented people. It is one of the most unique experiences in the video game medium, and to dismiss that by labeling it “so bad it’s good” is just lazy.

When your character crashes crashes his car in the game's opening, he misses two squirrels who scurry off and make a... monkey sound?! I think this perfectly summarises Deadly Premonition, in all its stengths and weaknesses.
Considered by many to be the 'best worst game of all time' and Guiness record holder of 'Most Critically Polarizing Survival Horror,' Deadly Premonition might be the gaming equivalent of the 2003 cult movie The Room. They have plenty in common, mainly that every creative decision feels so incredibly wrongfooted that you question how it was even greenlit.
Any development team would hear those monkey squirrels and scratch their heads, as much as every gamer has subsequently. This game might have a fabulous team behind it, but, creatively, this is evidently the work of an individual.
Just as Deadly Premonition is gaming's answer to The Room, Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro might be its answer to Tommy Wiseau: an eccentric and intellectually contentious visionaire whose name is planted everywhere in the opening credits.
I think the game's cult status comes from that distinct personality, as much as the game's obvious inspirations (it's basically Twin Peaks with the gameplay of Shenmue without either's subtlety). Yes, the characters are dumb, the story is nonsensical, the sound is jarring, the music is annoying, the world design is derivative, the gameplay is clunky, the enemies are grating and the sexual politics are questionable - I could go on and on, almost as long as some of the cutscenes - but all of these things do one thing right, that is they form a wholistic sense of place, a unique atmosphere and a singular vision of its world, though a strange one. If all of these things were the culmination of a group effort, rather than an individual, it would show and immediately be less compelling. When you watch The Room, you never doubt that literally no one but Wiseau is at the wheel, it is the same here.
There are actually some aspects worthy of standard merit here. I am surprised to admit that some moments in this game are downright creepy and the plot becomes somehow even more unhinged in the final third - the game is at its best here because it eventually ditches the pretentions of being a Twin Peaks game and finds its two left feet placed firmly in the realm of Japanese weirdness.
Ultimately, it's not a 'good' game in the traditional sense, but instead a fascinating work of art... for all the wrong reasons.

6 stages of enlightment:

1. dp is bad

2. dp is so bad its good

3. dp is good in a genuine way, despite the controls and graphics and everything else besides the story and characters being bad

4. dp is good in a genuine way.

5. the endgame and the final bosses are bad for reasons relating to how dp treats its characters in need of the most crucial care, with the turn of events throughout being too dumb for its own good. and in retrospect the sequel may have only made it obvious that swery is not all that great of a writer, as far as the main stories around his protags and major supporting characters in general goes. every other problem with the game that has been talked to death about, i really dont care. the scale of greenvale and the scripted lives of its residents remind me that swery is a genuinely good director/designer if nothing else (not to ascribe too much credit to him over others). york in this game is a neurodivergent king and im not interested in anything to the contrary. the lynch comparison is inevitable even if its a little overspoken, and you can say that swery's attempt to translate the humanity of loss that made twin peaks what it is yielded mixed results, at the very best, of dp's climax. but expressing mundanity in the weird is dp's greatest asset; its more self-aware in its camp than it will get credit for, and it is always sincere in its ambitions to make the player become accustomed to both the socially oblivious weirdo you play as and the people of a pacific northwest town that is not so far off from him in their own quirks. and i think it does have some humanity in its more understated moments, particularly the series of sidequests that kicks off after talking to anna's mother, or from talking to certain character once they are arrested. even if there is some kind of auteur excess type ugliness to be found underneath the "ugliness" of the gameplay that is truly not as bad as its made out to be, sometimes monotonous and something to just get out of the way wrt the combat sections at worst imo--it can never detract from the passion within this game i feel when i am simply in it, without any flair or tonal whiplash to disturb that. a lifechanger for me that, in all the ways that really matter, still mostly deserves that title.

6. tee hee (executes a mathematically perfect 90 degree turn with a flick of the e-brake, blowing off the police investigation YET AGAIN to collect [Right Hand Bone] while york feeds me tremors movies trivia bc im about to starve to death) yay!