Romeo Is a Dead Man Review

Time, the old saying goes, is a flat circle. We go round and round, repeating forever. The same events, the same choices, the same conclusions. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Romeo is a Dead Man, the latest from developer Grasshopper Manufacture and director Suda51, posits a different question: what if time was a sphere? The events might change, but all roads still lead to Rome. It’s a fascinating idea, but also one you shouldn’t rack your brain trying to figure out. This is a time travel story: spend too long trying to piece things together, and you’ll be making diagrams out of straws. In a convenient example of form as function, Romeo is a Dead Man is as fractured as a game as the universe Romeo navigates within it. To tell you the truth, I’m still trying to figure out if I liked it several days after beating it. But I can’t stop thinking about it, and how its form mirrors its narrative. And that’s not nothing.

Our tale follows the titular Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff’s deputy in the small town of Deadford (you’re going to notice a pattern with the naming conventions pretty fast, if you haven’t already) in Pennsylvania (okay, not that one).There’s not much to Deadford: it’s known for a potential alien landing site and its “dead” tomatoes. One day, Romeo discovers an amnesiatic woman named Juliet lying in the road. She begs him to kill her, but Romeo’s a good lad (and kind of a doofus), and he falls in love with her instead, despite the super questionable confluence of their names. “No good will come from falling in love with a woman you found in the middle of the road,” his grandfather, genius inventor Benjamin Stargazer, warns. And you know what? He’s right! You wanna be star-crossed lovers, kid? Because this is how you become star-crossed lovers.

Anyway, they fall in love, agree to elope, and then Romeo gets attacked by a weird creature and dies, but his grandfather saves his life with a super cool helmet, then also dies. Romeo becomes Deadman, space time is shattered by a mysterious incident, and Juliet disappears. The latter two might be connected. Now sustained (and powered-up) by his grandfather’s tech, Romeo is recruited by the FBI’s Space-Time Police and tasked with bringing space-time criminals to justice, tracking down Juliet, and figuring out what, if anything, she has to do with all this. He also gets a bitchin’ jacket that his dead-but-also-not-dead grandfather has somehow transported himself onto. Ol’ Ben also technically invents time travel in the future, making him a literal grandfather paradox. Wild.

That’s a lot, huh? Listen, this is a Suda51 joint. Weirdness is the name of the game. If I tried to explain all of it to you, I’d probably look like a dude with crazy eyes and a wall of notecards and newspaper clippings connected by red string. The truth is that, even after finishing Romeo is a Dead Man’s 15-hour story, I’m not sure I understand all of it – and hey, neither does Romeo. Talk about feeling like the main character. But for whatever reason, it’s stuck with me. That all of this is conveyed through a combination of cutscenes, comic book pages, and other weird but cool methods as you get deeper in probably didn’t hurt.

Like the Fragmented Universe Romeo finds himself in, Romeo is a Dead Man is a game made up of a lot of very disparate ideas. Missions start on the Space-Time Police’s ship, The Last Night, which is a 2D, sprite-based world where you can hang out with the crew – they’re a weird group that includes Romeo’s mom and sister, as well as FBI Space-Time agents with names like BlueMountain, TheBlack, and RedBrown; one tells you that Deadman is a lame name. From there, you scan the universe for anomalies, pilot The Last Night to them (you mostly pick a destination and hit the gas), blast away at the dimensional monstrosity blocking wherever you need to go with a weapon called Eternal Sleep, and then ride Romeo’s motorcycle across a bridge of light to to your destination. I can’t emphasize enough how ridiculous all of this is, especially when your ship says “FBI” on the side in big bold letters.

Once you’re where you need to be – which could be Deadford City Hall, a cult enclave in the ‘70s where you run around with a delightful zombie named Jenny, or a haunted asylum, among others – you’re playing a 3D action game where your job is to track down a space-time fugitive and bring them to space-time justice, which usually means fighting a lot of zombies and other monsters who are also here for… reasons. Romeo has access to four melee weapons and four ranged weapons. You’ll have to unlock every one but your starting chainsaw-sword and pistol, but the process is pretty quick. I had them all after the opening mission. Once you do, that’s it. There are no more worlds to conquer, weapon-wise.

Melee combat is your standard combination of light attack, heavy attack, and dodge that seems to have taken over every modern action game, and I’m kinda wondering why game designers hate blocking so much (unless it’s a parry). The cool thing about Romeo’s melee combat is that you can chain light and heavy attacks together in any order. It’s not particularly deep – weapons don’t have move lists, and there’s nary an Izuna Drop (or anything similar) in sight – but it does feel good, especially against the smaller Rotters. I enjoyed every weapon in Romeo’s arsenal, whether it was his standard sword, the combining-and-separating Arcadia or the gauntlet-based Juggernaut, which allows Romeo to pretend he’s a boxer… or Dante from Devil May Cry. Even the big, slow sword is cool.

Against the bigger, badder enemies, you’ll want to sheathe your blades and get your hands on some superior firepower, mostly because those enemies come with flower-shaped weak points. There are no bad ranged weapons here: pistol, machine gun, shotgun, they all work great and pack a punch, though I was particularly fond of the rocket-launching Yggdrasil. When something absolutely, positively has to die, accept no substitutes. You may have to reload after every shot, but Romeo’s wearing Solid Snake’s bandana no matter what smoke wagon you’re making guys dead with. “Don’t worry, infinite ammo” baby.

I admit that I’m kind of mixed on Romeo is a Dead Man’s rogues’ gallery. There are a decent number of them, yeah, and the varying nature of their weak points is nice, but Grasshopper shows you all of its cards pretty early on, and by the end you’ll have seen these cats a lot. That said, I do really like things like the Jellies, which force you to disperse their oozing exterior with a melee weapon before you can do real damage to the body beneath.

