Okay this one is a total mind fuck. Remember my Deadly Premonition review? Well this one is from the same guys and
they haven’t got any more sane between games. I got D4 while it was on Xbox One’s Games with Gold list. I can’t remember
when this was now but I was so keen to play it, it survived several hard drive
culls when I’ve been making room for bigger titles.
D4 follows the story of David
Young as he goes on a quest to find the person responsible for the death of his
wife Peggy. But he isn’t just an ordinary investigator, oh no. He can use
certain objects (known as mementos) to travel back in time to see events as
they unfold. And also get involved in them which I’m sure should have
irrevocable time paradox consequences later.
Remember Forrest Kaysen from Deadly
Premonition? He turns up as David’s partner here and is supposedly a good
guy. He certainly isn’t some kind of mutant being from another planet or
something else bizarre which does make this slightly more believable. David also
has a cat (Or a roommate?) called Amanda. Amanda is essentially a woman who
thinks she’s a cat. But David has a cat in the flashbacks? And I think the cat
was called Amanda? Anyway, to cut a long story short, David has a cat-person
called Amanda who sells him all kinds of stuff and lives with him.
So that’s the background for this wacky game, now on to the actual game
element. David has a problem in the same way that the cars had problems in Deadly Premonition. The cars would run
out fuel driving from one end of town to the other. David will pass out from
lack of energy if he opens too many cupboards. A large element of the game
involves keeping David fed and watered and doped up on Tequila so he can carry out
the various things required to solve his investigation. It works like a point
and click adventure game in that you have to direct David by clicking on certain
points in the environment to navigate him to objects of interest. Like cupboards.
And plants.
I don’t want to ruin too much of the game for those that haven’t played
it as the story is the main focal point but pretty much every character is
weird, some outwardly and others creepily. There is a really tall doctor who,
for some unexplained reason, is always carrying a knife and fork; a weird guy
who is so into fashion that he carries a mannequin around with him and appears
to think she is a real person; and Forrest who I’ve already mentioned has a
bizarre appetite where he eats more food than his body weight – and he’s not a
small guy. Some missions invite David to eat with Forrest and in stark
contrast, David doesn’t eat anything other than the stuff you make him eat.
Achievements – 1,000 Points – 78
Achievements
For a standard 1,000 points, D4 has
a sizeable achievement list but they do offer a lot for not doing very much. A
prime example is the first one you will get which is for ‘Started playing
Season One’ – so start playing the game. Don’t be fooled by this though, the
entire game relates to Season One as Season One is the entire game.
The game consists of a Prologue, Episode One and Episode Two and you will get 9 whole achievements
for playing from A to B. The game allows you to replay episodes and none of the
episodes are particularly long and as such, none of the achievements are
missable and require you to replay the whole thing. This even applies to
completing the game without retrying. If you don’t feed David, he will pass out
and you will fail but you only have to do each episode separately for this.
Aside from completing the main game, there are achievements for doing
extra cases for the other characters you meet. You will get 2 achievements for
each character; one for doing one of their cases and one for doing all of them.
There are also four quick time events in the game and each one carries
three achievements – one for actually doing it (story related), another for
doing without any poor or misses (and if you get enough of these you will ‘die’)
and another for getting 75% or higher score which, due to the nature of the
quick time events themselves, is actually quite difficult. The game is designed
to utilise the Kinnect and these bits don’t really showcase its ability to
accurately read what you’re doing.
Pretty much everything about the achievement list is notable. You have
to find over 75% of everything you can either collect, push and observe as well
as gathering witness accounts. You have to find all of the collectibles which
includes letters from Little Peggy, Scrap Book articles and Golden Credits. On
top of this, the biggest pain in the ass is for eating all of the items on the
food list. There are a lot and you can only find some of them in the game
environment. By the end of the game, you will need to buy lots of the items
from the store – something that you won’t have enough money for without
grinding out some serious credits.
That leaves some of the more frustrating achievements. They aren’t
necessarily difficult but they do take some effort to get. You need to play
this minigame where clovers fall from the top of the screen and you have to
move a big hand to catch them all. If one clover hits the floor it’s game over.
You have to amass 1,200 points during one game to net some more achievements.
Once you have played the game during the story and completed the game, you can
replay it from David’s flat at any time.
The last lot of achievements I got related to getting 100,000 credits,
activating vision 100 times and ingesting 500 fluid ounces of alcohol. You can
use the clover game above to get credits relatively quickly by exploiting a
glitch. What you have to do is play the game and get a high score. Once you
lose, go to play the game but instead of actually playing you can quit out
straight away and it will reward you with the same amount of credits it gave it
you during your last play. What I did was play this out then use to money to
buy alcohol. You need alcohol to use vision so I used vision until I didn’t
have any more, then drank some more alcohol then used vision. Rinse and repeat
until they all unlocked.
There was one more that was probably the biggest pain and it involves
reading all of the fortune cookies in David’s flat. This was a pain because you
can only read three at a time, there are more three different fortunes per
episode and David gets ridiculously worn out from cracking open a cookie. There
is also no tracking involved so you will have no idea which episode you need to
replay to get the remaining fortunes. Basically it’s trial and error and it was
only because I fucked up the quick time events so much that I got this earlier
than the last one.
Downloadable Content – N/A
The fact that there is no DLC is disappointing. The story sucks you in
and actually makes you want to know exactly what is going on in this bizarre
universe. Then the game ends with the promise of Season Two. It’s been more
than two years since Season One now so I doubt I will ever be able to finish
the story and that for me this is the biggest disappointment about D4. It’s a real shame that it appears to
be a funding reason that we won’t see an end to it so I guess not a lot of
people engaged with the game like I did.
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