Playing A Game Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut PC

Technically, I've played a bit of Deadly Premonition before; back on the Xbox 360, the game was both "too weird" and "too boring" to keep me interested for long.

Since then, the game's weirdness has become more well-known, cultivating a status like ... The Room of video games. One I looked forward to trying again, in its enhanced PC release. (Despite the utter idiocy of follow-up D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die.)

But Deadly Premonition's "Director's Cut" feels more like a meta-joke than a real attempt to enhance, or even to re-iterate, a game. I have trouble believing that anyone involved in this release seriously expected it to be played.

There are some, eh, "par for the course" PC port issues like its 720p resolution lock and other graphical shortcomings -- for which fan patches pick up the slack. And there are some gnarly, and bizarre compatibility problems such that the community recommends steps like running in Windows 7 mode. You might note that Windows 8 was released a year before this game.

None of that mattered to my Deadly Premonition attempt, though. After the inscrutable introductory cutscenes, once the game finally gave me control, I ... couldn't move. I could only rotate in place, use an invisible flashlight, and flail around while the lobby-style opening level taunted me with interactive-looking elements.

Is it a problem with the game's recognition of an Xbox One gamepad? Are the game's movement physics broken on modern CPUs? Did my GPU load the level's terrain into an impossible state? I'll never know for sure.

Community warnings like "make occasional backup copies of the save file" give me no hope for Deadly Premonition's technical integrity going forward.

Not since Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed have I been so completely blocked from attempting to play a game.

Rating: Awful