The word “maverick” could have been invented to describe veteran Japanese developer Suda51: in the past, he has been hailed as the games industry’s answer to Quentin Tarantino. Over the years, his games may have varied in quality, but you would never mistake them for anyone else’s games. But with Romeo Is A Dead Man, his latest opus – due to be released on 11 February for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC – he has excelled himself in the distinctiveness stakes.
There’s never anything beige about Suda51’s games, but from the moment I first fired up Romeo Is A Dead Man, it didn’t so much grab my full attention as wrestle me into submission, via a technique which surely contravenes the rules of game development. Its first hour simply battered me with an assortment of markedly different art styles.
Playing with art styles
Typically, a Suda51 game has a bizarre storyline that makes little sense but allows it to create a unique and memorable game universe. The first knockings of said story are introduced against a visual backdrop of rural America, rendered in a high camera angle and graphics oddly reminiscent of a model train set. To be fair, that particular art-style doesn’t make it beyond the initial intro, but it does at least set the scene for the game’s visual Tourette’s.
Next, Romeo Is A Dead Man cuts to a horror-game-inspired, faux-dashcam first-person scene from inside a police car, from which Romeo Stargazer, our eponymous hero, emerges to investigate a body in the road, but gets gruesomely killed by a weird white being. At which point, all hell – both narrative and visual – breaks loose.
Romeo’s suspiciously young-looking boffin of a grandad appears to save his life by injecting a life-support kit into Romeo’s eye, which leaves him with a superhero-style helmet, a gun, and what is effectively a light-sabre (in itself a Suda51 in-joke). That intervention plays out as a non-animated cut-scene enacted in pure comic-book style – although throughout its full course, it switches between two distinct comic-book art styles. Those comic-book cut-scenes recur throughout the game.
Hyperactive retro nostalgia
Don’t imagine that’s the end of Romeo Is A Dead Man’s whirlwind of art styles – far from it. While its predominant gameplay settles into a more conventional third-person hack-and-slash perspective, albeit nicely and distinctively stylised, it continues to throw art-curveballs at you.
Loading and transition screens tend towards eyeball-melting psychedelia, presenting random fractal-influenced patterns and weirdness like apparently disintegrating, meticulously rendered fish. And before long, Romeo, recruited into the FBI’s Time-Space department, finds himself on a spaceship depicted from a top-down perspective in a pure 8- and 16-bit pixel-art style, complete with menus apparently cribbed from a late-80s or early 90s home computer.
Even in the main 3D third-person gameplay levels, there are several distinct art styles, as Romeo must solve puzzles by descending into subspace, which turns out to be a Tron-influenced, retro-computer-graphics-inspired version of the world above. Accessed, naturally, via CRT televisions which run some sublime, luridly-coloured pastiches of 16-bit pixel-art, and in which Romeo has amusingly cod-philosophical discussions with a shadowy character.
Plus, Romeo has a special attack which charges, and when you unleash it, it temporarily turns the area around him into a posterised, Pucci-print-style outburst of lurid colour.
Creating a cohesive design
What’s truly remarkable about the whole affair is that, instead of coming across as a jumble of wildly different and hitherto, one would have imagined, violently incompatible art-styles, Romeo Is A Dead Man somehow manages to make a weird form of sense and even form a coherent whole in visual terms.
It’s a neat trick, helped by the fact that Suda51 and his team have chosen and depicted their myriad art styles with taste and skill. By rights, it should be an unholy mess, but somehow it manages not to be.
The way in which Romeo Is A Dead Man skitters between art styles is obviously motivated by a desire to pay homage to the visual signatures of a vast range of games and films across the ages – and some of those homages are more obvious than others. For example, when Romeo departs the FBI spaceship to take down each individual who exists outside of space-time, causing anomaly-inducing havoc that makes entire worlds implode, he does so on a space-motorbike, which is pure Tron.
Perhaps bizarrely, another element that helps congeal the visual mishmash into a whole is the sheer ludicrousness of Romeo Is A Dead Man’s plot. I found myself being asked to suspend disbelief for the first time, maybe ten minutes into the game, at which point its plot veered so wildly into nonsensical territory that I simply rolled with it, until it had constructed a fantasy universe so weird that using a cornucopia of art styles to show it felt almost like the logical thing to do.
Romeo Is A Dead Man swiftly took me down a rabbit hole, and when I emerged on the other side, any amount of breaking the rules of game development seemed permissible.
Plays as good as it looks
Romeo Is A Dead Man certainly buries one gaming misconception. It was made in Unreal Engine 5, so if anyone ever tells me that all Unreal Engine games look the same, I’ll make sure to force them to play it.
While Romeo Is A Dead Man’s primary gameplay is at times way more conventional than its visuals, this is still a hugely satisfying and fun game to play. Suda51’s latest opus is shaping up to be his best yet and is without a doubt destined to become a cult classic. Especially so for anyone with a more than passing interest in the visual aspect of video games. It’s due to arrive on February 11, and we’ll bring you a full review pre-launch.
Romeo Is A Dead Man releases 11 February on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Visit the Grasshopper Manufacture for more details.