The Last of Us 2 epitomises everything about overly-produced, mass market-friendly content that many of us are becoming exhausted with. SWERY, knowing full well that his game will be castigated on Metacritic and widely mocked, has satirised every mainstream expectation of a video game in Deadly Premonition 2. There’s nothing that suggests that anything within this game is not an entirely deliberate, surrealistic subversion of expectations, and while Deadly Premonition 2 is not for everyone (and potentially offensive to some), games as an art form are better off having works like this to exist in parallel to mainstream entertainment.

The sequel to Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro's most memorable creation rests entirely on the same things that made the former a cult game. For better and for worse.

Dear developers, you can't treat us like this. Deadly Premonition 2 has a great story with excellent characters that are held back by an abysmally bad technical side. Fans will accept this and have fun. Everyone else will avoid DP2 at all costs.

The hardest part about reviewing Deadly Premonition 2 is that in a lot of ways it’s exactly what fans of the first game wanted. It’s a broken mess that controls like a dog on roller blades that looks ugly and runs even worse, with the bizarrely charming writing that only somebody like Swery65 could bring to the table. Nobody in Le Carré feels quite Greenvale levels of weird, but they’re all a bunch of weirdos all the same. Well, except David, he’d fit in Greenvale pretty well. If you like the first Deadly Premonition you likely already know what you want and what you’re getting into, and you’ll likely be pretty happy with this sequel. Your everyday average player should probably weigh how much jank they’re willing to put up with before giving this game a shot, though.

The problem with Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise is that it aspires to be a cult work from the first moment, something quite pedantic on the part of its author, who wants to repeat the pattern of the original title: an unfinished, poorly done video game, which stands out simply for its great argument.

From the top of its intrigue as twisty as the meanders of the bayous, Deadly Premonition 2 is surely the best bad game of recent years.

Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise is a broken game on multiple levels. Its narrative is broken, in that its interesting core mystery fails to engage due to the most agonizing delivery possible. Its ideologies are broken, as it seems to think trans people are evil, women are weak, and black people are sentient stereotypes. The rest of it – the abysmal gameplay, unacceptable performance, tendency to crash – is no better.