Romeo Is A Dead Man: The Kotaku Review

Spending time with my mom inevitably means talking about work, and since she’s retired, this almost always means my work. During a recent conversation, I brought up being asked to review Romeo Is a Dead Man, the latest project from Grasshopper Manufacture and its chief auteur Goichi “Suda51” Suda. Or, putting it in terms she could appreciate, “a new video game from that guy I was super excited to interview a few years ago.”

Her follow-up question was a little more problematic: “What’s it about?”

It felt as if time froze. I’d spent hours with Romeo Is a Dead Man by that point but didn’t have a good answer. Was it a doomed love story? A mind-bending, interdimensional adventure? An ode to human complexity? A fascinating example of Grasshopper excess? A lesson in self-actualization? A send-up of American exceptionalism? An indictment of the ironically isolating nature of social media? A vehicle for Suda to yet again pay homage to his favorite movies, television shows, music, and video games? A cheeky love letter to Grasshopper’s history, not to mention gaming as a whole?

“It’s… complicated,” was all I could muster before changing the subject.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is, on paper, pretty much what I’ve come to expect from a modern-day Grasshopper Manufacture project. It’s everything above at once and yet not at all like what I described at the same time. Is it fun? Is it meaningful? Is it worth time and money? I think so—and will try to explain why in the forthcoming paragraphs—but the process of explaining how a piece of art made you feel involves more than just words.

• Back-of-the-Box Quote:

  “I didn't understand anything and loved every second of it.”

• Developer:

  Grasshopper Manufacture

• Type of Game:

  Action-adventure, hack-and-slash.

• Liked:

  Maximalist aesthetics, peak storytelling

• Disliked:

  Makes few innovations to a well-trod, albeit still fun, formula.

• Platforms:

  PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S (Played on PlayStation 5).

• Release Date:

  February 11, 2026

• Played:

  40 hours; playthroughs on both Milk Chocolate (normal) and Couverture Chocolate (super hard) difficulties with some post-game secret exploring while maxing out stats on Romeo as well as his weapons and Bastards.

The late David Lynch, in his autobiography Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, says people know more than they think when it comes to interpreting art.

“Someone might say, ‘I don’t understand music,’ but most people experience music emotionally and would agree that music is an abstraction,” Lynch writes. “You don’t need to put music into words right away, you just listen. Cinema is a lot like music. It can be very abstract, but people have a yearning to make intellectual sense of it, to put it right into words. And when they can’t do that, it feels frustrating. But they can come up with an explanation from within, if they just allow it.”

So while it’s easy to say things like, “Romeo Is a Dead Man is an evolution of the mechanically gratifying, hack-and-slash formula previously created with No More Heroes,” because it is, it’s another, more excruciating exercise altogether to define the game’s overall meaning. It’s this quality that makes Grasshopper Manufacture’s games so special, and something Romeo has in spades.

Slice, Dice, and Julienne

Let’s start by getting the easy stuff out of the way. Romeo Is a Dead Man is Grasshopper’s first original project since spending the last 10 years (maybe) wrapping up the No More Heroes series. It stars Romeo Stargazer, a young sheriff’s deputy who, after being munched on by a demon, is saved by his grandfather Benjamin, a Doc Brown- or Rick Sanchez-style scientist with almost limitless scientific knowledge, and turned into a half-dead superhero. Romeo trades his life in small-town Deadford, Pennsylvania for a gig with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Space-Time Police, and the story kicks off in media res as he tries to figure out his situationship with the mysterious Juliet Dendrobium and hunt down nefarious criminals wreaking havoc on time and space.

Romeo Is a Dead Man’s moment-to-moment gameplay is spent traveling through mostly linear levels broken up between sections set in the action-heavy “real” space and the more peaceful subspace, an area that makes up for its lack of combat with aesthetics based around distinctive, voxel-based mazes with walls that warp in and out of reality. Altering the environment in one dimension frequently affects the other, which gives the game a distinct—if not wholly unique—rhythm where moments of pure chaos flow into chill, puzzle-solving sections and vice versa.

If you’ve played No More Heroes 3, you should already have a good idea of what’s on offer here as far as combat goes. Grasshopper is the king of fast-paced, frenetic melee combat, and Romeo Is a Dead Man lives up to that reputation. Romeo may be a more subdued protagonist than Travis Touchdown, but he still carves up foes like a hot chainsaw through zombie brains. And in eschewing its tendency to develop games for Nintendo platforms first, Grasshopper is able to take full advantage of the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC’s more powerful hardware to fill the screen with an almost obnoxious amount of visual flourishes. At times, the only way to keep track of Romeo through all of the button-mashing violence is through the lighting on his sword as it turns enemies into Miike-esque fountains of blood. The boss battles, on the other hand, feel as meticulously designed as anything you’d find in Dark Souls, and proved to be a compelling and formidable challenge even at the normal difficulty.

