Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise PC port first impressions
For the record, the game was played on a PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super, and this nvme SSD.
The Deadly Premonition series has a long history of technical issues. Initially released on the Xbox 360, the original game is mostly fine, if not for some weird problems with controls. The Director’s Cut version of that game, however, had a troubled PlayStation 3 version, with further control issues and a poor framerate. The PC version was even worse, lacking any of the options expected in a PC port, suffering from poor performance and being very finicky with its setup, eventually requiring a mod from Durante to save it. Deadly Premonition Origins, its port to the Nintendo Switch, should have been an opportunity to clean things up, but again, it struggled with its performance and the Switch made the already-dated visuals even worse.
Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise got it the worst, however. Releasing as a Switch exclusive, it fell victim hard to the limitations of that hardware, and was plagued by a nauseating framerate and horrifically long load times. This video from Digital Foundry shows off how bad things were at release, with an average framerate of 15fps (going as low as 2fps) during open-world segments and load times over a minute long. Though things have been improved with a few patches, they're still far from ideal.
The release of a PC port should be the perfect opportunity to fix things and provide the definitive Deadly Premonition 2 experience; but, given how bad the PC port of the original was, things could get even worse. And, frankly, while things don’t get worse, the new PC port is more reminiscent of the original’s PC port than you might think.
Let’s start with the biggest problem the original release had: low framerates and high loading times. Loading times are significantly better, but maybe still a little bit longer than people would expect. When entering a large area, like the main town of Le Carré, it typically took about ten seconds to load, and smaller areas took about three or four seconds. Longer than similar games, for sure, but much more manageable and playable than the Switch version.
Another big problem with the original was that the framerate would often drop to zero during loading screens, leading to confusion over whether or not the game had frozen or crashed entirely. While there are some stutters and dips during the loading screens (the lowest I saw went all the way down to 7fps), I’m happy to report that these were the only framerate drops I experienced during my time with this version of the game. At all other times - skateboarding, combat, minigames, exploring Le Carré - the game maintained a solid 60 frames per second.
But fear not, Deadly Premonition loyalists! This game is still a technical mess. There were times where I fell through the floor for a moment, your skateboard has a bizarre habit of bouncing up off of nothing, lips would desync from dialogue, and character models would clip through objects during cutscenes. Even things that I thought were caused by the framerate issues when I played on the Switch, like the awkward timing on the skateboarding minigame, I’ve now realized are just baked into the game. Truthfully, these things don’t bother me, as they feel more in tune with the low budget charm of the series. It’s perfectly playable now, which is about as much as you can ever expect from a Deadly Premonition game.
Speaking of which, don’t expect any in-depth customization options. There are absolutely no video options, not even something as simple as being able to toggle between fullscreen and windowed view (you can still do it with alt+enter, of course, but no in-game menu option exists), let alone more complex things like different resolutions or framerate targets. There also appears to be no .ini within the game files that you can edit manually to force specific settings. This appears to be a relatively straightforward port of the Switch version, with the exact same customization options. In fact, you can’t even play with a keyboard - only a controller is supported. Not only that, but the buttons are oriented to match the Switch’s button layout rather than an Xbox controller, so the B button is always used to advance menus and dialogue, rather than A like in every other game to use an Xbox controller. Funnily enough, upon loading the game, you get a warning to not turn off your “console” while the game is auto-saving.
The PC port of Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise is about as barebones as you can get away with, but, honestly, it’s perfectly serviceable. The Switch release was unplayable at launch and merely unpleasant to play after several patches. And it’s a shame, because there was a lot to love about Deadly Premonition 2 that was hidden under all those technical problems. The PC port isn’t as robust as most would want, but it’ll finally let people enjoy a game that’s too unique to have been overshadowed by some bad numbers.
