With the first interminable combat sequence left in the dust, it's time to a actually start meeting other characters in the game. But before that, let's take a look at a detail that captivated me the first time I played the game, and interests me still—a sequence of no seeming value or consequence.
When the "profile" ends, York doesn't immediately meet the local police who are waiting for him. Instead, he walks out of the woods a good five hundred meters from the bridge they're meant to rendezvous upon. This forces the player to spend a minute running down a wet highway to get there. Is this sequence meaningful? Is it just a strange design error? After the cliched Silent Hill-esque Other World sequence (hereafter referred to as the SHOW), did the developers want to give players a moment with a uniquely Deadly Premonition location and experience before the plot got moving?
I recognize that I may be reading a little too much into such a tiny portion of the game—it's not like this is Metal Gear Solid 3's climbing/theme song sequence. I think it's a telling scene, though, because this is the first piece of gameplay that defies genre convention and begins to establish the game's own tone. There's nothing new about crashing cars and gunfighting zombies in suspiciously narrow forest paths, but running down a wet highway at dawn in the Pacific Northwest? Now that's something I've never seen in a video game before. There's no score, either, nothing to interrupt or overpower the soft repetition of York's footsteps as he closes in on Greenvale, the game's main setting.
As I wrote above, I could well be reading (and writing) far much too into this, but considering the languid pace that much of the game moves at, I find this to be almost a perfect introduction to the real world that Deadly Premonition is about exploring—not the trite SHOW scenes, but rather the subdued depiction of an isolated community in the middle of the woods.
And after such an elaborate buildup, wouldn't this be a great time to spoil things with some awkward translation?
I've always wondered what it's like for North American voice actors recording the dialogue for translated games. When they're confronted with a line that's just a slight word-change away from being natural English, do they ever suggest fixing it? Or do they just read the scripts put in front of them without comment, happy to be working?
Not that Deadly Premonition has any particularly egregious examples of Engrish to offer, no one sets up anyone the bomb or anything like that… but Deadly Premonition suffers more than most games would from the occasional slip because there's such a fundamentally serious story being so well-told. It's hard not to snigger whenever something utterly unnatural comes out of a character's mouth, but for now I'm going to have to ask you to play along and just ignore the rare instances of awkwardness as much as possible. It's always going to be clear what people mean, so hopefully you'll be able to let the occasional awkward wording drift by without much trouble.
It's easy to forgive those small mistakes when you're dealing with a game that has such a strong sense of how to stage and execute a dramatic scene. Whether it's the broader notes of the power dynamic between York and George (like York's childish attempt to regain some control of the interaction by blowing smoke and suggesting that George get his luggage), or the subtler notes like George possessively standing between York and Emily, this first scene of character interaction lets us know the developers understand how important it is to establish strong personalities for their characters right away, so that their interactions can go on to provide a dramatic spine for the story.
We also learn why York does that thing where he touches his temple and tilts his head whenever he talks to Zach—it's a move designed to hide his mouth from anyone nearby—when combined with the way he lowers his voice during these asides, the goal is clearly to hide his conversations with Zach as much as possible. This way, at worst, he'll look like someone who mumbles to himself a little, rather than a full-on psycho who speaking to a second personality all the time. It's interesting to note that he does this even when he's alone—he's obviously so used to talking to Zach around other people that he's gotten into the habit of doing it all the time.
York does, in fact, retire to the hotel for a nap, where he has an unsettling dream…
This is something of an odd video—the Shadow is creepy enough, but the main thrust of the scene, that we're supposed to be learning a key gameplay component, never really hit home with me. The idea that enemies won't be able to detect you if you hold your breath is interesting, but it never really becomes useful in the game. I'll get into this a little more later on, but the fact is that enemies generally aren't fast enough to corner the player, or they appear in hallways so narrow that they can't be snuck past. In yet another failure for the terrible combat sequences, I was able to get through the entire game without once holding my breath to confuse a zombie.
The location York's waking up in is the Great Deer Yard hotel, which is about five times bigger than makes sense for the size of town it's in. Like most of the game's mysteries, this will be explained soon enough. In the room the player can futz about with York's inventory, change his clothes, and, of course, shave.
I find the game's seeming fixation on the minutiae of day-to-day life oddly endearing. It's by no stretch of the imagination a realistic game, but the few random nods to how things actually work—York will get stubble as time passes, if he doesn't dry clean his suit it will start to attract flies with its rank odor—serve as another thing that separates Deadly Premonition from the crowd. At every turn, it attempts to bring the player more fully into York Morgan's world, as he eats, sleeps, and travels from place to place during the investigation. The game only balks, thankfully, at addressing the bathroom situation in Greenvale.
After cleaning himself up, York meets the first of the game's "quirky townspeople", Polly the owner/sole employee of the Deer Yard Inn. The ensuing breakfast scene, in addition to providing a primer for where to travel in and around Greenvale, includes the game's single most referenced and mocked moment, right at the end:
"F.K…. In the coffee!"
