Deadly Premonition (PS3) - skip the entire game... almost
24This video contains massive spoilers for Deadly Premonition, as you might expect.
As far as credits are concerned, thanks to Tojimaru for getting the ball rolling and suggesting this skip idea. Kazooie was also visiting and is the player in some of the clips here.
0:00 - There's a certain major NPC whose house only becomes accessible near the very end of the game. As serious as he is about his privacy, he carelessly left a single box lying next to his house; this enables York to enter without permission.
Pushing a box auto-positions York in a way that makes him sink into adjacent walls. There are a few ways you can use this to your advantage, but in general, creating an artificial tight space in conjunction with the "Push" command is useful. Sometimes you can create a tight space with two boxes. Here, this option wasn't available, so I used an enemy instead.
Push the single box once towards the wall, then lure an enemy to approach from the right. Avoid his grab, then run between the enemy and the box, "Grab" the box and run towards the wall to the left.
We could clip into the house with surprising consistency using this method - it shouldn't be too tough to pull off, as long as you get the enemy positioning right.
0:42 - George is just hanging out in his house and seemingly not too bothered by York's invasion.
1:08 - everything inside the house works as expected. Venturing deeper, you get the usual story cutscenes and the whole chapter ends.
1:51 - since I accessed this location during Chapter 4, the game showed me the Chapter 4 results screen.
2:17 - nonetheless, the level progression takes me straight to Episode 6, which is literally just a few minutes from the final boss fight.
2:43 - after finishing the raincoat killer section, it becomes apparent that something is not properly loaded inside the game. Some of the cutscenes are abridged or completely missing, for instance most of the climactic cutscene with Emily simply doesn't play.
To note, we tried saving & reloading as well as getting a game over in this section to force the game to load everything properly, but this didn't work. It must be a side effect of some deeper bug in the system, which we have no idea how to fix at this time.
3:46 - Kaysen fight 1 works like normal, but afterwards the chase sequence is very buggy. Kaysen doesn't exist and there are no graphics at all. Wiggling the L-stick does still work and moves York down the stairs, though. Trying to move camera causes odd visual effects, as if the whole map is unloaded at the moment and you're seeing some out of bounds scenery.
4:22 - the next cutscene does not have Kaysen in it, which looks strange. The final boss battle begins afterwards, quite abruptly.
4:43 - upon dealing the final blow... no cutscenes whatsoever. Eventually you get a picture of some unloaded scenery and the game is softlocked. Too bad!
5:10 - in the main menu, it seems as if this skip has unlocked all of the previous chapters at once. However, trying to access any of these previously skipped chapters ends badly. After some loading, the chapter begins with York falling out of bounds. There is no current objective. Can't do anything to avoid falling down. After you hit the bottom, "Continue" is grayed out too. Failure is the only option...
Overall, if this skip had worked as it is, you could've theoretically gone all the way from Chapter 2 to Chapter 25, which would've been maybe a 2.5 hour time save in speedruns.
All hope is not lost yet, since you probably get different results with this skip depending on how far you currently are in the game and which story flags you have hit. This still needs a lot of research to figure out, however.
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Edit: a week later, me and Torimaju have tried doing this skip from various chapters around the game - at least 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 18 have been tried - but so far it always results in the same softlock.
Out of curiosity I also tried doing the skip by smoking until night is over, just in case being in George's house at the wrong time of day was messing things up somehow. But that wasn't it either, the cutscenes still remained buggy.
Chapter 3 had the only unique result so far. In that chapter the cutscenes are even more buggy than usual so that nothing plays when you reach George's basement. There's just a normal loading screen, then a red loading screen, followed by softlock.
In the light of all this, it seems likely that this skip is destined to not work... unfortunate!
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