Either way, killing enemies builds blood, which can be spent on Bloody Summer, a very strong attack that also regenerates some of Romeo’s health. Each weapon has its own version of this move, and you can also use it while dodging or jumping for some variety. It’s a good way to dish out the hurt and manage Romeo’s health without dipping into his limited healing items.

Bafflingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, Romeo is a Dead Man borrows elements from the Soulslike genre. (If you were ever looking for a sentence with a 100% success rate in the “typing this made Will sad” category, there’s a winner.) Space-Time Pharmacies serve as save and fast travel points and restore your health and healing items, but also respawn any enemies you’ve killed. There’s no penalty for dying; you don’t drop the currency you’ve earned from killing enemies. Instead, you actually roll a roulette wheel that provides buffs to things like attack, defense, blood gain, and so on, courtesy of Romeo’s mom. Without other consequences, respawning enemies can make death and saving annoying in what is a fairly linear action game. I guess you could argue that it might fit thematically with each death or use of the Space-Time Pharmacy creating a parallel universe or something, but mostly it just feels weird and makes certain segments repetitive.

Even the bosses aren’t immune to repetition, and you’ll see the same mini-bosses multiple times. The space-time criminals that cap off each stage are one of one, but even these fights aren’t total home runs. There’s a couple of really good ones, like the hard-charging Death Changeling, but you have seen these archetypes before and some are… less good. Sorry, Fused Reanimated, but instant kill attacks are never fun. The reality is fighting bigger enemies (and bosses) often means exploiting their weak points with your guns, leaving melee weapons in a kind of weird limbo. Romeo is a Dead Man’s combat isn’t bad, per se, but I do wish there was more to it.

Thankfully, Romeo isn’t alone, or at least doesn’t have to be. You can find seeds scattered throughout spacetime that allow you to grow Bastards (yes, this is what they’re actually called) aboard The Last Night. Bastards are friendly zombies that can be summoned in combat and do things like serve as sentry cannons, heal you, shoot chain lightning, fire weakness flowers at baddies, and even run at enemies and explode. They’re cool to have around and incredibly useful – though Romeo is a Dead Man does a poor job of emphasizing that; I had to fuse a bunch together late game to get some strong enough to help me out because I’d largely ignored them until then (and growing them is its own process I will get into later).

The places you’ll do all this fighting are pretty grand. They’re largely not remarkable spaces in and of themselves, but what’s cool is subspace. Romeo, being a space-time cop, can access subspace, which is another dimension parallel to the one he’s in. But he can’t do it whenever he wants. He has to find TVs showing a dude eating steak and saying weird and sometimes cryptic things to him, and he can enter subspace from there. Subspace is generally made out of neon rectangles that form paths and structures beneath your feet, but because subspace is parallel to real space, it kind of sits on top of the normal environments. The long and short of it is that paths blocked in real space might not be in subspace and vice versa, and you’ll often have to find your way to another TV to get around roadblocks in whatever dimension you’re in.

Solving puzzles in subspace will open up new paths (and new TVs to reemerge into the real world from), and finding keys in subspace will open blocked paths in the real world. I enjoyed seeing how these dimensions fit together, and subspace is usually combat free, so it’s a nice change of pace. The only downside is that subspace looks very samey, so it can be easy to get lost if you need to backtrack or forget what TV you came out of. Thankfully, Romeo is a Dead Man clues you in by having the guy inside the TV say something new once you find a new TV. Thanks, chief.

If you need a break or want to upgrade Romeo, you can head back to The Last Night from any Space-Time Pharmacy. In addition to the cool sprite art and crew, The Last Night is also home to a shop where you can buy food, materials, and equipable pins that up your numbers. You can also tend to your Bastard garden (you gotta plant those seeds, you know?), cook stat-boosting curry with Romeo’s mom, and refine space debris into weapon upgrade materials.

The best part of The Last Night is how tactile it is. You want a new Bastard? You gotta manually go to the garden, have Luna (Romeo’s sister) appraise your seeds, plant them, and then come back and pull them out of the ground when they’re done. If you want to upgrade them, you have to fuse two together manually. Wanna fight a boss you’ve taken down again? You have to talk to a specific guy. You want curry? You have to play the minigame to make it every time. My favorite example is the little arcade game that you play to level Romeo up, spending the currency you collect to travel what is essentially a ghostless Pac-Man maze. How you do it is up to you, but you have to do it. There’s no “oh, just level me up” option. Even something as simple as taking on optional challenges for rewards (decent stand-alone dungeons where you fight through to the end and so on) requires traveling to them physically. Romeo is a Dead Man forces you to live in its world.

Some folks will consider this repetition for the sake of it, but a lot of Romeo is a Dead Man happens over and over again. Each night, he has a nightmare and spills the drink on his nightstand when he wakes up. Each time you find a new fugitive, you perform the same series of actions to defeat the Dimensional Seer blocking your path forward and get to where they are. Each time you take a space-time criminal down, the credits roll. This is a time travel multiverse story; the point is that the same events are going to happen a lot. They’ll change, but the destination is the same. Remember the sphere? In the end, you always end up in the same place. By forcing you to engage with the repetitive nature of its world, Romeo is a Dead Man tells its story through its gameplay. It’s rad. Does it always work? No. I never found much use for the curry (and many of the other supplemental items). But I’m kind of eager to dive into New Game+ and see if it changes anything, because… well, multiverse time travel story, right? If time really is a sphere, it might not matter, which might make Romeo’s use of New Game+ even cooler.