Oh My God, I love Deadly Premonition

 WARNING! SPOILERS!

 I love this game so much, the movement system is terrible and the boss fights are a pain in the neck, but I love it all the same.

 I think what I love the most about it was the way it made me want to keep playing. I wanted to find out what was going on, and I’d shoot through as many Joker wannabes as it took to get the answer.

You have to admit, there's a certain similarity.

 I mean, we had the mystery of the murders, the red seeds, Zach and so much more.

 My favourite was ‘who was ‘G’?’, although I figured that one out almost immediately. I mean, there were literally two people in town whose names began with the letter G. George and Gina the rose. As much fun as it is to imagine a scantily clad woman with an aggressive husband taking advantage of sweet, adorable, Thomas, let’s face it; it wasn’t likely. I wasn’t expecting what happened though, it caught me completely by surprise.

 I mean, I knew Thomas was gay, but I wasn’t expecting him to be a cross dressing pervert. I mean, he shares the man he loves with his sister and two teenage girls.

 Sweetie, you have bigger problems than Emily.

 I mean, when you’re a flaming stereotype degenerate gay man, you have to step back and reconsider your life, seriously.

 But Thomas and his turning out to be crazy and/or evil is only one part of a far greater community of weirdoes.

 You learn more about some of these people during the main plot and some of them you learn about during side quests. For example, I learned that George’s mother was abusive through the main quest and that she liked a nameless flower that only bloomed in the rain during a side quest. Although one questions how a flower that only blooms when it rains gets pollinated.

 One of the things I learned during a side quest was that Sigourney used to be incredibly beautiful. In the side quest I got from her, I learned that she believed her pot could see all. I would have done more, but they’re driving side quests and I was only killing time during the first one.

 This is one of the things I truly love about that game, the way all the characters have lives, secrets and interests outside of the plot line.

 You learn a lot about the main characters during the little optional parts of the game, like having lunch with Emily, George and Thomas, and when you talk to either your passengers or Zach when you’re driving. I mean, there’s no place in the plot to learn that York can never remember what happened in Superman IV.

How do you forget this?

Or to hear Thomas describe Emily’s cooking as ‘Amazon-style’ which made me like all the people in the conference room having lunch just that little bit more. I mean, one of them was an attempted axe murderer and another was a flaming degenerate gay stereotype, but they were still people. Moments like that were what made them more like real people, even though what happens later happens.

 If you haven’t worked it out yet from what was in the last statement is that George is the murderer. Which is especially funny as Doug started joking that he was the murderer the second he turned up. We were genuinely surprised though, when it turned out to be him. Something that York had suspected all along, apparently.

 Funny that he figured that out so quickly considering that he didn’t work out that the ‘upside down peace sign’ was, in fact, a tree until sometime after George told him it was. I was literally thinking ‘God, you’re thick, I worked this out in Episode One!’. I think I love York all the more because he’s both incredibly clever and unbelievably stupid at the same time.

 Actually, speaking of York, I love how he’s so protective over Zach. I also love how adorable Zach is, especially in comparison to York’s cool, calm and collected nature.

 The two of them are great, and the way the townsfolk react to them is great too. They see Zach, as it’s his body, not York. So while we see a green eyed brunet with a relatively small scar, they’re seeing a heterochromatic white haired man with a much larger facial scar. Although, when they talk about Zach’s scar, I think York thinks they’re talking about the scar under his eye, not the one he got when he was a child.

 Finally, I want to talk about George. The man has both physical and mental scars from the abuse his mother put him through, not to mention that her husband told us that she had a mental illness and George may very well have inherited that. The way his mother treated him taught him to seek strength and he became a physically impressive figure, what Doug and I both call ‘being a mountain of a man’. Despite this, he still has his absolutely adorable side, and not just because of the group interactions during lunch, for one, during one of his side quests we learn that he named his dumbbells. Oh, and they’re not just called anything, they’re called ‘Arnold’ and ‘Sylvester’. Naming your training equipment after action movie stars is, frankly, adorable.

 I was actually kind of sad that he was the murderer because I liked him so much. He was awesome, even though he had a thing for Emily who is way younger than him. However, his crazy ranting just made him ridiculous. I’m not going to lie, I liked how bat shit insane he got. His rationale for wanting Emily confused me though, she moved to Greenvale in high school and that’s when he first asked her out. Why? Because she was ‘a goddess from the city’. No, I’m not kidding. I don’t get the rationale for this at all, and let’s keep in mind, when people get weird ideas it is generally for a reason. What makes her ‘god like’, exactly? Having coping strategies for living in an area with a large number of people in it?

Emily, goddess of not looking people in the eye for too long.

 Apart from that though, his insanity is amazing.

 Overall, I’m in love with this game and I want to play it again. Regardless of the terrible movement system and the fact the first two boss fights are complete nightmares I would totally recommend this game to anyone who loves a good mystery and doesn’t mind a lot of blood in their video games. I would recommend going to Keith and buying the spiritual map A and getting the infinite sub-machine gun as soon as possible, though. It makes the game a lot easier.