Playing A Game D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die - Season 1 PC

It's a widely-believed fact that Quentin Tarantino's view of popular American culture was shaped primarily by watching older movies. It's fairly evident that Goichi "Suda51" Suda's view of popular American culture (No More Heroes, Killer7, et al) was shaped primarily by watching Quentin Tarantino movies. And I now believe that Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro's view of popular American culture (Deadly Premonition, D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die) was shaped primarily by playing Goichi Suda games.

It's laughably stupid, as should be expected, but past just looking stupid; D4 also plays like an idiot. The demo shows off examples of the game's "investigation" and "action" segments: The former being a poor imitation of Myst-styled adventures, with MacGuffin-y interactive objects at certain combinations of physical position and visual perspective; and the latter being arrangements of quick-time events that sit somewhere around PaRappa the Rapper's territory.

It's yet another example of a game that's essentially a dressed-up visual novel with a nonsense plot, but that aside, it feels like the mechanics were designed to be deliberately bad. A "stamina" meter goes down every time you interact with investigation objects, effectively discouraging you from examining and learning more about the game world. And the QTE action prompts are ambiguous enough that they require paying real attention, while the entertaining stuff - people acrobatically fighting each other under hectic rock music - plays out in the background.

D4 isn't quite a parody of over-shallow action games, but it's getting pretty close.

Progress: played the demo.