Romeo Is a Dead Man is a strange game. That shouldn’t shock anyone who has played and enjoyed previous works from executive director Suda 51 and developer Grasshopper Manufacture–The Silver Case, Killer7, Lollipop Chainsaw, and the No More Heroes series all contain wild tone shifts, interesting visual choices, and twisty, sometimes esoteric narratives. Romeo Is a Dead Man is strange in many of the same ways those games were, but something important’s missing from it: a sense of purpose.
In the game’s opening moments, Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff’s deputy with a taste for conspiracy theories, is brutally attacked by a monster in the middle of his hometown of Deadford, Pennsylvania. Thankfully, he’s saved from death by his own time-traveling grandfather, who turns him into a cyborg with the Dead Gear Life Support System. Some years earlier, after the world is shattered by a mysterious singularity event, and Romeo–now known as Dead Man–is swiftly inducted into the FBI’s Space-Time Police unit, where he’s forced to hunt alternate-timeline versions of his amnesiac girlfriend, Juliet (yes, as in Romeo and Juliet), and a handful of other deviants who have holed up in the past.
If the plot sounds like nonsense, it’s worth noting that the game clearly knows this too. Sometimes its tongue-in-cheek humor lands–it’s funny to get carted off for your “training” when you’re already several levels into the game, for instance, and the way the game keeps flashing back to “previously on” segments depicting events that happened before the game started is amusing. The first boss is inexplicably called “Everyday Is Like Monday,” and there’s a good ongoing bit where characters keep correcting themselves after referring to the protagonist as “Romeo” instead of “Dead Man.”