Yes, that really happened. He mentioned it a few movies back, but that's not what the Internet fixated on. This seems to be the make-or-break moment for suspension of disbelief when it comes to the game, although I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps this says more about my own personal craziness than anything else, but the only thing that occurred to me when I got to this scene was "Huh, so York believes in divination. Neat."
For those not familiar with divination, Wikipedia has an amazing list of every type you can imagine, and a few more. In short form, though, divination is the belief that you can find messages from the divine in everyday patterns, from the I Ching to tarot to astrology to reading tea leaves, any time you try to gain a glimpse of the future from a random pattern, you're engaging in divination.
What I find most interesting about this scene is not that York believes in divination (again, this might be the Twin Peaks influence showing through—see the video at the end of this article for a related scene), but rather that he's seemingly devised his own method of it. I'm familiar with reading coffee grounds, or wax dropped into liquid—but the shapes that cream makes in coffee before dispersing? That's a new one to me—and yet another reason I found York Morgan to be a fascinating character. Did he come up with this idea himself, along with all of the possible meanings for various squiggly shapes.
That's the last time we'll see coffee-reading play a role in the plot, but if the player so desires, they can always check their fortune a few more times—
Which one is your favorite? Mine, naturally, involves the Blues Brothers. Now, a warning: this is not the last time I'll be openly amazed by the amount of raw content that the game has to offer.
If you've found any other this craziness compelling (in any way), remember that Deadly Premonition is available for purchase at Amazon for less than 20 American dollars—there's more craziness to come, and I suspect that you'll enjoy it more firsthand than you would filtered through my alternating criticism/fawning.
Next time on my Game of the Year coverage of Deadly Premonition? I reveal my status as a stupe, and then examine the brilliant conceit I mentioned way back at the start of this thing.
And now, as promised, a favorite scene from Twin Peaks:
Next time: Riding in Cars with York (Deadly Premonition is the Game of the Year, Part 5.
cream vs. milk bottles
The one thing I really loved about Deadly Premonition was getting paid to shave or change your shirt. On one level it was fortuitous because I played the game not long after the game blogs flared up over the Jesse Schell talk at DICE. David Carlton has an excellent writeup about this with a wealth of links to other great responses. The short version is that Schell described a future in which games are used as a way to build brand identity and alter behavior by awarding points for things like brushing your teeth or riding the bus. It's amusing to consider the possibility that York, who is so freaking weird, is actually being rewarded for behaving like a well-socialized individual.
I had a feeling the milk bottle scene would come up. Simplistically, you're right. Dale Cooper uses divination (sort of), and so does York. But there's an enormous gulf between these two scenes. The first thing to note about this scene is that it is stuffed full of people. From a plot perspective, there's no reason for them to be there; everything that's accomplished in the scene could be done just as well, and in less time, if Cooper was just off all by himself throwing rocks at a bottle in the woods. The Sheriff and his deputies, however, play an essential role in making the whole scene, which is completely absurd, seem normal.
The scene digresses constantly as the Sheriff's people joke around with each other or try to figure out what "Jack with one eye" means. All of this comes across as typical behavior on their part, so it's clear they don't think Cooper is all that strange. They're treating this event as normal, which encourages the viewer to see it the same way. Lynch and Frost even lampshade how odd the whole episode is when Harry confronts Cooper briefly about how this "deductive method" came from a dream. That Harry trusts Cooper about this encourages us to trust Cooper, because Harry is a normal kind of guy, like us. It's also important that we see Harry's trust as justified, on the basis of Cooper's preceding shows of deductive prowess. We don't have any of this with York, who hasn't shown any particular competence and is sitting alone doing something very odd.
Another essential feature of the milk bottle scene is that what Cooper is doing makes sense. His decision-making process is one that we can see clearly, because it relies on an obvious physical interaction. Contrast this with FK in the coffee, which I can barely see after four viewings knowing that it is there.
The reason it's important for us to understand what is going on is that Frost and Lynch involve the viewer in the logic of the scene. Note that Cooper never explicitly describes the method he's using. He gives a basically irrelevant introduction about Tibet, tells us that it's a mind-body technique, and then just performs the technique without explaining what each component means. The viewer has to figure out for himself what's going on and what every outcome means. The viewer is assisted by the multi-viewpoint nature of the series, which has already cast suspicion on Jacoby and Leo Johnson and removed it from the other characters.
Because we know things the characters do not, and have these things confirmed by the scene, Cooper comes across as an offbeat genius. Sitting alone, learning two inscrutable letters by drizzling cream into his coffee, York comes across as a crazy person in need of a spoon.
The milk bottle scene is marvelously written. What is going on in it is completely absurd, even comical, but the hardcore strangeness of this scene is blunted by the naturalistic behavior of the secondary characters and the involvement of the viewer in the scene's logic. To watch Cooper throw rocks at the milk bottle is to watch a bunch of normal people engage in slightly odd behavior that we nonetheless understand. To watch York gaze into his coffee is to watch an alien behave like a madman. That's why Twin Peaks is brilliant and Deadly Premonition is a failure.