Driving around in the game can be tedious, but there are some interesting conversations to be had during driving, either with George and Emily in the car, or the conversations with “Zach” when driving alone. York’s musings about his favorite movies and stories of previous bizarre FBI cases make it worthwhile.

There are some good fan-made maps of Greenvale, with annotations, so that one doesn’t have to switch to the in-game map all the time while driving.

The one from the official DP Wiki:
http://deadlypremonition.wikia.com/wiki/Locations
(Click on map to make it bigger.)

One made by TheLastDuchess, with a detailed legend listing all sorts of locations via map quadrants, can be found here:
http://img.waffleimages.com/a6fc22481b9b17ca25e76b3064acd92da8b9e5f5/20sshgx.png

The Complete Greenvale Map by Whitney C, with in-map annotations, is here:
http://whitneyc.deviantart.com/art/Complete-Greenvale-Map-197278835
(Click on map twice to zoom further in.)
Whitney C writes: “There’s been several Greenvale maps made to help players in their investigation showing, flower, bone, and card locations but for my Deadly Premonition website, Welcome to Greenvale, I wanted to take it a step further and make the most complete Greenvale map to date!
To make this complete map took screen caps of the entire in-game map and then pieced the map back together in Adobe Photoshop. It wasn’t very pretty due to all the in-game map lines and cross hairs so I redrew the entire map in Adobe Illustrator!”

The li’l plush red raincoat killer is adorable.

@ Frazer: Let me stat by saying thank you and you will be doing a play-through of Deadly Premonition. I love this sandbox game, and believe that it has an unfair reputation as being bad. Therefore I was happy to hear you start the first video by saying that you love the game, too, and have played it before. But when you claimed it’s more “prudent” to use the inifinite ammo FBI pistol instead of melee weapons because those break, and that you think the game rewards you for using the gun instead of melee, my hopes sank.

Please please PLEASE, Frazer, I beg you, *use* melee weapons on the zombies. The game will let you find plenty of them. And first chance you get do the side-quest which gives you the infinite wrench. Go back to the police station every morning during the first half of the game to have Thomas make you breakfast, because not only are those breakfast-with-the-cops cut scenes hilarious, they’re also a side-quest. Don’t be afraid to ditch the cops at times… the game has already established that York and George do not get along well and York does his own thing. You *can* miss plot-relevant meetings if you are not there on time, but the game will simply give you another chance next day.

Worse, you didn’t start the game at the beginning, leaving out important information! You left out the whole prologue cut scene, which shows the twins and their grandfather discovering the dead body of the girl Anna crucified upon the red tree in the woods, which is the whole reason York visits Greenvale. Also, the prologue shows us which persons in Greenvale grieve most for Anna, which give the player hints what people to talk to first.

A lot of the bad reputation of this game, in my opinion, was caused by online reviewers playing this game very badly. Examples:

There were TWO Endurance Run play-throughs up on GiantBomb.com back in 2010, by two two-man teams, but both teams played the game like morons:

* Refusing to use melee weapons on the zombies and fixating on guns instead, thereby making everything harder on themselves. (Especially making fighting wall-crawlers into a tedious exercise where it took them about 20-30 minutes to kill a single one, instead of 20 SECONDS! Yes, a mere twenty seconds on Hard difficulty to finish one off, if you know what you’re doing! See the link “Supergreatfriend’s Let’s Play” of Deadly Premonition below.)

* Refusing to do side-quests unless they stumbled into one by random chance, claiming that “side-quests are always a waste of time” (when in this game they are essential), thereby missing half the story and many useful items, like the police radio, the guitar (the coolest of the infinite melee weapons the game has) and the weather doll, not to mention bigger inventory, extra money and the chance to buy faster and upgraded cars at the scrapyard so you don’t have to drive around in the crappy police car. Doing the side-quests makes the game-play experience FASTER and smoother, not slower!

* Not playing the game logically: Searching out and questioning family and friends of the first victim (Anna) as soon as possible, following leads and staying persistent like York, the eccentric FBI agent, would do even if some NPCs at first don’t want to talk to him. Instead thy were playing it like a gamer sitting in front of a screen, only doing stuff when prompted by the game. Which let to them, among other things, not bothering to have York clean up and change his dirty clothes right before he was supposed to hold a public speech! (Who does that in real life?) It took them an hour to realize what the flies surrounding York and the “stinky agent” warning meant. It had me yelling at the screen, “The game is trying to tell you something, guys!”

* Rarely listening to what the NPCs had to say, never visiting a location twice (like i.e. the hospital) except the police station, and not visiting NPCs at their homes at all.

* Ignoring their surroundings in-game, i.e. missing the hotel map on the wall in the hotel’s lobby and thus getting lost in the hotel. Ignoring the weather forecasts. Ignoring the in-game time of day! Certain events, like breakfast at the hotel or the police station (which costs no money), can only happen at certain times. Shops and night clubs have their own opening hours, and movement of NPCs in town is ruled by time of day, too. People go to work, then go home, and stay indoors during rain. During the first half of the game, those moron players wasted whole days which they should have spent exploring Greenvale and surroundings by letting York sleep for 12 hours “because nothing in the main plot was happening”, then whining how he was nearly starved when he woke up (but again ignoring breakfast times or opening hours). The game gives the player ample time to do things on their own early on, but the more the main plot progresses the less time there will be for side quests and some become impossible to do after certain events (although a few side quests can be finished after the main plot ends, like returning the guitar to its owner).

It was frustrating.

There is an excellent 100% completion run play-through of Deadly Premonition by Supergreatfriend with a detailed and informative (and also very entertaining)commentary about the game itself, its characters, and tips and tricks about the gameplay
You can find it here, among the Let’s Play section on his reviews website:
http://supergreatfriend.com/deadlypremonition.php
or on his Blip channel:
http://blip.tv/supergreatfriend