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From the main menu onward, Romeo is a Dead Man is a kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of visual styles. In turn, a model village, a graphic novel, and a top-down retro pixel game. Then a farming sim, a hack-and-slash action game, a retooled double-axis pong, and an anime. Before morphing into a cooking sim, an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil-style psychological horror nightmare peppered with jump scares and sooty specters, a thinly-veiled Pac-Man clone that cleverly acts as a power-up mini-game, and a hand-drawn storybook.
It thrusts you in the shoes of Romeo Stargazer, a reincarnated cyborg sustained by a life support system created by his grandfather, who, of course, installs himself on the back of Romeo’s garish jacket. Now known as DeadMan, our hero is a singularity detector, an FBI space-time cadet, a celestial cop on a mission to track Juliet, his love interest, and defeat a gaggle of space-time fugitives.
However, through a convoluted cosmic quirk, Juliet comes in many forms: a Ferris wheel, a towering witch, a combat Juliet with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, a headless mutant giant. And so unfurls a space-hopping quest to find the true Juliet and meet a memorable, oddball cast of characters along the way.
Wherefore art thou?
It’s a dissolving of the boundaries between genres and styles: sorcerous and endearing with lashings of kitsch – lame to the point of being cool, as a quipping AI describes Romeo himself. It’s an act of rejection of calcified video game norms; a dynamic hocking and belching of ideas onto a polygonal canvas more than happy to receive them.
Bastard Seeds, Emerald Flowsion, Enhanced Phantasm, TickTock Boy – Romeo is a Dead Man is coated in this joyous lexicon of nonsense words. It’s almost petulant in its rejection of restraint. Erratic, hyperactive even. There’s an eclectic sonic identity to it all, too, pitching between Japanese hip hop, piano ballads, hyper-pop, four-to-the-floor house nodders, grisly industrial ear nibblers, Ride of the Valkyries-esque orchestral symphonies, and looping Mario-like motifs. Difficulty settings are presented as a box of chocolates: white, milk, and orange. On and on go the idiosyncratic oddities.
Everything and nothing
But when this busy cake mix of ingredients hits the baking tin, curls up the sides, and settles, it’s a pretty benign action game. It’s snappy, no doubt, and paced fast, kicking you into micro-hordes of zombies with guns, blades, quick-use summonable zombies grown back in your spaceship hub (that you can even cross-polinate), and Bloody Summer, an ultimate ability of sorts triggered when the blood frenzy gets a bit too much for Romeo to contain.
It’s gory, ultra-violent action as murders of carmine speckles whip across the screen, and you duke it out in stylish boss fights against the likes of a stomping clump of curdled viscera and eyeballs.
But it’s all been done before, and better. Romeo is a Dead Man never quite delivers the cathartic, satisfying oomph of the very best action games. A shoddy default control layout makes Romeo a cumbersome avatar to puppeteer, and a waltzing frame rate is just a taste of the sketchy performance.
For all its stylistic flourishes, surreal presentation, and inventiveness, Romeo is a Dead Man isn’t all that fun or rewarding to play. At least, not fun in a conventional sense. Less a failure in execution and more of a design decision that favors style over ludic substance.
A brittle loop
It isn’t helped by an almost intransigent devotion to a repeated, predictable chapter loop and configuration that’s at distinct odds with Romeo is a Dead Man’s otherwise endless creativity. Slice and dice your way through mobs towards a set objective, venture into a between-worlds digital subspace searching for a path to a locked part of the level, and plow through a few more mobs.
Rinse and repeat several times for each level until you reach a boss, before the loop repeats. There’s a serialised TV show quality to it, with even a credit screen listing the game’s devs and voice actors at the end of each chapter.
Above all this, it’s a game that wants you to mull the brittle abstract and to care, but appears to have no substantive meaning, no moral to the story, no veiled parody, no critical guidepost, no truth to all the absurdity and symbolism, no trope – new or hackneyed – to make its untamed tangents cohesive. Or, more likely, I can’t find any meaning to it all. Maybe I’m not imaginative enough, that familiar gnawing, cackling imp back again.
It’s undoubtedly one to play if you belong to the parish of players that mouth reverent hymns at off-kilter indies, to the unusual and the inexact. Just don’t expect an accompanying guidebook to lay it all out in black and white.
Hopefully, you’ll have a better time than I did, piercing through its gorged barricade with satisfying hypotheses to make sense of it, because it feels, almost by design, made to stir up different interpretations from those who sample this bizarre anomaly of a game.
No rights, no wrongs; just another digital reverie from Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture to muse and ponder as you see fit. As the game puts it, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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