When a new game from Suda51 drops, you know that it’s going to both ultraviolent and uniquely weird. Even so, Romeo is a Dead Man might still surprise you with just how strange it is. This is a game where the ‘Game Over’ screen is a melting head, where Romeo’s late grandpa is an animated picture on the back of his jacket, and Romeo himself wears the silliest helmet I think I’ve ever seen. It’s a game so surprising that being set in a multiverse with alternate versions of characters doesn’t even break the top ten of oddest things.
At some point a singularity opened in a town in America and fractured the universe and the timeline. Now multiversal villains are wreaking havoc across time and space and the FBI are on the case, driving a motorcycle with a sidecar into singularities and destroying aberrations as they pop up in the hope that they might somehow manage to fix the universe. Romeo is also looking for his Juliet, a mysterious figure somehow related to the opening of the singularity that started this whole thing, but she’s lost somewhere in the multiverse. Naturally, after his grandpa appears, shoves a ridiculous helmet on him to save his life, and tells him to go fight a giant monster, Romeo joins the FBI to aid his search. Saving the universe would be a bonus.
Suffice to say the narrative running through Romeo is a Dead Man combines its many influences into something completely unique, and it’s wholly unpredictable beyond the fact that you’re fighting horrendous monsters. Through the course of the game you’ll fight a giant head that’s split into three, you’ll creep around a repeating asylum in liminal space, and you’ll regularly gallivant around a digital dimension called subspace that’s made mostly out of blocks and is accessed through a floating TV. It almost defies description in text, really, and it’s possible the most Suda51 game ever.
Between the ultraviolent third person combat and traipsing around digital dimensions, you’ll also be returning to your ship to upgrade gear and abilities. This ship is 2D, top down pixel art, and allows you to unlock and upgrade gear using resources found during combat. That’s about as normal as things on the ship get, though. You don’t level up in this game exactly, instead you use another resource as fuel for a little rocket ship that you guide around a Pac-Man-like minigame, picking up upgrades as you go. You can prioritise specific upgrades by just flying to them instead of other ones. It’s one of the weirder ideas in the game – one that Suda credits to his team – and I think it’s ingenious.
You can also grow bastards on the ship. Bastards are basically homegrown, organic versions of enemies that grant you abilities in combat. You can grow a bastard by finding a seed whilst playing, whether dropped from an enemy or found in a level, taking it to your little sister who, for some reason, is in charge of bastard cultivation. She will identify it and then you can plant it into one of the plots on the ship, where it will grow until you pull it out of the ground to harvest. Then you can equip it to one of your bastard slots and use it in combat, which you definitely should do because they’re invaluable. They can be as simple as a suicider zombie that charges at the nearest enemy and explodes, connecting a laser between the bastard and Romeo that damages anything in the way, freezing enemies, or placing turrets. They can also be combined, though I was a bit disappointed that it doesn’t combine effects except in rare cases where they become other specific bastards, otherwise combining them just increases stats and keep the main effect.
I haven’t talked about combat that much so far, and it’s because I don’t really like it. The things necessary for a good experience are here, but it just doesn’t come together in a way that lets you tackle the game’s difficulty.
You have up to four melee weapons and four ranged weapons, but they feel a bit weak, even when you’ve upgraded them significantly. You’ll want to focus on using them to cover yourself in blood, which eventually earns you a blood charge, allowing you to use Bloody Summer – a special attack that is different for each weapon (guns included) and deals a lot of damage. This, combined with heavy use of bastards will hopefully see you through the combat…
But things don’t flow as smoothly as they should, so I was often left frustrated. I’ve found that pressing the button to activate Bloody Summer sometimes just didn’t do so, which is infuriating when that leads you to lose a lot of health. Switching between weapons is also too fiddly in the heat of combat, needing you to use the D-pad and stop moving while you do so (unless you have exceptionally long thumbs). The guns sound and feel weak and aiming feels so loose that your shotgun can be fired into a crowd of enemies and miss them all. It also deals so little damage that it’s nearly useless as its spread demands it be used close enough that you might as well just use melee. Some enemies have weak points that can speed up significantly, resulting in the strange situation where a rocket launcher can one hit kill a bigger enemy because it has a weak point, but can’t one hit kill a basic enemy because it doesn’t.
The bosses can be pretty excellent, but some also have issues. The one that could turn into a giant ball of spikes and charge at me in the time it took to make one of my own attacks, so I would start a combo just fine but get wiped out before I could finish it. This boss could also trigger a wide radius attack that damages your manoeuvrability with very little warning. If you have a blood charge, you can do a little minigame where you rapidly input buttons to get rid of it, but the UI was unresponsive enough that it was safer to just wait it out.
The combat just isn’t enjoyable or tight enough to be this difficult. What’s more annoying is that you can’t change the difficulty mid-game, so I was stuck on the normal difficulty, pushing on because I didn’t want to restart the entire game on a lower difficulty that might make the combat’s issues less prevalent.
It’s a shame because the rest of the game is a sort of delightful fever dream. Every detail is silly and unexpected, but it’s endearing and makes you want to know what happens next. There are plenty of touches that are not only unique or peculiar, but demonstrate a willingness to do things that you don’t find elsewhere. That ‘Game Over screen I mentioned? That’s a video of a model melting, and it reverses once you decide to continue. One of my favourite moments is Romeo’s sister telling a story about a shinigami. It’s on the ship, so it’s just pixels and 2D, her text scrolling across the bottom of the screen with little else moving, and the story is long enough that it stops twice to ensure you want to keep going before it’s done, but for some nebulous reason it worked for me. The game is full of moments and unique touches like this.
There are also a few presentation issues. It’s solid graphically, but it won’t really impress you outside of aesthetic choices. There’s also a strange thing before certain fights where you basically do a quick time event to draw your weapon, it’s probably supposed to be cool, but, to me at least, it comes across as awkward. Picking items up is also annoying, as it wants you to hold the button, and then also tap to confirm. If you’re grabbing multiple things in succession, it can end up feeling like hours of your life draining away.
