Romeo is a Dead Man PS5 Review 7/10 "As far as I’m concerned, playing Romeo is a Dead Man makes you cool" ⚔️🩸 @romeoisadeadman @Grasshopper_EN @suda_51 #IndieGame #GameDev

It’s really very straightforward.

You play as Romeo, a young sheriff’s deputy who discovers a body lying in the middle of a deserted road. He investigates and is attacked by a monster that horrifically disfigures him. On the verge of death, his grandfather appears in a time machine and saves his life with the Dead Gear, trapping him between life and death and shattering the space-time continuum.

Now Romeo is a cyborg agent of the FBI's Space-Time Police, living in a spaceship, assisted by his katsu curry loving mother, zombie-farming little sister, a human with a cat head (or possibly a cat with a human body), his time-travelling grandfather (now a talking patch on the back of his sweet jacket), and a mission to journey across interdimensional parallel universe taking out evil version of his one true love, Juliet.

Y’know, one of those stories.

But, if you didn’t follow that, be assured that this is also a third-person action game in which you whack various flavours of zombie with a sci-fi katana.

It’s safe to say SUDA 51 is an acquired taste. Fortunately, I have acquired that taste and have thoroughly enjoyed everything from Killer7 to No More Heroes 3. None of SUDA 51’s games are ‘good’ in a traditional sense. Frankly, in terms of pure gameplay, they top out at competent and go down from there.

But what they lack in elegant design, they more than make up for in utterly demented storytelling, a batshit tone, and badass characters who slice through the chaos with a bevvy of slick one-liners.

Romeo is a Dead Man delivers pure strain SUDA 51, distilling everything that made his previous games cult classics into one 10-hour adventure. The overall experience is like being on a worryingly rickety and poorly maintained rollercoaster, being tossed from side to side as you’re inundated with bizarre concepts, as the rivets threaten to fail causing the whole thing to collapse.

I’m pleased to report that the game doesn’t collapse, though at times it comes close. After a relatively straightforward opening mission that tasks you with slicing up some zombies and an easy (but satisfyingly large) boss, you’re tossed into a tutorial section that introduces about eight complex secondary mechanics one after the other, each with a unique, abstract, artsy menu (planting and harvesting zombie seeds, frying breaded pork, 4-directional Pong space navigation, etc).

All that, explained by a cast of insane buddy characters each with their own bonkers situation going on, almost all of whom talk in riddles. I suspect bewildering the player is the point, and it was only a few more hours in that I finally figured out what most of these do. Frankly, I’m still not sure about the pork minigame.

But once you’re back in the field, in a map full of enemies with objective markers to run to, it gets a lot easier. I mean, sure, you still have to navigate a confusing virtual subspace world whose gateway is a sprite art man who lives in a floating TV that natters about existentialism, but by this point it’s a shrug and an “okay, sure whatever.”

In a lesser game, I’d argue that all the insane stuff is to distract from a relatively simple third-person action combat (it’s just a millimetre away from being clunky). However, to give it the benefit of the doubt, if everything else going on in a game is weird, the core combat being simple gives you a life raft to cling onto.

Plus, even then, the game doesn’t rest on its laurels. For example, midway through the game, it suddenly transforms into a genuinely unnerving survival horror for about an hour that scared the crap out of me. I’m not going to spoil anything else, but suffice to say the game doesn’t come close to running out of ideas right up until its final moments.

Romeo is a Dead Man isn’t going to win any Game of the Year awards. It’s not going to be a big seller. It’s probably going to get middling reviews from anyone who isn’t on its very specific wavelength. It has clear technical issues (most of them familiar to anyone who’s suffered through janky Unreal Engine 5 releases). But, dammit, it’s got heart.

SUMMARY
Nobody out there is doing it quite like SUDA 51, and with a game industry coalescing into a bland soup of dull titles aimed at everyone that please nobody. I’m just glad he’s still out there doing his thing, and that someone is giving him the money to do so.

As far as I’m concerned, playing Romeo is a Dead Man makes you cool. It’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s unlike pretty much anything else out there. And you want to be cool, right? Right? Yeah, you do.

7/10

🆒COOL🆒