I've had my eye on Deadly Premonition since it's release but I've put off getting to it due to other distractions. After I beat Persona 3 Portable (50 hours and counting. Still not done) I'm going to put Deadly Premonition as #1 on my rental queue. Game looks downright hilarious. It's like a survival horror version of a Suda51 game. I have a feeling that I'm not going to like the gameplay and that's a big issue. If the gameplay is intolerable, I'll go watch the playthroughs on youtube if I absolutely need to see the story to its conclusion. Given that GameSpot of all critics gave the game a 7/10 (and you'd normally expect GameSpot to shit on a game like this), the controls and map can't be as bad as it sounds so I'm optimistic. They shit on the controls and the map but they felt the game's positive qualities were strong enough to warrant a 7 overall.
I just looked at the sales. I never imagined that this game would surpass 100k copies sold in Americas. It sold so poorly at first (13k week 1) and I thought this was going to be a huge flop. But this isn't unusual for niche games. They tend to be a lot less front-loaded and a lot more word-of-mouth driven.
Still, this game was $20 right from the start so you'd expect sales to be better. But then again, when gamers see that a new game is priced at $20, many of them are going to assume that it's shovelware. And the sub-standard critical ratings (68 on metacritic, 3/10 by IGN! Remember, in the videogame critic world, the average is in the low 70s) probably turned off a lot of gamers.
