Deadly Premonition - Soundtrack Download & Information

Deadly Premonition - Soundtrack Details

A sharp wit and glaring self-awareness is often a winning formula for creating intelligent or thought provoking video games. Coupled with the ridiculous and a penchant for deliberately poor quality – feeling like a Twin Peaks remake made by Garth Marenghi – Deadly Premonition is one of the most memorable and unique gaming experiences found during this generation of consoles. This remarkably satirical yet serious theme runs throughout the game, with visuals, animations, voice work and the music all providing an assortment of the bizarre.

This article will specifically look into the Deadly Premonition soundtrack. While giving a listing of the 48 tracks included on the soundtrack, the article will also serve as some kind of analysis on the deliberate audio mixing used in the game. It has a rather jarring effect on the player, with character voices being inaudible and some of the more comedic musicality completely overshadowing it during important exposition based cutscenes. There are perhaps two main reasons for this befuddling mixing problem and we’ll tackle this after a Deadly Premonition soundtrack listing.

Deadly Premonition Soundtrack Download & Information

The 48 tracks, that come with the community released Deadly Premonition soundtrack collection (available here), are put into two separate discs with a tally of 25 & 23 unique songs respectively. This compilation gives listeners over two hours of ambience and penetrating auditory found in the main game. Due to the lack of an official release, this Deadly Premonition soundtrack is community made, therefore the creator has ripped the music from the game disc itself.

Both a FLAC and MP3 version of the Deadly Premonition soundtrack is available, with the FLAC version retaining the highest quality after being ripped from the Xbox 360 native XMA codec format. In addition to this, some of the tracks included on the download are not actually in the game, but are found unused on the game disc. They’ve been added with the assumption that they were cut content or intended for use before some publisher dialogue or other development misnomer. A couple of jingles – such as the weather report one – are missing as they couldn’t be effectively ripped.

The Deadly Premonition Soundtrack

Now to explain, as previously stated, that there are two possible reasons for the possible misdirection of the audio mixing in Deadly Premonition. Firstly, the possibility that this budget title didn’t have the funding or equipment to effectively mix their audio correctly could be an easy explanation. Further still, the apparent difference in characters voice volume when the camera is place near them could indicate something in line with this lowered cost of production – in comparison to AAA titles like Heavy Rain or Battlefield: Bad Company 2 etcetera.

The more dynamical interpretation would question its usage as a means of confusing & even as a direct obfuscation towards the player. This diegetic usage of the audio and sound in Deadly Premonition is perhaps one of its great strengths. Often, the heightened volume of the soundtrack and low sound of the voice work becomes comical, while maintaining a consummate air of satire also.

Either way, the Deadly Premonition soundtrack is available across the internet and for free, as there isn’t an official release of any tracks from this hidden gem of a game. Although listening to the soundtrack without playing the game may be tedious – give the contextually sensitive nature of some of the tracks – it still provides some obvious satirical & aesthetic benefit to the listener.