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If you've played any of the original games of Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro and his Access studio before, you'll know they can have a tendency to be a little odd. That much was clear as far back as Spy Fiction, and it's a strangeness that's snowballed all the way up to Deadly Premonition, the deliciously bizarre facsimile of Twin Peaks that earned itself a much deserved cult following in the years following its release. D4, an Xbox One exclusive that's to be released episodically over an as yet undecided number of instalments, is something else though. It's a surreal, hilarious and often imaginative adventure game that takes the bizarre humour of Deadly Premonition to an extreme, and it's really all the better for it. D4 - its full title, if you're interested, is Dark Dreams Don't Die - shares more than a sense of humour with Deadly Premonition. There are stamps that tie it to its spiritual predecessors; Forest Kaysen will appear, as he does in all of Swery's own games, while less explicitly the main character's called David Young, a throwback to the protagonist of Rainy Woods before Twin Peaks' lawyers presumably moved in and it became Deadly Premonition. More importantly, though, the loving reception that Francis York Morgan's tale received gives D4 a certain confidence; after all their plaudits, it feels as if Swery and his writing partner Kenji Goda are truly comfortable with how unhinged their art can be.
And it's never been as unhinged as in this. You play as David Young, a man blessed with the ability to travel through time via his interaction with Mementos, a skill that's central to your unravelling of the mystery surrounding the death of Young's girlfriend. The episode we sit in on takes place on a passenger plane mid-flight, and it's told as a graphic adventure game that's probably best described as Heavy Rain played for laughs.
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