Over the years, some games have become synonymous with glitches and technical issues they have. It’s why things like the strange ways characters behave in The Elder Scrolls are so easily recognizable in videos on TikTok. The shared experience of janky video games becomes a meme and, in some cases, can be viewed as funny quirks of the experience rather than ever being meaningfully addressed in patches. In other cases, like Mass Effect: Andromeda, technical issues and animations can be so prominent that they follow the game like a dark cloud hanging over them, even when they’re fixed. Well, Toybox Inc. wants Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise to be fall into the former category, which is why it has no plans to fix the game’s apparently awful frame rate issues.
Reviews of Deadly Premonition 2 are now live, and the game seems divisive. With a 57 on review aggregate site Metacritic as of this writing, with scores ranging from a 9/10 to a 1/5, the sequel to the 2010 horror game seems to be evoking strong feelings all around. But despite the divided nature of reviews, pretty much everyone agrees on one thing: the game runs exceptionally poorly.
Here’s a short clip from VG247’s Deadly Premonition 2 reviewer Alex Donaldson showing the game dipping into single digit frame rates while nothing particularly eventful is happening.
https://twitter.com/APZonerunner/status/1280850881416695809
But despite everyone pointing out how busted this is, in a statement from PR given to Jim Sterling, there are no plans to fix this particular issue. At the 2:12 mark of his video review, Sterling says, “And I spoke with the PR on this game, and they told me they’ve got no plans to fix it. No immediate plans come to mind for them to make it better.”
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Given that this statement has come before reviews came out and that specific issue has been spotlighted by pretty much everyone, perhaps a patch could come out as a reaction to criticism, but while there’s also been plenty of people criticizing it, there’s been a fair amount of people who view jankiness as part of the experience. It holds a particular nostalgia to them not unlike the glitches in a Bethesda open world game. Even in response to the news that Toybox has no plans to fix it, fans are leaving comments that flatley state this is a good thing, unironically so.
Whatever ends up happening, Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise is coming exclusively to Switch on Friday, July 10. While the frame rate being a new industry standard in bad technical performance is being framed like a weird artistic choice in the moment, maybe when the issue becomes more well-known something might change. Which would probably be a good thing, because based on the reviews, it sounds like there’s an interesting story here, although it’s not above dipping into some gross transphobia.
