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Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro is a stranger in a strange land. Back home, he's the designer and co-writer of a string of quietly successful if anonymous PSP titles at Access Games, a mid-tier developer based in Osaka. Here, though, he's something else - a cult hero, and one of the few singular voices working in the industry. In a tour that's taken him from the sprawl of Los Angeles to Hitchin, the small English market town where we meet on a Saturday afternoon muted by snowfall, he's adored and revered. And it's all thanks to one very odd game. Deadly Premonition, the open-world horror that's the embodiment of a cult hit and a game that hardly registered in Japan, has defined Swery. A struggle to make that saw little commercial success and a critical reaction so diverse it's gone on to earn a Guinness World Record for its Metacritic span, it's a game that continues to do so. Three years on from its release and Swery's preparing a director's cut, talking again to the fans that helped keep this strange, broken and brilliant game alive.
Swery's story begins in Osaka, a place that's defined the man and his output as much as any of his games. The third biggest city in Japan, it's renowned for jettisoning the reserved nature that hushes the rest of the country. It's a bright, bawdy place where excess replaces the minimalism typically associated with Japan.
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