Deadly Premonition Director’s Next Game Is About “Replicating Senses”

Deadly Premonition director Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro is working on a new mystery game for Microsoft, one that uses the new Kinect peripheral included with the Xbox One as your means of interacting with it.

The game is titled D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, and features David Young, a private detective, as its main protagonist. Two years prior, someone killed Young’s wife, and while Young lost his memories of the incident, he gained the ability to travel into the past in return. Throughout the game, he uses this ability to try and learn the truth behind his wife’s murder, and perhaps even prevent it.

In an internally conducted Microsoft interview, Swery says that D4 is based on the idea of empathy and the game’s mechanics are based around the idea of “replicating senses”. For this reason, Swery says, the development team is approaching Kinect like an input device that’s no different from a mouse or controller.

“The new Kinect can detect palm shape, it can capture players’ posture when they’re sitting, and it allows for natural voice input,” says Swery. “By using these attributes effectively, I believe that we can succeed at ‘replicating senses’.”

He elaborates, “It’s a game that replicates senses through allowing players to interact the way they want using Kinect, and I think that makes it very unique. We think of Kinect as an input device no different than a mouse or a controller. We’ve coded the process of replicating actions on the screen so that players can use Kinect to do it all.”