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Play It’s an interesting way to frame Deadly Premonition 2’s roughly 20-hour plot, and the episodes set in 2019 allow you to play as new character Aaliyah Davis, who’s charged with interviewing the sickly, disheveled modern-day Zach (whose pot-smoking is hilariously and repeatedly referred to as his “stinking indulgence”). It inherits many of the technical flaws of its now decade-old predecessor, but its story never manages to disturb or captivate to quite the same extent, making for a much more forgettable follow-up.Director Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro has apparently shelved his Twin Peaks box set in favour of binge-watching season one of True Detective, because Deadly Premonition 2’s story structure is highly reminiscent of that of the HBO series flitting back and forth between a videotaped interrogation with Francis “Zach” Morgan in 2019, and his 2005 investigation of a series of murders as his split-personality counterpart Francis “York” Morgan in the fictional deep south small town of Le Carré.
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Sadly its sequel, Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise, does not enjoy that same saving grace.
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The original cult classic Deadly Premonition featured terrible combat, graphics that were dated on arrival in 2010, and an erratic audio mix that rendered much of its dialogue unintelligible, but it was easy to look past or even embrace its low-budget shortcomings because its eccentric cast of characters and utterly bonkers story was like no other game that many of us had ever played.
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