Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise

Many of the successful video games that have a second part are games that have had commercial or at least critical success to have a loyal audience willing to support the second part, but there are some rare cases. These cases involve games that had mixed media and commercial response, but the players who tried them were impressed. In one aspect it has won a small but very loyal group of players and our game today is an example of this, namely Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise, the sequel to the horror game Deadly Premonition released in 2010, which despite its many flaws enjoyed a loyal fan base. The game was released on Nintendo Switch in 2020. It recently appeared on PC and we had the opportunity to try it out and give this review. So did the second part learn from the mistakes of the first?

Gameplay and Story

The events take place in 2019, ten years after the events of the first part, in which you and federal investigator Francis Zach Morgan investigate the events of the case from the first part and its follow-up case, which took place in the fictional town of “Le Carré ” in the state of Louisiana, and here events begin to move between the future and the past, that is, between the investigative session with Morgan and experiencing the events of the Lo Caria case.

Characters and Dialogue

As we know, the game comes from the Japanese director Hidetaka Suehiro, known as SWERY65, who likes to tell stories full of exaggerations and strange characters, like in the first part of Deadly Premonition and his other game D4 The same applies to Deadly Premonition 2, but in comparison to the first part, this part is less coherent in terms of… the events and you will find that the story is full of gaps and jumps that do not explain many details. The cast of The number of characters in the game is also very limited compared to the first part and many of the characters do not have a large share of dialogue, which is largely limited to dialogue between Agent Morgan and his alternative personality and his clever little assistant Patricia.

Open-World Exploration

Deadly Premonition 2 is an open-world game that attempts to provide a relatively large map of the city of Le Caria, but the game fails to apply the various elements of open-world games nor has it learned from its predecessor’s mistakes Has it benefited from any ideas or developments for games in this category? The playing card is relatively large. However, it is empty and there are few places to visit. Navigating this map is possible with a skateboard. Transportation is relatively slow, but when you visit the different areas you can activate the taxi station, which will make it easier for you to get around and save you a lot of time. We honestly don’t know why. Presenting such a large and empty map without learning from the many experiences we have had over the last two generations making the same mistake.

Missions and Side Activities

When focusing on investigations and wandering around the game world, the process is limited to moving from one place to another and talking to characters and nothing more. There are very limited and even rare ways to manage dialogues and they have no real consequences, allowing you to keep making the wrong decisions until you are right! Many of the missions are also a desperate attempt to extend the game’s lifespan, e.g. Such as asking to collect some ingredients for a particular meal, without giving any clues as to the location of many of those ingredients, meaning you have to wander around randomly in the hope of finding them. When you no longer need those resources, you will Asked them to return to the place where they are. Later in the day, if you need to do research and do no real activities, return to the hotel to sleep and pass the time.

Mini-Games and Combat

The game offers many mini-games such as: Such as shooting at targets while on a boat ride, or throwing rocks at the water and trying to make them jump off the roof multiple times, or even playing bowling and engaging in such side activities allows you to allocate certain resources as needed get on the points you’ve earned, but there’s no reason to do this. Therefore, these games are not particularly pleasantly designed and are very primitive. Obtaining resources in the game is very easy. Bullet packs contain enough bullets to kill the entire city, and the money you get for trivial reasons allows you to buy resources as you wish, and your weapon is powerful enough not to do that. You have to develop them or take care of the entire development process.

Other World and Conclusion

The second part of the experience involves going into a trench in the other world where you fight monsters and try to get to the end of it to find out the circumstances of the case. Each trench ends with you facing the criminal in the form of a monster. This part is frustrating and shows the same broken aiming mechanism as the last version. These fights are very easy and you have little difficulty finishing the trenches.

The large amount of dialogue in the game, the need to return to some areas later in the day, etc. significantly extend the lifespan of the experience. We finished the game in 20 hours, avoiding most of the side missions, the strange and funny dialogues in the game, and the frequent reference to bad movies and praising them in a serious, funny way. The game has its own fun, though this fun doesn’t justify suffering the long torment of broken gameplay elements and weak content. Deadly Premonition 2 not only failed to correct the errors of the first part, but also added more errors to it, resulting in a complete waste of time.