ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN: Ultraviolent love across a broken timeline.
Grasshopper Manufacture has been a strange and interesting part of the video game business for a long time. Goichi “Suda51” Suda was in charge of the studio’s artistic direction. They became known for their experimental stories, bold visual design, and games that often feel like playable punk albums.
Action games like The Silver Case, Killer7, No More Heroes, and Lollipop Chainsaw set a pattern: they were messy but fun to play, with weird humor, shifting tones, and philosophical themes. This trend is carried on almost boldly in ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN. It doesn’t feel like a well-thought-out movie, but more like a creative outburst—a game that puts ideas first and polish second.
In a lot of ways, this project feels like the end of Grasshopper Manufacture’s character. It combines character-action fighting with weird humor, retro style, and experimental storytelling. The end result is both familiar and strange, like an action game from the Xbox 360 era and cutting-edge science fiction came together. As many other Suda51 works, the game is weird, sometimes in a way that’s hard to understand, but it’s also clearly personal.
Romeo Stargazer is the main character of the story. He is a sheriff’s deputy in a small town who is interested in conspiracy theories. He meets a monster that kills him brutally while on what seems to be a normal watch. At the very moment Romeo is about to die, his strange, time-traveling grandfather Benjamin steps in and uses the Dead Gear Life Support System to bring him back to life. This action breaks the fabric of space-time, which starts the whole story.
The FBI’s Space-Time Police get Romeo, who is now known as Dead Man. After that, the story goes through many different timelines, singularities, and broken worlds. Romeo is on the hunt for dangerous criminals who are taking advantage of the timeline’s breakdown while also looking for Juliet, his lost girlfriend, who keeps showing up in strange, monster-like forms that are connected to the universe’s collapse.
The story doesn’t follow a straight line, and that’s on purpose.
Comic book panels, strange cutscenes, “previously on” recaps of episodes, and dialogue fragments strewn across tasks are all used to show scenes. The story can feel like a puzzle at times, with questions about youth, love, violence, and fate that players have to figure out on their own.
The story might hit home with some players on an emotional level and be full of meaning, while others might find it confusing and hard to follow. In either case, it makes a mark. The tone is what stands out the most: it’s equal parts ridiculous comedy, sad reflection, and violent show. A story about relationships and identity that is surprisingly emotional lies beneath the strange events, even if it never makes sense.
Most of the time, ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN is a third-person hack-and-slash game. Players fight hordes of zombie-like enemies called rotters as they move through linear stages set in different times and places, such as malls, woods, cult compounds, asylums, and government buildings.
Romeo can use both of his tools at the same time: a gun and a melee weapon. In the game, players can unlock four close-range weapons and four far-range weapons. Each has its own attack speed and damage rating. Light and heavy strikes, dodging, and switching between weapons to hit weak spots on the enemy are what combat is all about.
Players go back to the spaceship’s main area, called “The Last Night,” between tasks. This hub area is where you can improve Romeo, raise Bastards (unkillable friends you can call), cook food, talk to other crew members, and play stat-boosting minigames. The ship breaks up the action between intense combat tasks and gives the experience its own personality.
During battle, you collect blood from defeated enemies to fill up the Bloody Summer meter.
When this ability is used, it sends out a strong attack that hurts enemies and heals the user. It is often a mechanic who saves lives in dangerous situations. Bastards are a big part of another system. They are beings that grow from the seeds that enemies drop. When these are called up during battle, they can help by fighting enemies, making weak spots, or helping with defense. Bastards can also be fused together to make stronger versions, which adds a small amount of flexibility to the game.
Puzzle parts show up in “subspace” places that can be reached through TVs inside levels. During these parts, there is no fighting for a short time. Instead, there are challenges with navigation and simple puzzles in the environment that involve moving shapes, doors, or orbs. Even though they’re meant to slow things down, they can stop the action in its tracks.
The fighting in ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN is both fun and broken. In some ways, Romeo is easy to handle, and switching between close-quarters and far-off attacks can make for some stylish moments. Boss fights are especially tough; they usually have their own music tracks and require you to quickly figure out what’s going on. As players level up, their weapons get a lot stronger, which makes fights more chaotic and exciting.
The technique, on the other hand, does not have sufficient mechanical depth. Combinations are simple, fighting foes can become tedious, and huge groups of adversaries can be too much for the player to manage due to the fact that the camera is small and the gunfire is slow. During hectic bouts, the occurrence of technical glitches makes things even less smooth than they already are.
The Bastard system makes things more interesting, but it doesn’t really change fighting that much, and having too many duplicate seeds can slow down progress.
In subspace areas, the puzzles are theoretically interesting, but they are often hard to understand and repeat themselves a lot. On the other hand, progression systems are creative. Romeo can use the resources he gets from battles and travel to improve his weapons or raise his stats in mini-games.
One way to level up looks like a grid from Pac-Man, and players earn stat boosts on it. This makes progression more like an activity than a screen with menus for upgrades. The difficulty curve changes as Romeo gets stronger, which lets players beat enemies in later rounds.
The overall look of the game is not flawless, but it is distinctive.
The lighting is flat, and the textures are plain, which reminds me of older console generations. Environments frequently have an old-fashioned appearance. There is a possibility that frame drops will occur during some intense battle situations.
Even so, the artistic direction makes up for these flaws. The spaceship hub has cute pixel art graphics, and the story scenes use comic book layouts and styled cinematics. The game has a unique look thanks to its chapter title cards, strange enemy designs, and experimental presentation methods. The visual style changes all the time, which adds to the broken timeline theme.
The sound design is exceptional, and it is one of the game’s most appealing aspects. Rock, jazz, eerie ambient tunes, and original voice songs are some of the genres of music that are played during boss fights. It is a reflection of how unpredictable the tone of the game is that these variations in the music occur.
When you’re fighting, the sound effects really hit you, and the voice acting really sells the game’s strange personalities. A lot of the time, the music makes simple parts of the game more interesting by giving big fights more emotional weight and energy.
ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN is not a game that was made to be fun for everyone.
It’s messy, annoying, and hard to understand at times. Combat features can feel old, puzzles can slow things down, and there are clear technical problems. But it’s hard to forget the game because of its personality, creativity, and emotional drive. Its mix of silly science fiction, romance, and extreme violence makes for an experience that feels hand-made and very personal.
Once more, Grasshopper Manufacture shows that it’s ready to take risks that most studios don’t. In the end, ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN works because it is daring, not because it is perfect. This action game is still quite intriguing, even though it has several problems. It’s driven by style, heart, and a clear mission that makes chaos seem weirdly significant.