Grasshopper Manufacture

But that’s not to say Romeo Is a Dead Man doesn’t add anything to the modern Grasshopper formula. Romeo is also capable of dishing out punishment from a distance with a suite of firearms ranging from a simple pistol to a grasshopper-shaped bazooka. The damage dealt by these weapons largely pales in comparison to what you can achieve with melee weapons, but they do come in handy when targeting weak points on tougher enemies and bosses, which present as beautiful, blue flowers and satisfyingly explode with consecutive attacks. As the game nears its conclusion and starts throwing groups of more powerful monsters at you, Romeo’s guns become invaluable assets, even if using them nets you less energy for his special, health-restoring Bloody Summer attacks.

As you play through Romeo Is a Dead Man, enemies will sometimes drop seeds that you will then need to take back to the hub area—a spaceship used by the Space-Time Police where you can chat up your allies, upgrade Romeo’s stats and equipment, and bet on yourself against bosses in time-attack-style rematches—and plant in garden plots nurtured by Romeo’s half-sister, Luna. Over time, these pods become Bastards, helpful zombies who function like fighting game assists you can equip as back-up during missions. I built out my squad with variations capable of distracting enemies and trapping them in wormholes, but there are also Bastards who function to provide shields and restore your health. 

Romeo also includes a fusion system not unlike that in the Megami Tensei franchise, allowing you to improve your Bastards’ stats and even discover all-new Bastards with even wilder abilities. That said, the process of combining, planting, and harvesting Bastards can get a little tedious, and I was relieved to be done with it once I’d maxed out my favorites’ stats. Something so vital to defeating the game’s difficult bosses should probably have been cut back to just one or two steps, but maybe that’s the point: Good things take time. 

Life is but a Dream

I’ve long argued that Grasshopper’s work shares a lot in common with the movies of legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. Both are so full of symbolism, you end up being swept away by a flood of allegory and left grasping for any meaning you can find. Romeo Is a Dead Man is no different, but as I indicated earlier in this review, I couldn’t help but also think of David Lynch over the course of the 20 hours or so it took me to first reach the game’s credits. Lynch mixed dream-like absurdity and heartfelt earnestness in the pursuit of stirring the viewer’s emotional intuition rather than adhering to a strict, traditional narrative structure. The beauty and frustration of his art, like Grasshopper’s, is in how it demands you participate in its interpretation, or as Romeo’s narrator suggests at one point between chapters, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Grasshopper Manufacture

One of my favorite parts of Romeo Is a Dead Man is completely divorced from its violent gameplay. Speaking with the Space-Time Police force’s resident nurse WorstPink and asking her to evaluate you will kick off what at first seems like a silly personality quiz before it shifts into a full-on dating sim parody. WorstPink asks Romeo a static series of questions and you’re given three possible responses from which to choose. The catch is that only one is correct, while the other two will immediately end the side quest and boot you back to the hub area, forced to start from the beginning again. I lost count of the number of times this happened to me, but finally, I managed to memorize the mini-game’s 99 questions and see the ending.

Unlike the rest of the game, where you can develop the necessary skills and knowledge to defeat any challenge Romeo Is a Dead Man throws at you, WorstPink’s mini-game is based on a little luck and a whole lot of trial-and-error. It was probably the most stressed I’ve ever gotten playing a video game. I wasn’t exactly sure why until it finally dawned on me: The multiple-choice conversation, with its fine line between success and failure, reminded me of navigating social situations in real life. This part of the game essentially simulates what it’s like to be neuroatypical, or at least the gut-wrenching confusion that arises when you aren’t sure of the “right” thing to say and choosing the “wrong” thing feels like a catastrophe. In the end, all you can do is try to do a little better the next time around.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is full of little moments like this, mixed media distractions from the bloodshed that seem pointless before eventually taking on a greater meaning. They aren’t specifically built to tickle consumers’ dopamine pathways. They won’t always hit you the same way—or at all—but allowing Romeo to wash over you rather than trying to package its complexities in a neat little box will let you walk away with at least one thing to appreciate. Suda51 and the team he’s gathered at Grasshopper Manufacture continues to put out games that function both as entertaining distractions from the pressures of reality and thought-provoking art installations. It’s almost like having your cake and eating it too.