D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die

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.

Deadly Premonition

Story – 9/10

In terms of storyline, Deadly Premonition is one of the best I’ve ever seen in video games but not for the usual reasons. The storyline focuses on the main protagonist, York, who is an unorthodox FBI agent investigating a serial killer in a small town. 

A big highlight for me is that the game refuses to take itself seriously where the characters act accordingly based on your gameplay decisions. For example there are various points where you have to travel with other characters but you can also choose not to. Not doing so can cause some hilarious dialogue mainly aimed at York being an unaware lunatic - something that York continually disregards.

I really like that the gameplay interlinks with the story but the main highlight is comic value portrayed throughout, even during moments of seriousness.

Picture – 4/10

The visual quality of the game is very poor for Xbox360 standard. It’s very blocky and even during cut scenes, the characters appear rigid and if they are being forced to act. They also make strange gestures during conversations which leads me down the poor development path as opposed to being done on purpose for comedy.

Sound – 7/10

Going in line with the comedy elements described under the story, the accompanying music adds to the comic element. Some reviews have criticised this approach but I think it is genius, especially when playing light-hearted Jazz music during tense situations.

Gameplay – 2/10

This is where the game falls on its comic-horror ass. ‘Glitchy as fuck’ is a generous description of the gameplay which is a shame as all the good points above are undone by the game failing to do what it is created to do – be PLAYABLE.

On two occasions I have found myself completely stuck because the game has glitched and prevented me from progressing. One of these times was towards the end of a long and arduous section where one of the zombies wouldn’t load and it wouldn’t let me continue until I had killed every zombie in the room. I lost roughly half an hour of my life for no reason due to poor development.

Other situations involve the game not allowing me to progress even though I’ve done the required prerequisite activity. Sometimes the cut scenes won’t load and other times the game freezes completely.

However the one that nearly resulted in the death of my controller was when I was replaying a chapter to finish the trading card collection. It is important to note that you cannot save the game during a chapter replay I had collected about 5 cards which has taken about an hour. I went to the location of the next card and fell through a hole in the graphics, dying and losing all my progress. This is just unacceptable in terms of developer short cuts.

These are my massive gameplay issues. However, I also found the areas of driving and shooting to be sadly lacking, which is shit when you take into account that driving and shooting take up about 90% of the active gameplay.

The driving controls are awful. If you go down a hill, without any modifications to your car, as soon as your vehicle reaches 60mph, you can no longer control it and it veers off to the side of the road and smashes into the invisible barrier, if you happen to be driving next to a grassy embankment.

The combat aspects of the game are just as bad, if not worse. I lost count of the amount of times I’ve shot armed zombies (what is that about?!) with a shotgun from point blank range for them to then shoot me as if i did nothing. And then York falls on the floor holding his face in loads of pain... hmm. Really? Also it is unreasonable, on any level of difficulty, for a zombie to take 16+ headshots AND STILL NOT DIE. Why not just make it harder to shoot the zombies in the head? That would have at least made the combat scenarios more bearable.

That doesn’t leave much else of the game that isn’t poorly developed except for what I’ve already mentioned, making my score of 2 actually quite generous.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 12 Achievements

I’m all for secret achievements under one premise – that they are story linked and are unmissable. Deadly Premonition fails to meet these criteria in that there are achievements for completing the game on each difficulty level and another for completing an in game collection and they are all listed as secret.

Failure number two on the achievement front is having non stackable achievements. To earn 1,000 point you have to play through on all three difficulties. This is really irritating especially when it is mainly a story driven game and there is not that much difference in the challenge level between difficulties. This makes for the most frustrating aspect of these achievements in having to replay a story driven game three times to earn the 1,000 points.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Summary

Deadly Premonition is definitely worth playing from a story point of view, but if you fancy a 100% game I would avoid it. Having to play a game three times when it is exactly the same in each of these occasions is a definite miss for me.