Suda51’s role on Romeo is a Dead Man is producer, but his fingerprints and tone are all over the journey. The story follows space and time-travelling FBI agents who drink cream soda (hold the soda) and battle villains in violent displays with the help of zombies grown in a spaceship garden. The premise is ridiculous and fun, and it looks and feels like a different game every few minutes thanks to all its disparate art directions. I have my annoyances with Romeo is a Dead Man and its insistence on never getting too comfortable with any single idea, but the total package is one of my favorites from developer Grasshopper Manufacture. And it succeeds without many of the asterisks that typically accompany a game from one of gaming’s most enduring auteurs.
The plot of Romeo is a Dead Man is weird but worthwhile. The titular Romeo is half-dead as a result of an early incident (a fact that his superiors are constantly forgetting) and gets recruited to a space-time police force to help them pursue evil versions of Juliet, an amnesiac woman Romeo had the misfortune of falling in love with. I love the idea of a doomed romance across space and time (the main characters’ names are not an accident), but the broader execution didn’t fully pull me in. I wasn’t emotionally invested in the larger plot. Instead, it was the little moments that engaged me, like working with a zombie sniper to pursue a time-travelling villain, or listening to Romeo’s sister tell a story that the game warned me was going to take a while. The characters, each unique and realized, are the game’s strength, and spending time with them, either in cutscenes, conversations, or on our time-travel spaceship, is a joy.
With the dense, tongue-in-cheek setup established, the actual gameplay involves fighting zombies and bosses with a collection of laser swords and guns. The basic action is simple, but it makes efforts to ensure you are doing more than just repeating a simple combo. Larger enemies have weak points that must be shot, and executing a frequent special move to restore health makes combat a fun game of timing. I rarely felt overwhelmed by the action, which is how I like it. The fun of Romeo is a Dead Man is time-traveling to different eras to fight and learn more about the people helping you on your mission, not necessarily battling zombies, but that part is good, too.
Between your time-travel assassination missions, you hang out on your spaceship, which is presented in a completely different, pixelated art style. The personalities on board are big, and there are minigames for cooking health-restoring curries and a garden where you can grow Bastards, zombies you can use during battle to restore health, or fire lasers at your enemies, among dozens of other abilities. Growing and combining the Bastards is a fun (and weird) side activity that pays off in the combat moments when the action gets too intense.
One of my favorite elements of Romeo is a Dead Man, however, is upgrading Romeo. You collect currency to spend on improving weapons, but to upgrade Romeo himself involves navigating a large Pac-Man-inspired maze. Across the maze are upgrades like improved reload time (a surprisingly worthwhile improvement) and more health, among others, and you exchange your experience for passage in the maze. I got surprisingly invested in charting my path to acquire the specific advancements I wanted. It’s a unique and rewarding system for improving your character, and I would not be mad to see other games, even outside of Grasshopper, adopt it.
Romeo is a Dead Man continues the bizarre, violent, and unexpectedly thoughtful style of game Suda51 has made a career out of creating, or in this case, shepherding. Looking at Grasshopper’s gameography, this one lives near the top of the ordered list for me. I was left wanting more from the love story incidentally promised by the protagonist’s names, but I was eager to keep playing to make Romeo stronger, see where I was going next, and learn more about the colorful cast of characters.