Romeo is a Dead Man Review – A Zany, Instant Cult Classic

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: playing a game by Goichi Suda (AKA Suda51) is always a wild, unpredictable ride. It’s like agreeing to let a very strange, very loud friend take you on a road trip where they refuse to use GPS and insist on stopping at every wacky point of interest along the way. Romeo is a Dead Man is exactly that kind of trip. It’s messy, it’s confusing, and it’s got a heart of gold buried somewhere under buckets of digital gore and punk rock aesthetics. It’s been a minute since Grasshopper Manufacture gave us something this unfiltered, and if you’ve been waiting for that specific flavor of nonsense, you’re going to be eating good. But if you’re looking for a polished, triple-A experience where the camera always behaves and the story makes linear sense? Well, you might want to seek out a different ride.

Here is the setup, and honestly, it’s as crazy as you’d expect from this particular team at this point. You play as Romeo Stargazer. He’s a sheriff’s deputy in a sleepy little town called Deadford. Within the first ten minutes, things go completely off the rails. Romeo gets his face absolutely mauled by a white devil—this terrifying, pale monstrosity—and he dies. Game over, right? Wrong. Because this is a Suda game, death is just a minor inconvenience. His grandfather, Benjamin, shows up with all the swagger of Doc Brown, jams some sci-fi tech into Romeo’s eye socket, and resurrects him as a DeadMan.

The kicker? Grandpa Benjamin doesn’t survive the encounter. Well, his physical body doesn’t. His consciousness gets transferred into Romeo’s jacket. So for the rest of the game, you’re running around with your dead grandpa living on your clothes, offering advice and cracking wise like a sentient patch of denim. It is deeply weird, and the game treats it with a shrug, which is perfect. So now you’re an undead, cybernetically-enhanced space cop working for the Space-Time FBI. Your target? Juliet, Romeo’s girlfriend. Except its her visage spread across several space-time fugitives capable of destroying realities. The whole star-crossed lovers thing is inversed. Romeo isn’t trying to woo her; he’s trying to hunt her down across fractured timelines to save the universe. It’s a tragedy, but one where the tragedy involves laser swords and zombies.

Versatile Style

Visually, this thing is all over the place, and I mean that as a compliment. It feels like the developers got bored sticking to one art style, so they just used all of them. One minute you are in a gritty, high-contrast 3D world that looks like a comic book come to life. The next, you’re walking around your hub ship, Last Night, and everything is rendered in this charming, top-down 16-bit pixel art style that is reminiscent of old SNES RPGs. And then there are the cutscenes. Sometimes they are fully animated 3D. Sometimes they are motion comics. Sometimes they look like rotoscoped live-action footage that’s been put through a psychedelic filter. It keeps you on your toes. You never really settle into a visual rhythm because the game is constantly shaking you by the shoulders and showing you something new. It’s chaotic, but it fits the narrative theme of a broken reality. If time is falling apart, it makes sense that the graphics would too.

Style can only carry you so far if the actual act of playing the game feels like a chore. The combat in Romeo is a Dead Man is… fine. It’s functional. You have your sword (giving vibes of Grasshopper Manufacture’s other works with Travis Touchdown), and you have your guns. You slash, you dodge, you shoot. It feels crunchy enough when you land a hit, and seeing enemies explode into showers of neon pixels never really gets old. However, it doesn’t really evolve much. You start the game mashing the attack button, and ten hours later, you’re still pretty much mashing the attack button. There isn’t that deep, technical layer you’d find in something like Devil May Cry. It’s arcade-y, which works for short bursts, but can feel repetitive during longer sessions. You lock onto a rotter (read: zombie), you smack them until they stop moving, and you move on to the next one.

The developers did spice things up with the Bastards system, which is easily my favorite mechanic. Basically, you can grow your own little zombie helpers in a garden on your spaceship. You plant seeds, water them, and pop out these mini monsters that you can summon in battle. Some of them heal you, some of them shoot lasers, some of them just run in and explode. It adds a layer of strategy—and Pokémon-style collecting—that the core combat desperately needs. Plus, there is something inherently funny about farming zombies in a spaceship greenhouse.

Between missions, you hang out on the Last Night, and this is where the game’s heart really beats. You can go to the kitchen and play a rhythm minigame to cook katsu curry. If you do it right, you get a buff for the next mission. If you mess up, you get burnt curry and a lecture. You level up Romeo not by navigating a menu, but by playing a literal Pac-Man clone where you eat pellets to gain stats. It’s these little touches that make the world feel alive and distinct. The game knows it’s a video game, and it loves playing with those tropes.

While that downtime is charming, we have to talk about the subspace levels. These are sections where Romeo dives into a TV screen to solve puzzles or navigate platforming challenges to unlock the way forward in the real world. Conceptually? Cool. In practice? They can be kind of a drag. They strip away your weapons and force you to engage with mechanics that feel a bit floaty and imprecise. It’s like the game puts the brakes on just when you’re getting into the flow of the action. You clear a room of enemies, you’re feeling hyped, and then—boom—time to push blocks around in a monochrome void for ten minutes. Needless to say, it can disrupt the pacing.

Also, the story can be hard to follow. I know, I know. It’s Suda51. Confusion is part of the brand. There were times when I honestly had no idea why I was fighting a specific boss or what the stakes were in that specific timeline. The dialogue is snappy and often hilarious—Romeo is a lovable doofus, and the banter with his grandpa-jacket is gold—but the actual plot threads are tangled into a knot that I’m not sure even the writers could undo. You just kind of have to let it wash over you. If you stop to ask, “Wait, how does that work?” you’re going to have a bad time. You just have to accept that the FBI has a space division and that zombies can be farmed like turnips.

Wonderfully Weird

Some of the boss fights are incredible spectacles. There are countless fights against giant, grotesque beasts (like a sextuple arm, bright-haired troll), some of which boast breathtaking scale. The music swells—the soundtrack is a banger, by the way, full of jazzy, punk-infused tracks that get your blood pumping—and you feel like a god. That’s why, despite the repetitive combat and the pacing issues, I couldn’t put this game down. There is a charm here that is almost impossible to manufacture. It feels like a game made by humans who were having fun, not by a committee trying to hit quarterly engagement metrics.

It’s also surprisingly nostalgic. And I mean that in more than just in the retro art styles; it’s also the way it feels to play. It reminds me of the PS2 era, back when games were allowed to be a little janky if it meant they were doing something cool and original. Romeo is a Dead Man doesn’t care if it’s polished to a mirror shine. It cares if you’re smiling at the absurdity of it all. And I’ve long said games need to bring back the weird. Gone are the days where bonkers titles like God Hand were commonplace. Grasshopper Manufacture is among the shrinking remainder keeping the weird alive with games like Romeo is a Dead Man that exist outside the normal offerings.

If you played No More Heroes or Killer7 and loved them, you probably already bought this. You don’t need my review. You know what you’re signing up for. But if you’re new to this director’s work, here is the deal: You have to be willing to meet the game halfway. You have to forgive the camera when it gets stuck in a corner. You have to be okay with a story that operates on dream logic. You have to enjoy the vibe of a grindhouse B-movie mixed with a Saturday morning cartoon. If you can do that, you’re going to find a lot to love here. Objectively, it has flaws. The combat could be deeper, the puzzles could be better, but in terms of personality? It’s top tier. There is nothing else quite like it on the market right now.

Romeo is a Dead Man Review Verdict

[Editor’s Note: Romeo is a Dead Man was reviewed on PS5, and a copy was provided to us for review purposes.]