Romeo Is a Dead Man review: Suda51 and co let their baffling brilliance shine

The games of Suda51 and his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, are unlike any others.

The auteur behind cult classics such as The Silver Case and Killer7 has never held back with his creative vision, flooding his games with anything and everything he can conjure from the corners of his imagination.

Now, as Grasshopper prepares to ship its first ever self-published game, Suda has unleashed his staff with that same limitless freedom to do what they do best, resulting in a mishmash of game mechanics, art styles, narrative arcs and music that has no right to work together, but does so with aplomb.

Romeo Is a Dead Man stars the titular Romeo Stargazer. Straddling the line between life and death as a 'Dead Man' after his mad scientist grandfather pulls him back from the brink, he is enlisted in the FBI Space-Time Police, sent off to slice up interdimensional criminals and find his missing girlfriend Juliet.

It's a characteristically 'Suda' setup, and I promise it makes more sense when you're actually playing.

The first hour or so of Romeo in which this premise is set up does feel clunky, but it the job, serving more as a vehicle to teach you the mechanics first and story second.

Once you have a grasp on the concept – a tough ask in and of itself for any Suda51 title – things pick up and begin snaking out in typically fascinating directions.

One moment you're fighting a time-travelling slave owner in an abandoned mall draped in 1980s Americana.

A couple of hours later, you're crawling through an asylum, hunting a mad doctor who is rather heavily implied to be the Pied Piper of Hamlin in a section that genuinely rivals the some of the best horrors in the atmosphere it creates and the blood-curdling lore it peppers in.

The beauty of Grasshopper's games is that they can be easily enjoyed on the surface as flashy, stylish, gruesome adventures, but for those who want to delve deeper, there are entire worlds of subtext to uncover.

Romeo delves into themes of slavery, authoritarianism, medical ethics, and of course, life and death.

Like modern art, Romeo can seem impenetrable at first, but the more effort you put in to engage with it on a deeper level, the more it reacts to you, offering up some fascinating insights into Suda's view of the world.

On the gameplay front, Romeo bears similarity of Travis Touchdown's antics in No More Heroes, though adds plenty of new mechanics to make it its own.

The combat takes that hack and slash angle, providing you with a combination of melee weapons and guns to turn your enemies into red mist.

A summoning system allows you to call forth zombified 'Bastards' to serve all sorts of functions, from shooting enemies and restoring your health to providing you a barrier and blowing themselves up in your enemies' faces.

The focal point of your kit is Bloody Summer, a powerful attack that charges with the damage you deal, and is capable of wiping out entire groups of enemies at once, refilling your health bar in the process.

Overall, I wouldn't say that this aspect of the game is anything special, though this is not necessarily a bad thing. It serves its purpose as the style that lets you proceed to the substance of the story, and is, of course, great fun.

Where Romeo's gameplay excels, however, is in the little things. Levels regularly take you through an alternate dimension known as subspace, via a seemingly sentient television set – it all feels a bit Twin Peaks, in a way.

Mapped onto the real world, travelling in and out of subspace in certain locations can let you bypass real-world obstacles, and serves as a kind of simple spatial puzzle.

The variety of mechanics skyrockets once you get on board the spaceship that serves as your hub, and the Space-Time Police's spacefaring HQ.

Here, you can take part in minigames to do, well, basically everything.

Upgrading your weapons and stats? There's a minigame for that. Planting Bastard seeds to grow new Bastards to use in combat, all of whom are given a randomised name and personality? There's a minigame for that, too.

There's even a minigame wherein you fry a katsu cutlet, the tier of which influences the strengths of the buffs you get for consuming your katsu curry in combat, a concept I loved so much that I quite literally cooked Suda51 a katsu curry in real life.

This variety doesn't stop at the gameplay, either. After everything we've already talked about, Romeo's greatest variety lies in its presentation.

The game shifts art styles non-stop, between the more realistic style of its exploration and combat sections to the pixel art hub world, comic book exposition, rotoscoped animated sequences and more.

I mentioned in the beginning that Romeo felt as if Suda had let his staff loose to do what they do best, resulting in every aspect of the game being so vastly varied.

Normally, a game trying to cram in every idea under the sun like this would feel like an unfocused mess, but, with Romeo, unfocused it may be, the quality of the individual parts is finely tuned enough that somehow, someway, it just works.

At a time when so many studios are chasing the always-online, live service dragon, putting out games aimed at everyone and appealing to no-one, Romeo is evidence of why soul is so important in game development.

This is game where, around every corner, I can feel the heart put into it by Suda and his army of developers in Tokyo.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is far from a perfect game, all things considered, but that isn't what Suda is aiming for.

When I spoke to him last August, Suda told me that what he aims for in his games is for players "to remember it once in a while and feel something."

There's nothing punk about perfection, and there's nothing perfect about Romeo Is a Dead Man.

Instead, it's genre-bending, it's bloody, it's corny, it's messy, it's serious, silly and often incomprehensible all at the same time.

It's these things that make it a Grasshopper Manufacture game, an unmistakably Suda51 game, and most importantly of all, an unapologetic blast from start to finish.

Perfect it is not, but why be perfect when you can be unforgettable?

Romeo Is a Dead Man launches 11th February for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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