Romeo Is a Dead Man, a time-traveling zombie save-the-world love story, teems with cultural references both low and high.
There is Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” with a “Back to the Future” twist. A parody cover of the Clash’s “London Calling” album. A scene that takes place in a version of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” diner.
The game becomes an animated graphic novel during cutscenes, and the cultural riffs are appealing. But they are so varied that I wondered if Romeo Is a Dead Man could maintain its own identity.
Romeo Stargazer is the unwitting hero who mourns the departure of his girlfriend, Juliet. As the game began, he died by zombie attack. When he was brought back to life by his wise grandfather, Romeo’s head was replaced by a high-tech helmet. In a wonderfully odd twist, the grandfather is present as a talking patch on Romeo’s jacket, and somehow thrives as a mentor and general know-it-all.
Juliet, who incidentally hates Shakespeare, is the antagonist, shape-shifting into various gross beings in different time periods. The ongoing question: Is Juliet herself the evil being, or is she being controlled by a mysterious force?
As Romeo prepares to fight, a fascinating mechanical device made me like my least favorite thing in games: crafting.
Killing the undead, which are called Rotters, gave me a zombie seed. Feeling part Dr. Frankenstein and part Luther Burbank, I planted it, grew it, fused it with another zombie and made it fight for me during battles. I gravitated toward a combination of “unfathomably kind” Maxen, who turns into a green tornado, and Cameron, who looks “skinny in clothes” and has a scream that dazes enemies.
Many things are not quite clear in Romeo Is a Dead Man. They’re not even clear to Romeo, whose personality is thin. I found notes along the way that tried to explain space-time malfunctions and evil that led to a dysfunctional universe. It wasn’t quite enough.
Romeo’s moniker, Dead Man, is a positive. Because he is dead, he has become more powerful. Government muckety-mucks notice, and Romeo gets a job with the interstellar F.B.I. He is able to time travel on its spaceship.
While the plot is peculiar and sometimes illogical, those who go with the flow will feel at home in Romeo’s world, even as zombie blood flows like a fractured water line. The monsters are thoughtfully imagined. Enhanced Magrus moves as fast as an insect and looks like a stegosaurus and armadillo made of woeful human skulls.
Navigation, however, can be confounding. A kind of compass with an exclamation mark is supposed to lead you to, say, a key to a door. That’s fine when only one floor needs to be explored. But when there are four, it gets confusing.
There isn’t much guidance from Romeo’s grandfather, either. He just tells you to go back to the spaceship, perhaps to a room where weapons can be made stronger.
Sometimes, I would travel to an alternate dimension called Subspace by reading strange philosophical text on a old-fashioned tube TV named J. Edgar. This world was full of undulating blocks and tiles. Steps led to a combination of lily pad-filled ponds, walls and ladders. As free jazz played, I felt like I was in a sort of limbo, recalling that Suda51, the game’s creator, has said his favorite author is Franz Kafka.
Going down more stairs, what looked like a mass of falling snow blocked my path. I pressed a button, which lifted me off the ground and placed me in a meditative state. I pressed more buttons, which put the mass into a circle. At this point I continued moving from the real to this dream state, fighting increasing numbers of Rotters in between.
Even at the game’s end, I was never completely certain what I was doing or why. But I still enjoyed the experience. Here, as David Lynch said, you can “drift and dream” through the universe.
Romeo Is a Dead Man was reviewed on the Xbox Series X|S. It is also available on the PC and PlayStation 5.
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