When the framerate for your loading screen is more stable than the actual game, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Combat is still a broke-ass Resident Evil 4, and I’m not talking about a remaster: I mean broke-ass circa 2005. This is a late-stage PS2 game running on a non-slim PS2. Do not go into the sequel assuming that a decade later, Swery and his team made it a priority to eliminate jank. But you might be thinking: it’s not 1995, it’s 2020! And I realize that. The PS1-era was rife with these kinds of bug-ridden fairweather adventures that I had some of the best times of my life with.

Having played games since the ’80s, this is jank I can deal with. There’s even a few good old fashioned vague scavenger hunts that are going to elicit myriad walkthroughs for years to come. (Thankfully, fast travel is unlocked quickly enough.) The time mechanic returns from Deadly Premonition, which means a lot of waiting around, going to sleep at your hotel, or using plenty of cigarette items to advance the clock. Riding around on a skateboard beats the hell out of driving that car in the original, but it’s still trying at the best of times. Running around the sunny (“searing light” as York calls it) Le Carré is equal parts tedium and joy.

This is Swery to a tee, but I also get massive Clover vibes with Deadly Premonition 2. Like the original, this is an open-world joint (Le Carré, which is “just outside of New Orleans,” is the setting), complete with a skateboarding traversal system and minigames dotting the landscape. But while the story conceit takes a certain kind of patience and open-mindedness to enjoy (shots fired), the actual gameplay is much more down-to-earth.

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