Romeo The Dead Man Review – I Swear I’m Not Making This Shit Up – WGB

The problem with reviewing anything from auteur Suda51 and his team at Grasshopper is that it’s like trying to nail jelly to a tree. Except the jelly keeps changing visual styles, the tree has now evolved into a 100ft tall super-mutant, and for some reason you need to increase your hit power by playing. Pac-Man. There’s a lot going on in that review Romeo is a Dead Man it ends in this: it is Suda51. You’re either on board with the madness, or you’re not. Now stop reading.

Are you still there?

Available on PC, Xbox, PlayStation
Updated On: PS5
Developed by: Grasshopper Manafacture
Published by: Grasshopper Manufacture

Review the code provided by the developer/publisher.

OK then. I’m somewhere in between. I want to like Suda51’s games, but I find myself enjoying and disliking them in equal measure. This one is no different: a crazy romp full of a million ideas, from style changes to unusual mini-games. It’s crazy and romantic and weird. It’s everything art should be, right down to the fact that sometimes you stare at it and you don’t get it. As I write this review, I have a creeping feeling that I’m in the second group – the insider watching and wondering why everyone else is having all the fun.

He is Romeo, a small-town policeman with a budding relationship with the lovely Juliet. Unfortunately, however, Romeo stumbles upon a strange monster one night and takes off his face, so his time-travelling grandpa steps in and saves him by attaching a strange mask to him. And giving him a robot arm. You can’t be a bad guy without a robot arm.

It turns out that grandpa once again disrupted the space-time continuum or something, so now the universe is split in half. Romeo is hired by the space FBI (that’s what they really are) and now he helps out by sailing through space to different places where he hunts down bad guys and strange apparitions of Juliet. Except all those dimensions are basically parts of his hometown Dreadford.

I don’t do this.

Obviously, this is no classic Shakespeare, then. There’s… oh man, there’s a lot going on here, but that’s the general idea. It only gets weirder as you play the game. Although the story is straightforward, the weirdness and madness continue to grow.

Dialogue is where I struggled the most. English isn’t the studio’s first language, so I suspect translation issues play a big role, but there are times when word choice makes no sense, characters say something completely out of character, or just seem to ignore what’s being said to them. A few times it seemed like two characters talking to each other were in completely different conversations in a sentence or two.

Then you have the standard Suda51 tone whiplash. For a second it seems like he’s trying to be taken seriously; next, you manipulate the face of the corpse to match the image. It complicates things in the few moments when the game seems to want to be taken seriously and tries to deliver a heartwarming beat.

Influences are taken from almost anything that goes, from pulpy films to old school comics. That’s evident in all the weird graphics styles too, where the game often swaps styles to do something different, although most of the combat takes place in stunning real-world locations like a boring shopping mall or an ordinary shelter. Also, that odd tonal clash of crazy versus normal. Or… Is it lazy development? I’m sorry to say that, but some of these places talk about the probably small budget that Ntethe was working with.

Back to the story, there are some deep threads to catch amid the chaos, as long as you ignore the fact that one of your companions is an actual humanoid cat – something that almost reaches the WTF scale Romeo is a Dead Man. Delving into these themes, the story has interesting things to say on the topic of star-crossed lovers, love in general, and trying to change yourself to attract someone else. Whether you will see those deeper themes amidst all that is happening, however, is the question.

The way you walk is also unusual. The levels are divided into smaller sections, and the sections are connected by jumping to subterranean levels via floating televisions. Again, I’m not doing this. Parts of Subspace don’t involve combat and instead you navigate a strange cuboid world where walls appear and disappear as you approach them. Progress usually revolves around finding key parts to unlock the chapter’s main boss, and that means finding TVs in a small space that allows you to jump back into the real world, where you fight your way to the next TV and then jump back to a different place in the basement. Did you get that? It doesn’t end there, because there are also floating fuzzy balls that you have to stop in a simple little game, which will open new paths.

Subspace is probably the most boring feature in the entire game. It’s fine if the parts are small, but there are some very long subspace sequences that drag your feet. The visual style is nice at first, but since everything looks the same it can quickly become annoying to navigate, especially if you jump forward while unlocking new paths.

The core of the gameplay is close combat using a combination of four melee weapons and four ranged weapons that you can upgrade over time. Standard attacks are your bread and butter, supported by powerful attacks that I found myself rarely using. You can unleash some combos by jumping between the two, but I’ve found on harder difficulty that strong attacks are slow and enemies are able to counterattack with your strikes, rendering them useless.

