The early part of the year is always a weird one for game releases. Most gamers are still working through their post-holiday sale backlog and so a lot of the big names will avoid releasing new things until…well around now. Those that do release then tend to be more on the…creative end of the spectrum and so it was that Romeo is a Deadman happen to find its way to my desk. Now I’m not really familiar with the work of the dev team or Suda51 in general but given it looked like a decent hack and slash type of game I figured it’d be worth a try. What I wasn’t prepared for was a game that felt like a loose grab bag of a dozen different ideas, all of them stitched together in a haphazard way that honestly doesn’t feel cohesive in the slightest way. To be sure I can see that this might be intended but the fact remains that the game itself is none the better for it, intentional or not.
Romeo was just your average rural beat cop, living out a life that wasn’t so different from everyone elses. That was until one day he came across a woman unconscious lying in the middle of the road. When she woke though she had no memory of who she was and over the coming weeks her and Romeo developed a blossoming romance as they tried to find out her past. That all came to an abrupt end when it became clear that she was just one face of a time-travelling evil as rotters from other dimensions descended on Romeo’s hometown. Luckily his grandfather was a master of time travel and was able to save Romeo from certain death, converting him into something not living but also not quite dead. So was born Deadman, the latest addition to the FBI’s time travelling crime fighting specialist squadron.
If that hodge podge of an introduction has got you reeling then the visuals of Romeo is a Deadman aren’t going to help any. Whilst the main game has you in a third person world that, for whatever reason, reminded me distinctly of the visual style Dead Rising the game’s overworld is done in a pixel art style. All of these elements cross-pollinate between each other in various elements, like the overlays retaining the pixel-art style in the 3D world and some of the artwork using the 3D renders showing up in the overworld. Couple that with the comic book cinematic sections, various surreal 3D renderings and a smattering of other wacky visual elements and there’s a real lack of visual cohesiveness throughout the entire game.
But that’s not the only part which doesn’t really fit.
Romeo is a Deadman is effectively a loose grab bag of a bunch of different mechanics slapped together into a muddled experience. To be sure there’s a solid core of a hack and slash game in here, one that pits you against hordes of “rotters” that you’ll have to massacre your way through to complete your objectives. Surrounding that though is a bunch of ancillary things which are ostensibly for progression and giving you more tools but they all feel tacked on and out of place with the rest of the game. For instance there’s a whole game about farming bastards which are rotters that you control, a katsu curry cooking minigame, a kind of space mining/level selection sim, a maze that you navigate using one of the main currencies to get small upgrades and so on. There’s a lot of these kinds of things and, thematically, they kind of fit but in practice it just feels like you’re playing a bunch of different games that share the same launcher.
The combat is OK in a sense that yeah, it’s your standard hack and slash affair which seems to do its job well enough. However everything feels a bit floaty, imprecise and generally just a bit B grade for want of a better term. This is no better highlighted than in the boss fights where most of them are simply relegated to you beating away at the feet of some giant monstrosity who, for whatever reason, only has a single move to try and stop you from doing that. The levels are all linear with most of the exploration simply having you explore different iterations of the same room over and over again. I really didn’t come in with any kinds of expectations for this game but even that couldn’t stop me from seeing just how unpolished it all was.
This extends to the grab bag of other mechanics that feel like they were just thrown in because they felt like a good idea at the time. Like yeah, I can understand wanting to make the upgrade and progression mechanics different and interesting but they’re all so poorly realised that it makes engaging with them annoying rather than rewarding. Like the bastard farming system which requires you to sit through a cutscene every time you farm one or the maze upgrades which have an obtuse movement scheme that just makes it feel wonky. With so many different things, all with their own way of implementing them coupled with the lack of visual cohesion you are just left with a confused mess of different things that simply don’t work together at all.
Which is then capped off by the narrative which, I get it, is supposed to be surreal but the way it’s told is just simply bad. Like you have multiple rehashes of the initial plot, all of which only seem to add either the smallest detail or simply confuse the events of the initial story just because. Then you’ve characters and dialogue that feel like it was written by a high school student which, I’ll admit, could be due to something being lost in translation but honestly when all of the characters say multiple times things like “Romeo, I mean Deadman” or “Maybe we should call you Deadman” or “It’s Deadman now right?” it’s like, we get it, he’s got a new identity. Or how Romeo’s motivation for finding Juliet seems razor thin and only seems to come up after each boss battle. It’s just…bad.
Romeo is a Deadman is a confused mess, the sum of its parts adding up to much less than its whole. Whilst individual elements are competent enough nothing really feels like it’s been made to fit together properly. I can see the argument that this is the point of the whole thing but really, there’s ways to make a surreal/unhinged/disjointed game that still manages to make everything work together. Given I know little of Suda51 and his work this might just be par for the course but suffice to say, even going with no expectations, I still feel like I didn’t get much out of my time with Romeo is a Deadman.
Rating: 6.0/10
Romeo is a Deadman is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $73.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 5.5 hours and 25% of the achievements unlocked.
