Romeo Is A Dead Man review – punk will never die thanks to Suda51

Suda51, the man behind Lollipop Chainsaw and Shadows Of The Damned, returns with his weirdest and most entertaining game in several years.

With a career spanning more than three decades, Grasshopper Interactive founder Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda has a reputation for bringing a punk aesthetic to the craft of making video games. He’s best known for earlier titles like killer7 and No More Heroes but after a poor run in recent years, Romeo Is A Dead Man is very much a return to form. It’s quirky, rule-breaking, and feels like it shouldn’t work – yet, somehow, it does.

If nothing else, Romeo Is A Dead Man is utterly distinctive: you’re not likely to mistake the hard-boiled, ultraviolent, cynically humorous games Suda51 churns out for those made by anyone else. The first aspect in which this new game forcibly grabs your attention is by employing a blizzard of vastly differing art styles, instead of just one.

Thus, in Romeo Is A Dead Man’s first hour, you find a diorama style intro; comic book style framed cut scenes (which themselves showcase different styles of comic book art); conventional third person 3D which is also warped into a Tron style, blocky, shiny neon version of itself; a pixel art hub offering homages to games of the 16-bit era; psychedelic, fractal-like transition screens; and further retro homages going all the way back to the days of Pong.

The game is visually arresting but in the hands of anyone other than Suda51, it would surely have ended up as a horrible mishmash. That it manages not to, is attributable to the sheer off-the-wall nature of its storyline, which instantly forces you to suspend disbelief, then carries on further into the outer reaches of preposterousness. Once you surrender yourself to its logic-defying weirdness, the use of different visual styles to convey chunks of that narrative somehow makes sense.

Romeo Is A Dead Man’s plot centres on Romeo Stargazer, deputy sheriff in a small, dead end American town, who stops his squad car to investigate a body in the road and is mauled and killed by a monster. Luckily, his grandad Benjamin is a time-travelling boffin who has invented a life support system which he turns up with and injects into Romeo. Benjamin dies in the process but is reincarnated as a patch on the back of Romeo’s jacket.

As a result of his newfound powers, Romeo is recruited by the FBI’s Space-Time division, who send him off to take down a list of the universe’s most nefarious space-time criminals, lurking in different time periods and causing anomalies that destroy different multiverse versions of Earth. It turns out that among their number is Juliet, Romeo’s ex-girlfriend. Throughout the game, the story of their romance is told in flashback. Romeo, a puppyish character, still pines for her and that leads to disaster whenever he catches up with one of her variants.

Romeo, along with his mother and sister, and a cast of weird alien types, is headquartered on the FBI’s Space-Time spaceship, which provides a tempo-altering oasis from the relentless gore and violence that each chapter brings. There’s loads to do on the spaceship, most obviously upgrading Romeo’s abilities via a Pac-Man pastiche. But you can also grow zombie-like allies for you to summon or sit around listening to shaggy dog stories from the other characters.

When it’s time to go on a mission, you’ll find each chapter sends you to a different time period, where Romeo must use his melee and shooting skills to dismember hordes of enemies. The combat, using both a melee weapon and a gun, is reminiscent of No More Heroes and the only part of the game that feels in any way ordinary. It’s gory and fun, but it’s the set pieces, locations, and enemies that add the most flavour. The fact that you can’t change weapons without switching back to the main menu is a pain though.

The other element to each chapter is subspace, which is accessed via TVs on which a mysterious philosophical Svengali appears, and allows you to reach areas inaccessible in the surface world. There’s no fighting in subspace (at least until the game’s latter stages) but there are puzzles which open up new areas and staircases, and key parts to find, which will allows you to reach the chapter boss.

There are puzzles – some quite decent but never too obscure – in the surface world too, and plenty of gameplay variation between the chapters. One, for example, majors on stealth (and is set in a creepy abandoned hospital, bringing to mind classic horror games of yore). In another chapter, set in the 1970s, Romeo acquires a zombie assistant called Jenny, who ends up being dismembered but still survives. As is customary for a Suda51 game, dark humour abounds.

As the game builds to a crescendo, you’re even treated to an 8-bit style point ‘n’ click interlude, which morphs into a Japanese hip-hop musical number. By then, Romeo seems to exist outside of space and time. Each chapter begins with an Oscar Wilde quote and it’s a fair bet that no other game this year will be so chock full of literary references.

If you’ve recently worried that games are in danger of becoming generic and safe, Romeo Is A Dead Man will more than allay such fears. It’s completely out there, both visually and story-wise, pleasingly experimental, very funny, and pretty satisfying to play – although its combat is probably its most conventional aspect.

What it isn’t, is polished to within an inch of its life, although for some that will be another part of the charm. It isn’t the longest game around – if you explore every nook of subspace for collectibles, you might get 20 hours’ gameplay from it – but it also doesn’t overstay its welcome.

It makes little sense, at least as far as conventional logic is concerned, but in terms of pure escapism it’s off the charts, creating the absolute antithesis of anything corporate or bland. Romeo Is A Dead Man offers glorious proof that Suda51’s punk ethos is still alive and well. It won’t appeal to everyone, but that’s the point.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £41.99
Publisher: NatEase Games
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Release Date: 11th February 2026
Age Rating: 18

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