Swery65

D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die Season 2, Episode 3 [Cancelled – PC, Xbox One]

D4: Dark Dreams Don’t DieSeason 1 – was an awesomely weird adventure game by Access Games and Swery65, released after their cult – Twin Peaks inspired – Deadly Premonition. While the game was announced by Microsoft at E3 20013 as a “kinect waggle game for hardcore gamers” in the end D4 can also be played with a traditional controller and the first episode was also released on Steam in June 2015.

Unfortunately D4 was meant to be divided into different “seasons” (with a few episodes each), as a TV series. Only the first two episodes (Season 1) were ever released, while D4: Season 2 was sadly cancelled when Swery65 had to take a break from Access Games in November 2015 to recover from a serious illness and then definitely left the company for internal reasons in October 2016.

We should also consider that D4 did not sold much on Xbox One (and neither on PC) and that’s probably the major reason why Season 2 / Episode 3 was canned. For sure Access Games and Microsoft would have developed other episodes without Swery if the first one would have been a huge success.

Season 1 of D4 is still an original – short – game full of strange characters and it’s worth playing if you love weird games, but it ends with a huge cliffhanger that will probably never be resolved. Swery and Access Games had a few months to work on the sequel, but unfortunately we don’t know how much was ever done on it. Only a single scene of D4: Season 2 was ever shown, thanks to an interview with Swery by Gamasutra:

D4 Dark Dreams Dont Die Season 2 Episode 3 screenshot D4 Dark Dreams Dont Die Season 2 Episode 3 screenshot

D4 sells well on PC, can we expect future episodes?

Swery: It’ll be a little longer until I can start talking about new episodes, but I’m doing my best. The next season will be even better than you’re all expecting, so please keep cheering me on.

…no?

…You can’t accept that answer?

…Uuuh…

Okay, then. Just this once, just for you, I’ll show you a single picture.”

You can still support Swery65‘s new games (such as The Good Life) by following him on Twitter and wait for his next project with White Owls

Deadly Premonition [Beta – PS3 / Xbox 360]

Deadly Premonition (aka Red Seed Profile in Japan) is a survival horror created by Access Games and released in 2010 for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Originally conceived as a PSP adventure game in the vein of “Flower, Sun and Rain”, Deadly Premonition became a next-gen title only in 2005.

Not surprisingly, Sweary65 said in a interview with Destructoid that combat sections were a publisher’s idea added only at the alpha stage of the development cycle. Probably in the earliest builds the player could only hide or escape from enemies. The “useless” garbage containers scattered around which York can use to conceal himself are likely alpha leftovers.

In 2007 a beta version of the game, tentatively called Rainy Woods, was finally showed to the public but, due to the many similarities with the TV series Twin Peaks, notably the dwarf twins and the protagonist, the publisher decided to postpone Deadly Premonition in order to change the appearance of the characters. All the voice acting was completely reworked too. We’ll probably never know how the original story would have unfolded.

York now looks like the main character of a 1970’s exploitation film.

The sheriff wasn’t changed that much.

In the released game “the red room” is located outdoor in the forest.

This pic is strange. It shows beta York without his jacket in the prologue, but in the final version this happens only at the end.

You can also read this topic at Assembler Games for more info and theories about the differences in the beta version of Deadly Premonition!

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