Romeo is a Dead Man Review – Love and Necromancy

This copy of Romeo is a Dead Man was provided to Source Gaming by Grasshopper Manufacture for review purposes.

Light spoilers for Romeo is a Dead Man are in this review.

On the surface, Romeo is a Dead Man may seem like a riff on Romeo and Juliet. By “on the surface,” I mean that the two main characters are named Romeo and Juliet, and that they are romantically involved with each other. That is about as far as it goes.

Romeo is a Dead Man is a melting pot of numerous different things from absurdist humor, psychological horror, zombie fiction, dating sims… there’s a lot. But it’s mainly Gundam.

Romeo Stargazer is Char Aznable. He has nightmares about the “White Devil” killing him, which is what Char refers to the original Gundam as. There’s even more than that, but I don’t want to spoil any surprises. Just know that I keeled over laughing finding out how far it goes. Subtlety is for cowards.

Subtlety is for cowards.

Oh yeah, there’s characters from The Silver Case in this game. We got Midorikawa; Jabroni; someone who uh, resembles Sumio Mondo; and if you walk out of bounds on the spaceship and read the note that’s precariously just floating in space, you find out that the person leaving little paper slips of lore across space and time is famed TurtleGuy, Tokio Morishima.

Most of these serve as little more than cameos, aside from SilverSox, the aforementioned Sumio Mondo lookalike. I’m pretty okay with that, as it clears the stage for the main storyline which is convoluted enough as is. The connections to previous ‘Kill the Past’ games don’t seem to matter very much, but as a fan it is nice to see them. I’m getting ahead of myself though, so let’s go back to square one.

You play as time-traveling cyborg half-dead FBI Space-Time special agent Romeo “DeadMan” Stargazer (talk about a mouthful) and fight “Rotters,” which are zombies, with melee weapons and ranged weapons. You can also make use of your own Rotters, called “Bastards,” which you cultivate by planting Bastard Seeds and make stronger by having Bastards fight to the death.

Yes, the game turns into pixel art between missions.

Your mission as time-traveling cyborg half-dead FBI Space-time special agent Romeo “DeadMan” Stargazer is to track down a group of Space-Time fugitives responsible for disrupting the flow of time. The group is led by notorious Space-Time criminal Juliet Dendrobium. All the while, your Grandpa, Benjamin Stargazer, who saved you from death by traveling back through time, is a sentient cartoon on the back of your jacket.

Part of me is kind of going through the motions describing the insane premise, because it feels extravagantly weird just for the sake of being weird. I’ve gotten flack for “complaining” about a Grasshopper title before, saying “I’m just not a fan,” and in this case I’d like to say that (one) I’ve played every single game SUDA 51 is credited as the Director on that’s available in English, and (two) I don’t think any of them have been as abstractly wacky as this game is.

Except maybe No More Heroes III. I remember saying I was going to review that game four years ago. I liked it fine; it had a fun story and combat and a killer score. In that case, I embraced the absurdity.

Romeo is a Dead Man feels like an exercise in stream of consciousness game-making, and from interviews the subject of many things being ad-libbed as they went was confirmed. In that sense, I don’t think there are very many games out there like Romeo is a Dead Man, and as time went on, I began to take it for what it was: a poppy, somewhat slapdash game with a lot of heart that wears its influences on its sleeves.

A scene in Romeo is a Dead Man parodying contemporary horror games.

Eventually I embraced Romeo’s absurdity. I think the turning point came in the third chapter, when they presented me with a compelling villain, Dr. Hill. Hill had a concrete story of loss and his slip into insanity. The third chapter takes place in this creepy and horrific asylum and just straight up turns into a horror game. You go around reading the results of his twisted experiments, running and hiding from a horrific monster that stalks the halls, getting jump scared, all the while you’re having his story relayed to you through flashbacks. It is at this level that I finally entered my element and began to enjoy the game. Eventually, by teleporting about the asylum, you get to fight the man himself.

Something very monumental happens at the moment when you finally fight his mutated form: triumphant and heroic music begins playing, and it’s sung from his own perspective. The raw emotion of facing off against someone doing such heinous and horrible deeds who so thoroughly believes that he is right that he gets his own theme song, barking about how “for the sake of love [he’ll] fight to the bone,” is genuinely breathtaking. The boss fight too was a cut above the ones prior and may still be my favorite boss in the game.

From that moment on, I think I started to understand. I started treating the game like a proper ‘Kill the Past’ title, and I started seeing the themes and underlying emotions emerged from material that had just passed me over before.

