this is a difficult one to review. buckle up because i have a LOT of thoughts about this and they will probably not be cohesive

i love deadly premonition 1, despite it all. i love swery65 and his games. even when he is obviously so inspired by suda51, swery is a guy who makes games purely for himself and he makes games that he enjoys and his games are pure nonsensical fun because of that. you can tell that all of his works are products of love and a genuine interest in what he's making, they're silly and weird and so self-indulgent and it's great! deadly premonition is a broken game where its gameplay flaws somehow make it even better, and d4 is genuinely one of the best things i've ever experienced and i love both these games dearly.

deadly premonition 2 is complicated. i WANTED to enjoy this so badly, given how much i love the first game and i was so excited to hear a sequel was finally being made, and despite a lot of my issues with this game, i DID enjoy some of it. not all of it. and i am having very complex feelings about it.

upon initial impression, a few hours into the game, i felt like deadly premonition 2 was trying too hard to be good in the way that deadly premonition 1 was. dp1 was accidentally fun, a product of its time--the characters were weird and quirky and had so much accidental charm, the story was silly, the side quests were odd and unique, everything in this game was a direct result of a self-indulgent japanese xbox game made in the 2000s. you can feel it! and it's awesome!
deadly premonition 2, however, is trying so hard to replicate the charm of the first game that it isn't an accident anymore, and you can feel that it's trying too hard.

le carre is a HUGE town that is so incredibly empty. the majority of the map is residential streets and houses that you can't enter and with nothing to explore and no incentive to go off the beaten track; there's so many empty homes in the town yet there's a very very small cast of relevant characters and most of them die so quickly. greenvale was full of life, lived in, all of the characters had daily routines and you could see them at all times around the town, driving, in the grocery store, and it felt so charming and complete! le carre is deserted. you rarely see a character around town, there's almost no cars on the streets, there's really no stores to go into or npc homes to explore... it feels so lifeless. and it's sad. it's also frustrating to explore le carre without a vehicle--the skateboard is funny and all, but until you upgrade its speed it's SO horrible to get around such a large town with it, and by the time you do upgrade its speed you (finally) have access to fast travel, so it's pointless.

despite all of this, i guess i was trying my best to look past it all and enjoy it anyways. and i did! i can't explain why, perhaps just knowing that this was deadly premonition 2, a sequel to one of my favourite games of all time, i still had fun going around town and meeting new characters while the story was still beginning. that's where a lot of my hatred for this game comes in: the story developing.

from the getgo, i guess i should have expected that swery's take on louisiana voodoo culture wouldn't have been great. houngan is the first character you meet that indicates things are about to go to shit. i'll admit i don't know extensive knowledge about the culture, but houngan is supposed to be representative of a haitian lwa, and while his appearance is comparable to those in other media (see: every fictional variant of baron samedi), i still don't know if it's... appropriate or not. while houngan might be an accurate representation of a lwa, there's definitely issue in the way york frequently mimics his accent in a way that is supposed to be funny but is just blatantly racist.

the game just devolves as it goes on and by the final episode, me and my friends were in awe, speechless of how horrific the racism is here. throughout the game, we see multiple scenes of the clarkson family (an all-white southern family who own le carre) discussing their legacy, their tradition, and talks of a blood purge. it reeks of white supremacy. it's an obvious undertone to the family, addressed directly in the story with how melvin woods, the black sheriff of le carre, discusses his experiences with racism in the town and how the clarkson family dislike him. spoilers for the ending of the game: this is all turned on its head when it's revealed that melvin was actually one of the masterminds behind the whole plot of the game, and while he reveals his scheme dressed in all-white robes eerily reminiscent of a klansman, it's also hard to ignore the underlying narrative of a black man being subserviant to a racist white family. it sucks. it's insane to me that no one else is talking about how bad this is.

dp1 was bad, full of misogyny (every woman suffering a horrible death) and transphobia (in regards to its handling of thomas mclaine, a closeted trans woman), and while these things have been critiqued before, swery didn't seem to make it any better with dp2. dp2 is full of every -ism and it's so much worse.

with all of the racism previously mentioned, there's also insane transphobia: lena dauman is a trans woman who is murdered in a much more horrific way than thomas was in dp1, she's inexplicably "evil" (the mastermind of it all), she's constantly deadnamed and disrespected by everyone in town, and she also willingly partook in an incestuous relationship with her elder sister, having a child together. there's fatphobia: candy woods used to be the most beautiful woman in all of le carre, used to be being the crucial plot point, because now she's shown to be a grotesquely huge fat woman and this makes her disgusting and ugly, not to mention that she is unwillingly put in this situation as a pawn to the plot--candy was seduced by a guy who didn't love her and was simply using her, to which he drugged her for years and forced her into being a cult sacrifice. the misogyny here is just as bad as dp1, truly. it's a lot to handle.

my thoughts on this game are all over the place. it tries too hard, it's not fun, it's simply bad. i enjoyed the ending, and i am glad that zach has a happy ending and so does patricia, and i liked the cinematic feel and the aesthetics of the game (you can tell swery likes movies), but i just don't think i can look past everything else. i know everyone else has talked about this game being bad, discussing the boring sidequests and the poor gameplay, but i don't feel anyone has pointed out how horrible the entire plot and premise of this game is.

i wish i liked this more and i wish i could say it was good, but it's frustratingly disappointing how awful this was and it's kind of put me off any interest in future swery games. i won't be replaying this and i'm sad i didn't like it.