Within the first hour of Romeo is a Dead Man, the new game from Grasshopper Manufacture, I played a third-person action game with comic book-style cutscenes, a top-down pixel art home base, and kaleidoscopic credits. It’s a huge amount of visual variety for such a short span of time, but I wouldn’t have expected any less from creator Suda51, the mind behind games such as Killer7, No More Heroes, and Lollipop Chainsaw. While I tend to find many of his games to be a bit more style than substance, this game has a staggering amount of style, but also more substance than I’m used to from him.
The plot of Romeo is a Dead Man is a bit all over the place, but the maximalism of it feels like part of the appeal. Romeo Stargazer, a local law enforcement officer, falls in love with a woman named Juliet before he’s attacked by a monster, only to be brought back from the brink of death by his time-traveling grandfather. Now fused with the technology that keeps him alive, he joins the FBI’s Space-Time Police as Dead Man, hunting down criminals who are taking advantage of the currently shattered space-time continuum. On his journeys, he’s also trying to reconnect with his beloved Juliet, instead finding horrifying mutated alternate versions of her out for his blood.
Even this wild-sounding synopsis is only the tip of the iceberg. You’ll meet a wide range of characters along the way, both the criminals you hunt down and your coworkers in your home base, but many of them kind of end up running together, especially on your team. The biggest players are Romeo, Juliet, and grandfather, who, of course, now lives as a big patch on Romeo’s jacket. A lot of the dialogue in this game is stilted and weird, with no one really having a super distinct voice, but it all still feels tonally consistent with the vision of the game. In addition to the wild exposition, sometimes you get long stories that feel more like non-sequiturs than actually plot relevant. Whether that works for you is really hard for me to know, but it definitely drew me in more than it pushed me away.
Despite the out-there premise, Romeo is a Dead Man plays out in a pretty standard third-person melee style, with a few twists that elevate it among its peers. The game is broken out into distinct chapters, complete with an end credits sequence a la an episode of television, that are each focused on hunting down a specific criminal. Each of these missions takes place in a different time period, but you’d be hard pressed to tell based on the surprisingly plain environments you’re traversing. For how artistically strong the game is overall, I was a little underwhelmed that I was just exploring pretty standard locations like a forest, city hall, or a shopping mall. Even the standout level of the game, the asylum, is more distinct for the ways it changes the gameplay rather than how it looks, but more on that later.
What makes these areas fun to explore is the addition of Sub-Space. As you wander around and find yourself gated from progressing, you’ll run across floating televisions that will take you to an alternate dimension, presented in an abstract geometric style, that acts as a parallel version of the level. There, you can navigate past what was blocking you and return to the real world on the other side. As the game adds complexity, eventually you’ll have barriers that exist in both worlds that need to be broken by a specific type of key, making for interesting navigation and collecting puzzles that feel good to solve. It’s hard to see the full shape of what makes it cool in the first level, but once it gets rolling, it really feels like a joy to get around.
Far and away, my favorite mission in the game is the asylum level, which starts out by taking away your weapons and turning the game into a stealth-based horror level for a while. A surreal looping gimmick makes it feel like this game’s take on P.T., forcing you to repeatedly visit the same area as it continues to change into something more and more dangerous before returning you to your regularly scheduled gameplay. Other levels have small gimmicks that make them stand out, especially in the back half of the game, but this one was by far the most effective.
The enemies in the game were surprisingly stylistically simple, mostly consisting of fairly basic zombies and other Resident Evil-like mutants. None of them was particularly visually inspiring, but they fulfilled their gameplay purpose, each having a different function that was easy to read from a distance. Many of them even had big video game-y weak points that could be exploited to do extra damage. I feel like the majority of the enemy types were introduced by the halfway point of the game’s 13-hour campaign, with the combat escalation coming from the mix of enemies rather than new ones.
Once you collect a certain number of keys in the level, you unlock that stage’s boss, which usually has some sort of epic introduction as the criminal you’re chasing turns into a towering monstrosity. These fights offer a really great change of pace, pushing you in different ways than the standard encounters. It always ends with a satisfying little quicktime event where Romeo does some sort of gory and devastating finishing maneuver, acting as a perfect button to the scene. Boss fights were a highlight of the game for me, so I was relieved to see the option to be able to replay them, a feature I wish more games provided.
