This game, in its time, was revolutionary to me. I had never experienced anything like it. I didn't know that this was what video games could be. It was like an interactive Saturday morning cartoon, but a really weird one, packed with absurdist humour that had me laughing out loud on a consistent basis. All the songs were total earworms that had me singing the lyrics on the way to school. The metric used for whether you were doing well or not seemed wildly unfair and downright random, but I didn't care. Failing and replaying a 'level' again meant that I got to replay a level again.

Thanks for the memories Parappa.

Bought this the day it came out on the 360 in the UK. I had fun with it to begin with because the tone was self-knowingly silly and bonkers, and it seemed to me like the devs had a good handle on what kind of story they wanted to tell. Something that was an obvious ode to Twin Peaks, yet wasn't afraid to be broadly comedic. And then about halfway through, the game committed the cardinal sin of taking itself seriously. The gags disappeared and the tone got darker, yet for some godforsaken reason the story grew more and more ludicrous. And to make matters even worse, the frequency of the objectively awful combat segments increased and became more of a focal point in the campaign. Instead of playing to the game's strengths all the way through, Swery and his team got infected with some serious delusions of grandeur and decided it was a good idea to try and tell a story with some emotional heft. Bad bad idea.

IGN were right - Deadly Premonition is pretty damn shit.