Deadly Premonition

Unlike nearly all video games I've had in my backlog, I knew going into Deadly Premonition that there was a strong chance that I'd hate it. I don't know if I've ever played a game with such a clear 'cult' status- sure, I've played my share of offbeat games like Braid, and poorly selling ones like Dead Space: Extraction, and then even some bad games simply for the sake of series completion like Final Fantasy III, but Deadly Premonition is a combination of all three of these things and yet it managed to gain some serious attention (Don't believe me? Apparently this was the #1 selling game on the 360 the week it came out on Amazon) for reasons I'm still trying to grasp. With terrible gameplay and graphics, it's clearly not for any technical achievement. The obvious pick here is the story and how it's told. Deadly Premonition is a survival horror game that starts off like any other, although with a strong Twin Peaks influence- a young girl in a small northwestern town is found murdered, and hotshot FBI agent Francis York Morgan is called in to investigate as the case quickly spreads to multiple homicides. It seems pretty basic enough, but at times the game can can get truly bizarre- not in a 'we spoke to focus groups and they decided this was scary' type way, but more of a 'a crazy person wrote the script for this game'. Why do animals all make the completely wrong sounds? Why does agent Morgan repeatedly talk to an imaginary friend, who might be the player himself, like right in front of other people, yet no one calls him out on it until halfway through the game? Why are the musical cues so jarring and innapropriate at all times? Why is there zero sense of panic when York is greeted by a horde of zombies when he first arrives in town? I have to admit, I was confused at a lot of parts of Deadly Premonition, more than most other games I've played. If you believe that for a game to be considered 'art' it needs to provoke a strong reaction, then Deadly Premonition is a strong argument for a bewildering piece of art. I only bring this up because apparently the game is indeed often used as an example of 'games as art', or at least so says the Wikipedia page. While most of the 'games as art' examples seem to be obvious indie/art-house pieces that get tons of critical attention, Deadly Premonition is a poorly designed game that some people believe hits so low that it becomes a 'beautiful trainwreck'. I'm not buying it. I've played games that can be fun despite also being awful in every way (remember Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing?) and I've found them way more fun than Deadly Premonition, whose greatest achievement is probably its creative unwillingness to stick to any specific tone for more than an hour at a time. If you've got time, I'd suggest taking a look at the game's Wikiepdia page, or reading a review or two of it to see some wildly different opinions, but reading about the game was a lot more fun than playing it.