Romeo has a one-liner before every boss fight that is ever-endearing.

The second boss fight is against a time-traveling Civil War Confederate Soldier. After you defeat him, he goes an entire unhinged rant about how after the South had lost, he murdered a slave before he could be freed, and he enjoyed every second of it. At any point, you can kill this man; you can end his screed.

Romeo is a Latino Man, and the creature that keeps killing him in his dreams is named the White Devil. I know it’s a Gundam reference, but in the same game where you murder a Confederate Soldier, I can’t help but think that it’s a double entendre. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that some racist people couldn’t help but think that too and proclaimed the game as “woke!” The idea of someone making it all the way through the Grasshopper catalogue, including the game where you can have a protagonist wear a hoodie that says “FUCK RACISM” on it in every cutscene, and drawing the line here, is extremely comical.

Underneath the loud exterior, there’s a kind of melancholic existential dread that permeates through the entire game. Between each chapter you are treated to glimpses of Romeo’s life before becoming Deadman, and the acting, dialogue, and animation work is stellar. Truly, there’s a subtlety to the way each of these scenes is presented that leaves you guessing about the true feelings of the characters.

These cutscenes remain a highlight of the experience.

Oftentimes in levels you will speak to a man inside of a TV known as “JEH,” who spouts somber nothings at you before whisking you away to another Space in time. Everything JEH says feels kind of like nonsense, and the joke of him saying something completely irrelevant to the current situation had me hollering each time I approached a new TV. By the end of my journey, I was doing a live reading of each TV monologue, complete with the bookend of an abrupt change in prose and vocal tone of “Travel to [blank] Space?”

A lot of the rest of the story is told through comic book-styled cutscenes, and it’s in this and the overall environmental design that you can kinda really feel the budgetary restraints that this game has. I don’t really like the way the environments look, no insult intended to the artists, and oh boy does this game run badly, at least on my computer. Partway through making this review, an update was released that came with a bug that removed Frame Generation, which was the only way I was ever hitting 30 FPS. Even at time of writing, it’s still broken on the Intel XeSS upscaling method, which made my life pretty difficult. I had just reached the final boss, and oh dear, that final boss is hard, especially when the game runs at 15 FPS. So the extended period of time in making this review is both because I had to collect my thoughts and because it took so long to beat it. Consider this a formal request to please stop using Unreal Engine 5.

Aside from performance issues, the gameplay is fine. Fun, even! I found the standard buzzsaw Katana to be an adequately versatile weapon, and I enjoyed creating carnage with the Gauntlets and Lance weapon as well.

I’ve been hesitant to include screenshots of gameplay due to all of my images having horrible image quality. Such are the woes of modern low-end gaming.

The projectile weapons on the other hand don’t really integrate as naturally into combat as I’d want, and I can’t help but think they’re underbaked. The inclusion of a weak point that you can break by shooting or hitting them on an enemy adds an ebb and flow into the combat system that it would be lacking otherwise, but the gun gameplay is kind of just not very impactful outside of the bigass rocket launcher. The lack of an ability to reload a partially finished clip without aiming down sights is particularly frustrating, because aiming moves your camera which can be disorienting at times, especially with a million particle effects shooting off at every moment. Eventually I learned to adapt to this limitation, but it was a long learning process.

Truthfully, the main star of combat is the Bloody Summer finisher move. Bloody Summer allows you to do a supercharged attack with any of your weapons that decimates enemy health in what is usually a big explosion of some kind. You can use it to interrupt or cancel some enemy attacks, even bosses’. Bloody Summer also restores your health, and being low on health and unleashing it in a field of enemies and bringing that health back up is immensely satisfying.

There’s a sort of clinical feeling to the gameplay, after a certain point it kind of feels like it’s a means to an end. I can say with utmost certainty that I enjoyed my time with Romeo is a Dead Man, but it is an experience that is the sum of its parts. I have not forgotten about it in the four months it has taken me to formulate this review, and I don’t think I will forget about it any time soon.

Romeo hits the Gundam.

To everyone at Grasshopper Manufacture, I say this as a longtime fan, thank you for your hard work. I loved the game, and I wish you good luck with your future endeavors. Kill the Past!

Romeo is a Dead Man: Romeo is a Dead Man is a poppy, somewhat slapdash game with a lot of heart that wears its influences on its sleeves. – AShadowLink

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2026-06-12T16:29:31-0400