You Should be Excited for Deadly Premonition: Director’s Cut on PS3

Normally, I wouldn’t take the time to talk about the announcement of a re-release of a game from several years ago. However, “Deadly Premonition: Director’s Cut” for the PS3 deserves special attention.

Originally released for the Xbox 360 in 2010, “Deadly Premonition” was a wildly divisive and, for lack of a better term, just plain crazy game. The title actually holds a Guiness World Record for “Most Critically Polarizing Survival Horror Game.” Review scores on the game ranged from perfect 10s at sites like Destructoid, to two out of 10 at sites like IGN. That’s a pretty wild range of opinion.

And the game earned that gap.

“Deadly Premonition” is a story about an FBI agent named Francis York investigating a bizarre murder in the small mountain community of Greenvale. The population of the town doesn’t tend to trust York thanks to his abrasive and condescending demeanor. Actually, that friction might also have something to do with his tendency to talk to his imaginary friend, “Zach.”

The game is basically Twin Peaks told through the bizarre Japanese lens of Hidetaka Suehiro, more commonly referred to as SWERY or Swery65. As it turns out, that makes for a ridiculously strange blend.

Some of the game’s critical disparity comes from the fact that the game’s gameplay is not only terrible, but also absolutely stupid. Shooting sections are completely broken, movement is strange and uncomfortable and the game is littered with incredibly long, tedious driving segments.

However, the horrible gameplay only feeds into the endearingly bizarre nature of the game. Sure, those long driving sections make absolutely no sense, but they’re carried through by the fact that they are punctuated with long, incredibly detailed “conversations” between York and Zach about B-tier ‘90s movies like Gremlins -- for no apparent reason. This is game that’s all about character.

This new Director’s Cut aims to enhance the more busted elements of the game, while also introducing new content developed by SWERY himself. Coming from the man that decided the entire game’s open world map should be shaped like a Dalmatian when viewed from above (which no player would actually ever be able to see in the game itself) we can only hope that it will be just as ridiculous as the old stuff.

More importantly, however, this gives players a chance to experience the oddity that is “Deadly Premonition.” The game isn’t exactly hard to track down (it’s available on the Xbox in downloadable form) but it never really got the worldwide recognition that it deserved.

Hopefully, this Playstation 3 release will allow the game to shine once again for an even wider audience when it comes out in March of 2013.