Deadly Premonition's Swery takes time off for health reasons

The director behind cult hit Deadly Premonition and its follow-up D4: Dark Dreams Never Die is taking a break from making games for health reasons. Hidetaka 'Swery' Suehiro shared the news on Access Games' blog, where he discussed his decision and need to have some time to recover.

"Starting today, I will be taking a short break from game development, in order to focus on recovering from reactive hypoglycemia. I'm already slow enough at making games as it is, and I feel like all I ever do is make my fans wait... But I've decided that I need to take a rest here, so that I can hopefully continue to make games in the future." Swery signs off by promising his return to creating games. "When I recover from my illness, I'm going to do my best to make games that are better and more awesome than ever before!"

I wish Swery the very best in his recovery. Deadly Premonition and D4 are two of my favourite games of the last few years. They're almost impossible to imitate in their curious mix of elements—Deadly Premonition, released on PC in 2013, became notorious for its bizarre sense of humour and rough shooting/driving sections, but it also had engaging characters and functioned well as a kind of interactive Twin Peaks pastiche.

D4 channels what's great about Deadly Premonition into an almost Telltale-style episodic format where the story and humour can take centre stage. D4 hasn't, by all accounts, been a giant seller, but that's only because the world is a catastrophically unfair place.

Cheers, Eurogamer.