You may have heard of Deadly Premonition, the open-world horror/thriller game from 2010 that proudly claims (on the back of the Director's Cut box, no less) to be "the most critically polarizing game of recent times." With a $20 price tag and review scores ranging from 2/10 on IGN to 10/10 on Destructoid, Deadly Premonition quickly earned a reputation for being "so bad it's good." Like a good "B movie," this was a game whose primary entertainment value seemed to derive from laughing at its failures and its generally awkward incompetence.
There's certainly plenty of reason to dislike Deadly Premonition. The graphics look 10 years out of date, the controls are clunky, the animations are ridiculous, the sound mixing is poorly balanced, the lip syncing is awful, and the music selection is often totally inappropriate. As a result of the clunky controls and the large open-world, the bulk of the actual gameplay feels pretty uncomfortable, and even a little boring, particularly in the beginning when you have very little reason to care about what's going on. Hidden beneath all of these superficial problems, however, is a comically bizarre, oddly fascinating, and uniquely surreal experience.