Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut

Available on

PC
PlayStation 3

Publisher

Rising Star Games

Developer

TBC

Release dates

PC: TBC
PlayStation 3: 26/04/2013

Spotlight

VideoWatch: Hands on with Deadly Premonition The Board Game

Swery d65

13

VideoWatch: Johnny makes the sinner's sandwich from Deadly Premonition

'Do you feel it, Zach?'

15

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut review

I'll be Zach.

45

The cult of Swery

Deadly Premonition's creator has become the focus of a phenomenal cult. How did Swery get here, and where is he heading next?

10

Key events

7th May 2013

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut review

29th January 2013

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut shows off its newly enhanced gameplay

16th October 2012

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut out exclusively on PS3 Q1 2013

Swery's The Good Life campaign will fail on Fig

But...

Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro's new game The Good Life - a papercraft open-world murder mystery in a rural English town, oh and where you turn into a cat or dog at night - will fail as a campaign on crowdfunding platform Fig. He seeks $1.5m but has raised only a third of it, and his time runs out today.

VideoWatch: Hands on with Deadly Premonition The Board Game

Swery d65

Deadly Premonition is so very, uniquely weird that it's hard to imagine it translating well to a board game. Like Twin Peaks, its atmosphere is too specific and too bizarre, surely, to be supported by a tabletop game (a Twin Peaks board game really was produced in the 90s, in fact - I have it on good authority from Donlan that it's utter trash).

Swery's new game will be "perverted, violent and crazy"

And he reveals a disturbing early vision for Deadly Premonition.

What will maverick designer Swery, real name Hidetaka Suehiro, make next? How will he follow the Twin Peaksy eccentricity of Deadly Premonition, or the dizzyingly off centre D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die? More to the point: is he okay?

VideoWatch: Johnny makes the sinner's sandwich from Deadly Premonition

'Do you feel it, Zach?'

The nice thing about filming a different video game recipe each week is that we're never short of suggestions from our viewers. Having made eight different video game dishes now you'd think we'd be running out of ideas, but the recipes just keep coming in (I promise I'll cook something from Skyrim eventually).

Deadly Premonition headlines Rising Star sale

So says Mr. Stewart.

Do you like quirky things? Do you like saving money? Good news! To celebrate 10 years of bringing weird and wonderful Japanese games to a wider audience, publisher Rising Star has announced an anniversary sale over on the PlayStation Store.

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut is locked at 720p on PC

UPDATE: Rising Star releases patch, but resolution is still fixed.

UPDATE 3: Deadly Premonition PC's publisher Rising Star Games has announced that its new 1.01 patch is out, which should fix a host of errors. Unfortunately, it still doesn't address the 720p locked resolution, but modder Durante has issued a fix for that - even if it's still in alpha and a bit buggy.

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut review

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut review

I'll be Zach.

If there were such a thing as video game outsider art, Deadly Premonition would be it. Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro's 2010 horror mystery is naïve, ugly, overreaching and often tedious to play. Its weird blend of detective thriller, open-world adventure, survival horror and surreal art piece often seems to have been beyond the means, not to say talent, of its creators to achieve. But there's an endearing artlessness to its pursuit of this impossible dream. It's an authentic and unselfconscious game, and the laughs, pathos and charm it possesses are real.

Small wonder that it's become a cult release, one of few games to attain the "so bad it's good" cachet movie buffs use to excuse their indulgence in the trashy work Troma or The Asylum. That's not fair, through, because the bad parts of Deadly Premonition are just bad, while the good parts deserve to be enjoyed without irony. The game's cult status has won it this "Director's Cut" reissue, which also brings it to PlayStation 3 for the first time outside of Japan. The improvements made are mild and the additions minor; perhaps that's for the best. If Deadly Premonition had been made to resemble a competent modern video game too closely, it wouldn't be Deadly Premonition any more.

The game is essentially a crude cut-and-shut of David Lynch's seminal 1990 TV series Twin Peaks with a survival horror game in the Silent Hill mould. Francis "York" Morgan is an enigmatic, buttoned-down FBI agent who loves coffee, summoned to a fading Washington state logging town to investigate the murder of a young woman. There's a missing locket. There are surreal dream sequences. There's a mad old lady who carries an inanimate object everywhere and claims it tells her things (a pot, not a log). There's red velvet everywhere, and stuffed stag heads, and torch singing, and hints of an occult secret at the heart of this remote small-town community.

Read more

The cult of Swery

Deadly Premonition's creator has become the focus of a phenomenal cult. How did Swery get here, and where is he heading next?

Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro is a stranger in a strange land. Back home, he's the designer and co-writer of a string of quietly successful if anonymous PSP titles at Access Games, a mid-tier developer based in Osaka. Here, though, he's something else - a cult hero, and one of the few singular voices working in the industry. In a tour that's taken him from the sprawl of Los Angeles to Hitchin, the small English market town where we meet on a Saturday afternoon muted by snowfall, he's adored and revered. And it's all thanks to one very odd game.

Swery is interested in setting Deadly Premonition's follow-up in Europe. Producer suggests Hitchin

The Director's Cut dated for mid-April in EU, one week ahead of schedule.

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut has been officially dated for 19th April in Europe via publisher Rising Star. It was previously expected to come out a week later, and will contain improved graphics and control, an additional scenario as part of the main quest, and DLC such as new outfits, cars and a house.

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut shows off its newly enhanced gameplay

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut shows off its newly enhanced gameplay

UPDATE: Will likely come to EU a week ahead of NA in late April. Adds mini-map, smoother controls, still features awkward, blocky graphics.

Update: Rising Star issued the following update regarding the releases date:

"We are looking at last week in April for North America with the probability of Europe a week before!"

"I would still need to get confirmation on Europe…but we are set in the US for end of April."

Read more