Romeo is a Dead Man review: Stayin’ Alive

The latest game from Grasshopper Manufacture and Suda51 is a pulse-pounding and polarizing experience that may skullfuck your preconceptions of the limits of video game narratives.

In order to understand how wild Romeo is a Dead Man gets, we need to understand the game’s narrative premise. We play as Romeo Stargazer, a young sheriff’s deputy from the town of Deadford, Pennsylvania. One night he’s out on patrol and meets a distressed woman on the road named Juliet, whom he helps and takes to get medical attention. Eventually the two start to fall in love, and yet after a few months the world is suddnely torn apart by a singularity. The inciting incident is Juliet; she turns out to be a strange phenomenon not of this world. Due to the singularity event the world is essentially dissolved and separated into chunks of different time periods existing alone in the vastness of space.

And that’s when things get really weird!

The stages of all the different places in time are based on Romeo’s home town spanning all the way back to the 60’s. Here, time and events exist all at the same moment. In one timeline, our Romeo is on that same patrol where he found Juliet but instead of it being his future love it’s instead a weird paranormal brute called the White Devil. In the course of the scene Romeo gets his face cut in half and arm chopped off, and his grandpa jumps out of the prime timeline and installs onto him the Dead Drive, a machine that the Space FBI needs to fight and kill other singularity anomalies in different pockets of time.

All of this is revealed in the first ten minutes of the game. The FIRST. TEN. MINUTES.

That shows how truly bonkers the game can get, and how it plays with our expectations every chance it can.

What makes Romeo is a Dead Man so inherently interesting and fun to play is that it is an always unfolding piece of art, a digital ephemeral piece of humanity where we can see the fingerprints of its creator throughout. Oh, and it’s also a video game so you can play with it too.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest for February 13, 2026.