The experience I had playing Romeo Is a Dead Man was almost exactly the experience I had going to a childhood friend's wedding. As I walked up to the church, I started recognizing faces from years before: oh shit, Eric! How the heck are ya? Billy, my boy! What's life done to you goodness gracious. Wait… Lauren, you're in New York now? We should totally get dinner! And it's like no time had passed at all: The reversion to immaturity was immediate.

None of them were my best friends – those guys weren't invited – but they were people I was happy to see again and catch up with. 

None of us kept in touch after (Lauren moved away before we ever got that dinner), and this is honestly the first time I’ve thought about any of it in years… but I would still be happy to see them all again. 

And so it is with Grasshopper Manufacture. 

In high school, a pair of their releases – 2005’s Killer7 and 2007’s No More Heroes – shaped the way I think about games. Before the indie boom made punk-rock aesthetic commonplace, they felt genuinely different and even transgressive. Not necessarily in a “positive” way, but in a memorable one.

Like: most games were (and are) made for teenage boys, but only No More Heroes required aggressive jerk-off motion controls to charge the laser sword wielded by your deeply awful otaku avatar, Travis Touchdown, so that he could go around Kill Bill-ing people in his quest to El Topo. The second game, Desperate Struggle, was every bit as juvenile, but fuck dude I loved them so much. I have truly no idea if they would hold up (I bought but never actually played 2021’s No More Heroes III)… but Romeo Is A Dead Man makes me think I don't need to check. 

From the opening moments, this game overwhelms you: in the announcement trailer, a family is at home and Romeo Stargazer goes to the door and is immediately mauled by a giant white demon thing only to be sorta-resurrected by his grandfather… and the final game is only slightly less jarring, as the demon is happened upon while out on patrol but the grandfather is actually dead in this universe and Romeo’s rescued by an alternate-dimensional one (think Doc Brown by way of Rick Sanchez and you're 100% there) who jams a machine into his now-missing right eye that makes him Deadman the Half Dead Man with a big robot head and a newfound ability to wield wild weapons (😁) for the Space FBI (🤮)...

Also, that grandfather has been reincarnated or something as a moving graphic on the back of Romeo/Deadman’s jacket, where he keeps you company while you travel the cosmos in search of Juliet.

Shakespeare but make it PCP, right?

This Juliet doesn't like Shakespeare, turns out, not that that — or anything else — matters because this story is utterly incomprehensible. I think that these lovers become starcrossed on a night much like the one where Romeo was mauled: rather than a demon on the road, there was an amnesiac woman who asked him to kill her but instead he fell in love.

We get a few glimpses of what came next and maybe they’re real any maybe not (by a third playthrough, I think I’d have a handle on it: I’ll never find out), but the most important part is what came after, because it turns out she is the real time demon or whatever… and because Romeo fell in love instead of following her instructions, he (and therefore you) must now follow her across time to periods where she’s sewn the seeds of chaos and clean up her mess by making many of your own.

And what glorious messes you make. The next 15ish hours see you hacking and slashing and blasting through thousands of enemies full of an incomprehensible amount of blood, because now we've got the power of the PlayStation 5 Professional and where should that extra power go except in the service of more cartoon gore? 

This is what I want from a Grasshopper game. And many people lay that at the feet of the company’s founder and CEO, Goichi Suda AKA Suda51. Games like Killer7, No More Heroes, Killer is Dead, Lollipop Chainsaw, Shadows of the Damned, and now Romeo is a Dead Man fit the mold of “A Suda51 Game” in the way that Sentimental Value is A Joachim Trier Film… but the man’s got dozens of credits to his name, and plenty of them aren’t the kind of ultra-violent genre-hopping stuff people laud him for… and even within those games he had wildly varying levels of impact.

(In)Famously, IGN once published the line “‘There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,’ says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.” And this tendency hasn’t gotten better.

Which is frustrating, because we don’t need to do that here, right? When we talk about cinematic auteurs, we do so because there’s no other shorthand. You can feel the change in “A Christopher Nolan Film” that came when he shifted from working with cinematographer Wally Pfister to Hoyt van Hoytema. Quentin Tarantino’s movies absolutely became looser (probably derogatory) following the passing of his long-time editor Sally Menke.

Yet there’s no simple way to say all of that… and even if one film’s impact is the result of everyone’s contributions, it still gets filtered through the sensibility of the directors, which makes them a reasonable-enough stand-in that when I say “I like Kim Jee-woon films” it does mean something.

But it doesn’t need to be directors or individuals at all: A24 has a sensibility that brings people into a theater; seeing that Neon’s releasing a project always compels me to check something out. And physical releases by The Criterion Collection or Vinegar Syndrome or what-have-you do the same.

The structure of game development means you already have the studio to use as the stand-in. Unless you're, like, the guy who actually made Stardew Valley completely by himself, games are even more their parts than movies (watch Double Fine’s Psychodyssey if you have not). When I said the most weeb sentence of my entire life – “Romeo is a Dead Man out of nowhere breaking out the rakugo story at the heart of Akane-Banashi's current arc is crazy” – a friend should have said, “That’s Grasshopper for ya.”

It doesn’t matter whether the idea to include the Shinigami story came from Suda or co-writer/director Ren Yamazaki or a junior programmer, what matters is that other people went ahead and did it. And it wasn’t hard or expensive: it’s a static sequence in the same pixel art environment and you just sit with the story (tbh that’s rakugo! I’m hype as fuck for the Akane-Banashi anime tho), but that’s all it needed.

Romeo is full of shit like that and also just kinda in general. In the first hour, I honestly got a bit of a headache because tutorial screen after tutorial screen introduced new and whacky mechanics (this Dunkey video on Nioh 3 is quite relatable), several of which I basically never interacted with.

But I knew if I stuck with it it would eventually click, and anyway there was something nostalgic in the confusion: me a kid being utterly baffled by Killer7, a game starring seven split personalities who are also entirely different entities with their own special powers that you must switch between to work your way through the story which is literally running on rails with fixed camera angles until you have to pause to switch to first person to do a fight that feels like something out of an arcade light gun game.

It’s such a singular work and experience and every time you think you have a handle on it, a disembodied head shows up in a washing machine to say some cryptic… something. 

I didn’t understand Killer7 then and I don’t understand Romeo Is a Dead Man now, and Grasshopper’s latest even has a cryptic equivalent: A 2D man without a visible head seen in floating televisions that bring Romeo to and from “sub-space” offers… advice? fun facts about the world? utter nonsense? 

I genuinely couldn’t tell you what it was going for, and I really couldn’t care less. Tbh, a comprehensible version of this game would be a whole lot less interesting. And I come to Grasshopper for interesting, which is exactly what Romeo is a Deadman delivered: an experience equal parts surprising and comforting (and periodically frustrating). It really was nice to be back in this kind of world experiencing the kind of wonder that I did just about twenty years ago.

And so, ya know: if you're ever in New York again, hit me up. But for now I'm gonna move on.

The epitome of a 7/10