Your combat options are mostly melee, but with guns added into the mix to allow you to do crowd control from a distance. There are four of each type of weapon, all falling into fairly standard archetypes, even if their designs lean heavily into the sci-fi realm. This led to combat that feels great both mechanically and aesthetically, as blood fountains out of enemies with each slash of your sword. And that blood has an important purpose – building up your Bloody Summer attack, a huge move that not only does big damage, but also heals you. It’s a rhythm that comes together well, making you feel like an ultraviolent superhero.
As another layer on top of the already rock solid combat, you have a set of summons that you call on called Bastards. In levels, you’ll find Bastard Seeds that can be planted in your base that will grow into special zombies that can be used during combat. These have a variety of powers that include everything from a simple turret to adding a weak point to a target, and the bastards can be combined to create more powerful versions. You’ll eventually be able to equip up to four of these, and they’ll all act on a cooldown, making combat feel more dynamic and strategic. Being overwhelmed by a horde of monsters, only to turn it around with perfectly timed use of your Bastards and Bloody Summer, feels incredible, but never overpowered, finding a great balance between challenge and spectacle.
Between missions, you’ll head back to your home base, a time-traveling spaceship called The Last Night, which humorously has the huge letters FBI painted on the exterior. This section is the aforementioned top-down pixel art section, giving you reign of the ship to interact with characters and upgrade your character using a visual style completely different from the rest of the game. The unique part is that you rarely do standard interactions to enact these upgrades. Sure, you have basic menus to purchase new weapons and improve them, but upgrades to your character are all handled by playing an arcade-style top-down driving game where you navigate a maze and pick up little items that give you bonuses. At first, I scoffed at this as a little too clever for its own good, but by the second time I visited, I was fully engrossed in finding the best path to optimize for the stats I needed.
Other favorites were a cooking minigame where you have to time how long you keep the food in the fryer to maximize its quality and the previously mentioned Bastard garden, where you need to hold down a button to play an animation of them being pulled out of a grave when they’re ready. There’s even a weird little Pong-style game that you play in order to run a scan to try to track down the next time anomaly. Not everything is a hit mechanically, but it’s never annoying enough that it detracts from the experience.
While I found so much of the game’s aggressive style to be charming, there were parts of it that just didn’t work for me. The humor did kind of fall flat for me at times, especially when it came to a lot of the “weird” names of your coworkers on the ship. It feels like they were really going for quirky, but names like “RedBrown,” “WorstPink,” and “BlueMountain” didn’t really do anything for me. Other presentation things bothered me, like the text messages you would receive in-mission, which would appear on screen while you’re doing other things, making them hard to read unless you come to a full stop. You also got a companion late in the game, but that felt both mechanically and narratively underwhelming, never really figuring out how to make that a significant part of your experience.
By the end, the story was a bit of a mixed bag to me. There’s A LOT going on in the game’s plot, and it doesn’t always feel like things follow each other. The game continues to introduce new characters and concepts right up until the end, which can be exciting, but often means that a lot of elements fall by the wayside. It’s honestly best when you let it all just wash over you, getting enveloped in its manic narrative energy without being concerned about how it feels in the sense of story structure. My wife was watching me play some of this at the beginning because the visual style really impressed her, but when I tried to explain to her how the game ended, she was overwhelmed and confused by everything I was saying, quickly losing interest.
Romeo is a Dead Man is best when it’s leaning into the vibes rather than the actual plot. There’s a really great repeated sequence that’s shown several times in the game, but with a twist that makes each iteration different from the last in a clever way. While I’m not sure exactly what it meant, it definitely felt cool to me. It’s easy to dismiss this as a wacky story that’s not worth paying attention to, but there’s something to the feeling of the nonsense that feels consistent and additive, even if the details and structure didn’t always resonate with me.
In a world where so many games play it safe narratively and stylistically, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a game like this swing for the fences. Romeo is a Dead Man is unabashedly its own thing, complementing its ultra-violent, time-travelling love story with rock solid combat and clever level design. Its wild art style and nearly nonsensical plot won’t work for everyone, but I still can’t help but give it my recommendation. It feels like the product of a team with a clear and consistent vision that was given the space to execute it exactly how they wanted, and even if that doesn’t always hit, it’s worth celebrating.
Review code provided by publisher. Romeo is a Dead Man is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam.
