Ever since he baffled GameCube owners with 2005’s Killer7, Japanese game director Suda51 has had a reputation for turning heads. From parodying the banality of open-world games with 2007’s No More Heroes to collaborating with James Gunn for 2012’s pulpy Lollipop Chainsaw, his games often offer a welcome reprieve from soulless, half-a-billion-dollar-budget gaming blockbusters. It was with considerable excitement that I fired up Suda’s first new game in 10 years.
The game kicks off with a slick cartoon that shows our hero, Romeo Stargazer, being eaten by a zombie. Hastily resurrected by his zany scientist grandfather, Romeo returns from the brink imbued with new powers – and then we’re off. Almost immediately I am bombarded by an impenetrable wall of proper-noun nonsense. It’s like this for the next 20 hours.
Romeo is now a “deadman” – a being trapped between life and death – who has been recruited by the FBI’s space time police to stop interstellar criminals from terrorising the cosmos. Along the way you’ll be taking down wave after wave of unstoppable zombies – known in this world inexplicably as “bastards” – while a woman called Juliet sporadically appears in different dimensions, terrorising your dreams in PS2-era 3D, before battling you as an end of level boss. If this description sounds like it’s been written by a kid who hasn’t done his homework, I’m sorry to say that’s because even after playing this game to completion, I’m still none the wiser.
In an interview last year, Suda cited Rick and Morty as a major influence on Romeo Is a Dead Man, struggling to explain the game’s story while espousing his love of chicken katsu and sticking it to “the bastards”. I remained hopeful that there would be a deeper meaning underneath all the bafflingly juvenile nonsense, but more fool me.
Outside of the story, the game itself initially seems promising. Main missions see you swinging a legally distinct lightsabre as you carve up wave after wave of “bastards”, playing like a souped up successor to the seminal No More Heroes series. Hacking and slashing at zombies is dumb fun, with stylish attacks inviting screen-filling bursts of colour. The boss fights are fun and stylised, and everything feels satisfyingly chaotic. Yet as the game drags its nonsensical story kicking and screaming to the end, even the game engine decides it’s had enough. Despite reviewing this on a PS5 Pro, I found that the frame rate regularly slowed to a crawl as I was mobbed by waves of enemies in later levels, making an already flawed game almost unplayable.
In between inter-dimensional killing sprees, players roam a charmingly retro hub world – your FBI-branded spaceship. Here everything is depicted in 16bit-era 2D pixel art, as you roam the spacecraft chatting to Romeo’s shipmates – which include an ancient Roman god, a talking cat and a Jamaican journalist. You can buy new stuff, play mini games and tend ability-granting plants inspired by the different zombies you slay along the way.
One thing Romeo Is a Dead Man has going for it is it’s always interesting to look at. From fully animated cartoon sequences to PS2-tribute polygons and sculpture-esque art, this is a game that features more disparate visual styles than most game publishers’ entire catalogue. Yet while it looks eye-catching in trailers, the final playable collage ultimately feels less auteur-led and closer to a child mashing together all the disparate contents of their toybox.
Romeo Is a Dead Man is certainly not predictable. It’s capable of getting a baffled smile out of you, and its anti-gaming-establishment attitude will have diehard fans searching for an irony-drenched reason to celebrate it. But where No More Heroes’ simplistic yarn kept the fights flowing and the jokes rolling, Romeo Is a Dead Man’s sprawl feels disappointingly directionless. Instead of coming together as a kitschy universe-spanning epic, this sci-fi story is sadly told with all the mastery of a rambling drunk in Wetherspoons.
