Romeo is a Dead Man Review – Suda51 Still Swings for the Fences

Romeo is a Dead Man Review

I think it’s fair to say that the list of video game auteurs is kind of limited. Kojima for sure. Probably Miyazaki. Rounding out the trio has to be Goichi Suda (Suda51), who has always seemed pretty fearless when it comes to following his vision. Grasshopper Manufacture’s Romeo is a Dead Man is proof that Suda51 is still capable of surprising us. A kitchen sink of ideas, Romeo is a Dead Man is occasionally whiplash-inducing and consistently interesting to experience. It’s also inconsistently fun to actually play. I should probably mention that at its core, Romeo is a Dead Man is a third person action game.

Grandpa, Get Off My Back

Romeo is a Dead Man’s narrative plays some interesting beats, but being coherent isn’t one of them. A young sheriff from a small American town, Romeo Stargazer dies in a shootout with aliens. But he doesn’t really die, because he’s brought back to life by his grandfather, an Emmet Brown-type inventor who has been messing with spacetime. Now Romeo is kept alive by a special suit, with granddad infused into the back of the jacket as a would-be guide. Romeo joins a branch of the FBI devoted to scouring the universe for time-jumping criminals. You think jet lag is bad? Wait until you jump around the multiverse.

One of those criminals happens to take on multiple versions of Romeo’s love interest. You guessed it, Juliet, whom he found lying in the road. Now, sadly, this is about where the references to Shakespeare’s tragedy begin and end. The various incarnations of Juliet are essentially the monstrous bosses of each level. There’s a lot more to the story, and a lot of the exposition arrives via some well-executed comic book excerpts.

Home Sweet Home…In Spaaace

Romeo’s home base is a time-and-space traveling ship called The Last Night. In between missions, this is where Romeo takes care of business, like upgrading his weapons and abilities, cooking consumables, and tending to his garden. Romeo plants seeds he finds on missions, and grows up Bastards, which are clutch items in the form of zombies he can use in battle. There’s a whole mini-game centered on hybridizing Bastards.

The Last Night is rendered in retro pixel art, top-down 2D style, another one of the many abrupt style shifts. Upgrading weapons or setting coordinates means playing a little old-school minigame. Once the initial novelty wears off, they’re kind of a pain, if appropriately janky. I soon wished they were skippable.

After an appropriate amount of time puttering around The Last Night, Romeo jumps into the DeLorean…I mean climbs on his motorcycle…and heads to the next destination in time and space. Then the action begins.

Souls-Lite

Romeo is a Dead Man’s action takes place in a variety of spaces suggesting different eras, like an 1980s mall, the home of a rural cult, an abandoned old-school insane asylum, and others. While there are a few changeups to the flow of the action, most focus on gunplay, melee and the strategic use of Bastards. There are tons of low-level enemies, a few elite types, and a boss battle at the end. Like seemingly every action game, Romeo is a Dead Man pulls from the Soulslike playbook, with light/heavy attacks, dodging and parrying and healing or saving at Pharmacies.

As an action game, Romeo is a Dead Man is pretty good, if not on par with some recent titles. The weapons feel appropriately punchy, there’s a lot of frenetic color and light and special effects and combat can be satisfying. Boss battles are a significant challenge, requiring the usual tools of pattern recognition, appropriate weapons and Bastards to tilt the tide in Romeo’s favor. At locations marked by old-fashioned TVs, Romeo can pop into subspace. Distinguished by its shifting wireframe construction, subspace serves as a place for Romeo to heal up and, more critically, to find his way around obstacles in the “real world” levels.

Less positively, combat can also get pretty repetitive. The themed levels are visually fairly bareboned and while Romeo’s arsenal of weapons are fun, his move set is pretty basic. Although fundamentally melee feels good, there’s quite a bit of imprecision when it comes to shooting and evasive movements need a tune-up.

Shakespeare, It Ain’t

For a game that explicitly references the Bard of Avon, Romeo is a Dead Man’s dialogue can also be a dud, man. Especially on board The Last Night, characters have endless amounts of unvoiced exposition. I’ll admit a certain impatience here, and I get that the game is going for a classic JRPG vibe. So your mileage may vary. Romeo is a Dead Man leans heavily into humor and cultural references, and they’re hit or miss. The motion comic sections feel the most polished.

His past games have demonstrated that Suda51 is probably incapable of making a cookie-cutter action game. Yet underneath its misdirection of wild and crazy, that’s kind of what Romeo is a Dead Man really is. Strip away the disorienting style shifts and patchwork narrative, and you’re left with a fun but limited third-person action game with Soulslike elements. The game succeeds at stylistic surprise but at the expense of polished mechanics and satisfying coherence.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***