Romeo Is A Dead Man slyly parodies multiverse nonsense before playing it too straight

While the act of playing the game isn’t quite as strange, it’s defined by a baseline competence that is elevated by a general sense of eccentric style—those who’ve played GrassHopper and SUDA51’s other games, especially No More Heroes, will feel quite at home here. In his search for Juliet and other space-time criminals, Romeo travels to fragments of reality from across the decades: at one point, he’s in the ’70s, investigating a sunny cult, while at another, he’s in a shuttered asylum that leads to a horror game sequence. Getting through these areas will also involve crossing into “subspace,” an abstracted world of digital cubes that conveys the game’s generally disorienting vibe. Adding to this otherworldiness is an anonymous man on a floating TV set who waxes poetic about North American cryptids and other half-discernible topics, talking to you dozens of times as you cross the border between the real world and this digital one. Admittedly, some of this oddness is eventually blunted repetition—you’ll be going through subspace a lot—but the process of working through these areas largely holds up until the closing hours.

Along the way, Romeo has to battle “Rotters” (which are basically zombies but with a much more convoluted backstory). These fights start very simple: You can do a light or heavy attack with your melee weapon, aim and shoot your guns, or do an invincible dodge move to get around incoming attacks. There’s also Bloody Summer, a damaging, psychedelic strike that builds up after slicing and dicing enemies at close range.

The process of battling these not-zombies isn’t quite as complicated or fluid as a spectacle fighter like Bayonetta, and not as heavy and deliberate as FromSoftware’s strain of action game, but somewhere in-between, instead relying on the theatricality of gore explosions and liberally applied slo-mo to give your strikes a sense of fatal weight. You’ll also be relying on your guns a lot compared to other games in this style, and instead of using a pair of pistols to keep a combo going like in Devil May Cry, you’ll be targeting glowing weak points for massive damage (most likely using the rocket launcher, which is the clear standout). In practice, this is more of a shooter/action game hybrid than you might expect, a twist that largely works out until this small stable of Rotters becomes a bit too familiar. The bosses fare much better, though, and on top of their gross-out looks, they make for tightly designed showdowns that offer room for very different strategies; in a smart move, there’s an optional boss challenge mode that lets you relive these battles and earn some in-game currency if you can clear them in a set time.

Fitting with the game’s general vibe, there’s also at least one idiosyncratic inclusion when it comes to these fights: the Bastards. These guys are creepy humanoid creatures that you can cultivate and bring into battle, beginning as piddly pea shooters before eventually becoming harbingers of destruction. Yes, this is basically a Pokémon minigame. The presentation here is appropriately strange; you literally pull these dudes out of the soil, and if you dismiss them after running out of space, they’ll send you sad letters in the mail. You can also fuse them together to power up existing Bastards and create new variants, which is a bit disturbing considering they’re apparently capable of written speech.

Reminiscent of something like Yakuza 8’s Sujimons, it’s dangerously easy to fall face-first into this minigame, obsessively returning to your ship mid-mission so you can tend your garden of nasty, rotting monsters. There’s a reward for having this kind of green thumb, because you can eventually craft a lineup of Bastards that positively trivialize even the hardest boss challenges; these guys are fun, bizarre, and at least partially make up for the increasing tedium of the latter levels.

But while the Bastards fully bloom, the same can’t be said for what is initially the game’s biggest hook, its weirdo narrative. After evocatively channeling sensory overload, the final stretch attempts to tie together its fragmented cosmos into an overly tidy picture, a move that diminishes what came before. Frankly, it will probably feel even worse for many longstanding Grasshopper fans who’ve been trained to expect some kind of eleventh-hour rug pull. Here, it never comes. Romeo Is A Dead Man lives and dies by its eccentricity, delivering multiversal strangeness and zombie Pokémon before losing steam as it approaches a conclusion it doesn’t know what to do with. Given its galaxy of possibilities, it’s rather disappointing that its climax is so terrestrial.

Romeo Is A Dead Man was developed and published by Grasshopper Manufacture. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available for PC and the Xbox Series X/S.