Late night at the Penny Arcade Expo, after many of the best panels are finished and the show floor is shut down for the night, a passholder can use their open play rooms to catch up on games they might not have otherwise tried from years past. Some experiments can go awry, as the one time my friend and I caught up on the truly tragic Wordtris, the most obnoxious game I have ever played with the word Tris in the title (and that includes another late night PAX experiment, Tetrisphere).

This year, since neither me nor my friends had Xbone, we tried a couple of their games. They were generally pretty dull, but I’m not here to talk about the Xbone games. Instead, one late night, we tried something daring: we asked for help. We didn’t know what we wanted to play, so we were all “What should we try?” This one awesome girl with great energy bounced up and asked if we had tried Deadly Premonition. Excitedly described as an awesomely terrible knock-off of Twin Peaks, she proceeded to semi-describe how this game will blow our minds. I, being both a bad movie fan and a fan of Twin Peaks, was game. Thus began a deep love for a great experiment gone so right and so wrong.

Deadly Premonition is an open-world (GTA) survival horror (Resident Evil) cop procedural with occasional RPG qualities (Fallout). The weird part is that it all blends rather seamlessly, or as seamlessly as one could expect. One rainy night, you’ll be going on an open world driving quest when suddenly you’ll transition into a survival horror dungeon crawler which finishes in a cop procedural.

The story is what you would get if you asked a Japanese person to re-write Twin Peaks based only on a synopsis and a few commercials. Agent York Morgan, an FBI agent who also has multiple personality disorder – he constantly talks to Zach, a person in his head – comes to Greenvale to investigate the murder of Anna, a teenage waitress who dreamed of becoming a model in the big city. To get to the bottom of the murder, York must investigate the quirky townfolk while also traversing to a ghostly otherworld full of zombies, periodically being interrupted by dream sequences with red and white rooms (black and white lodge). York is also obsessed with coffee. He loves coffee. He sees letters floating in his coffee. He gets fortunes from his coffee. He gets tired and hungry as the days go by, and you can drink coffee and eat food like cherry pie to stave off both qualities.

While investigating the murder, he must work with Greenvale’s police department. The three main officers are the oversensitive Officer Thomas, the love interest Officer Emily, and the brute Sheriff George Woodman, played halfway between the sheriff from Deer Meadows and the sheriff from Twin Peaks. George is initially defined by his love of working out and having a sick mother. Emily is a terrible cook and a newbie to Greenvale. Thomas can cook and cries a lot.

The Xbox edition of Deadly Premonition is nearly broken in the controls. My friend, who was playing the survival horror dungeon crawl, struggled to keep his character under control. Similarly, the cars have worse handling than The Simpsons Road Rage. You struggle to make them turn, and frequently forget what controls what (you can use the wipers, turn signals, and a police siren…but none of these have any effects on how everybody else reacts to you).

But, it’s the plot that is positively bonkers. Spoilers for a 6-year-old game ahead. You see, Anna wasn’t just murdered and put in a river. She was the victim of a ritualistic murder who cut off her tongue, cut her body from her crotch to sternum and tied her with barbed wire to a tree in a Christ-like pose. She was also stuffed with red seeds, linking her murder to a bunch of other murders happening around the country, which is why the FBI is now involved.

Somehow this is all attributed to the Raincoat Killer, a myth about a killer who only kills when it’s raining outside. As Agent York is in town, more and more girls are killed in increasingly bizarre ways. One girl is trapped in a bathroom held aloft by fabrics set to strangle her if people attempt to free her. Another woman is chained above a giant wooden tree statue. Both have ritualistic elements in their death with the removal of the tongue and the force-feeding of red seeds.

The red seeds come from trees distributed by a fat traveling tree salesman and his dog. The tree salesman gives saplings to those he likes, and is intricately involved in everybody’s life around town. He spends his day tooling around town visiting everybody in town during your whole stay.

The biggest problem of Deadly Premonition comes from the plot itself. For a Twin Peaks knockoff, it totally misses the point of the show. Where Twin Peaks interrogated how a friendly town turned a blind eye toward the visible family trauma of its citizens, Deadly Premonition says that the whole town is actually rotten through no fault of their own. The government had actually used a gas on the town back in the 1950s to make everybody in town super aggressive intent on killing each other. The Raincoat Killer was the first guy who became a super being during this assault.

But, that Raincoat Killer is not the same as the new Raincoat killer, who is killing people because of a myth somebody created. The myth is if you eat enough of the red seeds, and killed people after feeding them the red seeds, you become immortal. The Raincoat Killer is also involved in a kinky sex club that half of the women in town belong to. Beyond that, the killer is involved in a love triangle with a brother and sister, the brother of which becomes a psychotic transvestite in his last moments.

OK, so regressive gender issues, calling the killer a victim of the government’s experiments, and quirky town folk that owe as much to In the Mouth of Madness as Twin Peaks. The side stories fill in details from Twin Peaks that aren’t already twisted by the main plot. One series of quests has Agent York quickly driving a lady back to her home before her pot gets cold; she also talks to her pot (Log Lady). Another series of quests reveals stories of gruesome accidents which have created rifts in the spiritual world. The chef of the local diner, married to one of the servers, lands in jail and has to send letters to his wife.

Deadly Premonition wants to be a b-movie. While driving, Agent York is a Chatty Cathy. As you drive around town – and it takes awhile, since some locations are like 7 minutes apart and I couldn’t find a fast travel feature – York will talk to Zach about b-movies, including how he went on a date to see Superman IV, though he prefers 1 and 2 because they were directed by Richard Donner, speaking of which, didn’t you love Ladyhawke? The bar you go to is Galaxy of Terror, and the game doesn’t let you forget where that reference is from. And, the characters are constantly talking about bizarre happenings, acting like b-movie filler.

Is Deadly Premonition worth it? Well, up until the surprising turn from stupid Twin Peaks to bisexual love triangle complete with regressive transvestite cliches, the game is completely entertaining trash. In the end, the rapey subtext, where the victims are penetrated with knives and impregnated with red seeds, becomes text. It’s a wholly unearned development that took me by surprise. I can sort of respect the whole S&M leads to murder regressive storyline, simply because it’s so cheap and cheesy. But, the sudden rape text is more than a little gross and put a sour taste in my mouth. With that exception, Deadly Premonition is one of the weirdest wacky games in creation. As such, I’ll leave you with one of the weirder moments, a venture of unintelligibly phonetic singing (and one of the only scenes without subtitles). This is no Julee Cruise.