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\u2019s a fascinating idea, but also one you shouldn\u2019t rack your brain trying to figure out. This is a time travel story: spend too long trying to piece things together, and you\u2019ll 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\u2019m still trying to figure out if I liked it several days after beating it. But I can\u2019t stop thinking about it, and how its form mirrors its narrative. And that\u2019s not nothing.<\/p>\n
Our tale follows the titular Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff\u2019s deputy in the small town of Deadford (you\u2019re going to notice a pattern with the naming conventions pretty fast, if you haven\u2019t already) in Pennsylvania (okay, not that one).There\u2019s not much to Deadford: it\u2019s known for a potential alien landing site and its \u201cdead\u201d tomatoes. One day, Romeo discovers an amnesiatic woman named Juliet lying in the road. She begs him to kill her, but Romeo\u2019s a good lad (and kind of a doofus), and he falls in love with her instead, despite the super questionable confluence of their names. \u201cNo good will come from falling in love with a woman you found in the middle of the road,\u201d his grandfather, genius inventor Benjamin Stargazer, warns. And you know what? He\u2019s right! You wanna be star-crossed lovers, kid? Because this is how you become star-crossed lovers.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s tech, Romeo is recruited by the FBI\u2019s 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\u2019 jacket that his dead-but-also-not-dead grandfather has somehow transported himself onto. Ol\u2019 Ben also technically invents time travel in the future, making him a literal grandfather paradox. Wild.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019s 15-hour story, I\u2019m not sure I understand all of it \u2013 and hey, neither does Romeo. Talk about feeling like the main character. But for whatever reason, it\u2019s 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\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n
Romeo is a Dead Man is a game made up of a lot of very disparate ideas.\u201c<\/p>\n
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\u2019s ship, The Last Night, which is a 2D, sprite-based world where you can hang out with the crew \u2013 they\u2019re a weird group that includes Romeo\u2019s 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\u2019s motorcycle across a bridge of light to to your destination. I can\u2019t emphasize enough how ridiculous all of this is, especially when your ship says \u201cFBI\u201d on the side in big bold letters.<\/p>\n
Once you\u2019re where you need to be \u2013 which could be Deadford City Hall, a cult enclave in the \u201870s where you run around with a delightful zombie named Jenny, or a haunted asylum, among others \u2013 you\u2019re 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\u2026 reasons. Romeo has access to four melee weapons and four ranged weapons. You\u2019ll 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\u2019s it. There are no more worlds to conquer, weapon-wise.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a parry). The cool thing about Romeo’s melee combat is that you can chain light and heavy attacks together in any order. It\u2019s not particularly deep \u2013 weapons don\u2019t have move lists, and there’s nary an Izuna Drop (or anything similar) in sight \u2013 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\u2026 or Dante from Devil May Cry. Even the big, slow sword is cool.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cDon\u2019t worry, infinite ammo\u201d baby.<\/p>\n
I admit that I’m kind of mixed on Romeo is a Dead Man’s rogues\u2019 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. <\/p>\n
Combat isn’t particularly deep, but it does feel good, especially against smaller foes.\u201c<\/p>\n
Either way, killing enemies builds blood, which can be spent on Bloody Summer, a very strong attack that also regenerates some of Romeo\u2019s health. Each weapon has its own version of this move, and you can also use it while dodging or jumping for some variety. It\u2019s a good way to dish out the hurt and manage Romeo\u2019s health without dipping into his limited healing items.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ctyping this made Will sad\u201d category, there\u2019s 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\u2019ve killed. There\u2019s no penalty for dying; you don\u2019t drop the currency you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a couple of really good ones, like the hard-charging Death Changeling, but you have seen these archetypes before and some are\u2026 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\u2019t bad, per se, but I do wish there was more to it.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, Romeo isn\u2019t alone, or at least doesn\u2019t have to be. You can find seeds scattered throughout spacetime that allow you to grow Bastards (yes, this is what they\u2019re 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\u2019re cool to have around and incredibly useful \u2013 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\u2019d largely ignored them until then (and growing them is its own process I will get into later).<\/p>\n
The places you\u2019ll do all this fighting are pretty grand. They\u2019re largely not remarkable spaces in and of themselves, but what\u2019s cool is subspace. Romeo, being a space-time cop, can access subspace, which is another dimension parallel to the one he\u2019s 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\u2019ll often have to find your way to another TV to get around roadblocks in whatever dimension you\u2019re in. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Will’s Favorite Action Games<\/p>\n
Rise of the Ronin is Team Ninja’s latest foray into the action genre. Here’s how it stacks up against my favorites.<\/p>\n