Various combats are mostly available to fight one or two enemies, and to hit the weak points shining on various zombies and strange monsters you will draw a sad path. It sounds decent, but again, on harder difficulty the reload times make it difficult to use them effectively until you unlock some upgrades that make stacking new dots much faster.

Whatever attack you use, you will soak blood into everything you cut, dice, and riddle with bullets. It’s all that red liquid that gives Bloody Summer special moves to pull off, which also have the added benefit of restoring some health and often super awesome enemies like bosses.

All of these moves are used against roving packs of “Rotters”, which are little more than Zombies, and a bit of a miscellany. The game is very enjoyable, so cutting them is satisfying.

The problem with the combat is that it’s tighter than an action game should be. There are too many animation locks that leave you unable to dodge or swing your sword. There are many awkward situations or small corridors where the camera struggles. And many full screen effects that look great but leave you blind. None of this makes combat bad, but it certainly doesn’t make it good either. To put a brutal point on it, at best the game can be classified as an average action game, and at worst, a poor one.

You can summon a company during battle by sending Bastards onto the battlefield who…um, I have to explain that sentence, right? I swear, reviewing a Grasshopper game is about going, “Okay, hold on, let me explain this a little bit.”

Bastards are basically zombies that you can mysteriously collect in the form of seeds and plant in the soil back on your home ship. Once they’ve grown, you can equip them as an ability and throw them onto the battlefield, where they can act as grenades, suicide bombs, healing points, whirlwinds, and more. And that’s not all, because you can also combine Bastards to create new variants or simply increase their stats.

I swear, I’m not doing this.

Romeo can get his own base stats increased by playing yet another weird mini-game, this time with a mysterious sound. Pac-Man. Using your hard-earned Emerald Flowsion, you can move a character through a pixel maze, collecting advanced attack stats, health, and more. There are even little teleporters to bounce you from side to side. It’s this kind of weird design that makes Suda51 and Grasshopper such fascinating developers – or makes them such a nightmare, for him.

Weapon upgrades require another type of resource that you can harvest while on the job, or by visiting special tears in a space called Athena Palace, which act as mini dungeons. You can also find out more by collecting space debris while flying the spacecraft between missions. Oh yes, there is something else I have to explain. You drive the ship to reach new places, but that’s generous: really, you point it in the direction you’re going and go forward or back on a set course. You can scan the environment for debris, which can be converted into resources for further development. Oh, and the space debris contains the ingredients used to make katsu curry.

Wait, wait, wait. Hold on tight. Katsu curry. Let me explain that. Jesus Christ. That’s right, you get ingredients like onions and mushrooms in space debris or in normal levels that can be turned into katsu curry using yet another minigame, and those curries can be eaten to give things like attack boosts for 30 seconds. Did you get that?

Oh man, and I didn’t even explain how scanning a crack in space requires playing a crazy type of Pong with four paddles where you have to return the ball to the center post. It hurts.

He still doesn’t do this.

Considering how the game is set up, the bosses aren’t incredibly deceptive. Some of them have cool looking designs, sure, but they are basic and occasionally annoying in how they can lock you down and shoot you into oblivion.

Performance is a major issue on the PS5 version I was playing. Framerate drops were common and didn’t seem to require many on-screen enemies to trigger. And I’m not talking small dips – I’m talking full-on crashes into the hole. Fortunately, you should be able to get past them and they will clear up, but the developers will need to update the game’s functionality.

Coming to the end of this review, I think it’s only fair that I talk about how much I haven’t talked about. There are some small games, art style shifts, and awkward moments that we wouldn’t get out of this bloody review if we were to address them all.

It’s a mediocre and mostly unpolished action game worth playing through because of the Suda51 craziness packed into it. But that’s the magic of Grasshopper and Suda51, isn’t it? The group continues to perform crazy bat-shit performances held together with duct tape and enthusiasm that attracts a large but solid crowd. That’s real art, and I’m glad to see it exist and be loved, even if it’s not entirely for me.

What fans are most excited about. I don’t think this is the best game Suda51 and his team have made, but it’s up there. For anyone else, it’s hard to tell whether to try this or not. If this review reveals the craziness of the game, then hopefully you already know whether it sounds annoying or very attractive – and that’s all I can do for you. It’s up to you now.