Hands on with Romeo is a Dead Man

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

It’s a story as old as time, boy meets girl, girl convinces boy to run away from it all with her, boy gets killed by a timespace monster, boy gets turned into put on life support as a half living, half dead man…oh and the girl might be the nexus of unraveling time and space. That’s the tried and true premise of Grasshopper Manufacture’s upcoming title Romeo is a Dead Man. Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff’s deputy in the quiet town of Deadford, Pennsylvania finds a young woman named Juliet Dendrobium lying on the road. The two get to know each other, and just as they make plans for the future, Romeo is attacked by a mysterious beast known as the White Devil. On the cusp of death, Romeo’s grandfather Professor Benjamin (who feels like a Doc Brown…or if you want to get more recent, Rick Sanchez pastiche) saves his grandson with the use of the DeadGear Life Support system, turning him into…a Dead Man. With a new lease on life Romeo joins the FBI’s Space-Time Division to fight off threats.

Tools of a Space-Time Agent

I’m not going to summarize the gameplay since it’s literally the first hours of the title, so I’ll let you experience it yourself. I will however go through the game’s combat mechanics. Romeo fends off those who hinder his mission with the weapons which are stored in the DeadBall (Which surprisingly looks like Kamen Rider Zeztz’s Capsems). You’ll start off with Spazer, a Katana/Chainsaw hybrid that’s looks cool as hell, however those who have been following the studios’ GhM Direct 30 Seconds video series will know in time you’ll unlock other melee weapons such as heavy broad sword “Star Destroyer”, gauntlets “Juggernaut” and the split spear “Arcadia”, giving you plenty of options to draw blood. Drawing blood will be a crucial part of gameplay as you fill up a gauge on the left side of your screen, you will be able to perform Blood Summer, an extremely strong attack which not only deals heavy damage, but will heal Romeo as well!

You’ll have two levels of melee attacks, weak and strong and using different button combinations will enable you to make short work of “rotters” which are the fodder enemies of the game. However you will come across stronger enemies that sport an eerily azure bloom, yes, you can use your melee weapon to bring them down, but why not focus your attacks on that otherworldly flower to do MASSIVE DAMAGE! Thus Romeo can unholster his sidearm and blast away. Like your melee options, you’ll start off with the pistol “Discovery” and as you play you’ll earn shotgun-ese “Diaspora”, sub-machine-like “Nebuchadnezzar” and if you want to go heavy, the shoulder mounted cannon “Yggdrasil”. 

Fieldwork makes the dream work!

As you are out and about hunting time space criminals, you’ll have face down hoards of enemies and sometimes they will get the best of you. When you just haven’t drawn enough blood to perform the restorative Bloody Summer attack, you can get some sizable health recovery by ingesting a Regenetizer, think Estus flasks…from souls-like games. Speaking of souls-likes if you run into a cross-like construct made of three tvs, that’s just a Space-Time Pharmacy and it’s absolutely not an analog to bonfires, even though it’ll recover your Regenetizers, lets you upgrade weapons, allow you teleport back to your base…and oh it’ll repopulate the area with enemies.

During your travels, you might find yourself at a dead end in real space…thankfully you can enter sub-space via a Nirvana TV. In sub-space you will likely find a way to bypass the blockades which hinder your progress in real space…as long as you don’t get lost in its blocky maze.

You’ll find yourself close to the target when you locate a Klista Gate. This mossy-colored pixelated construct when unlocked will lead you to your quarry. In the segments we were able to experience, these encounters usually involve a gigantic grotesque monstrosity. While I’m never going to complain about being an underdog, I will have to say that given your opponent’s size and how close the camera keeps your character, it makes it really hard to see your enemies attacks which will lead to some health loss and a death or two. Thankfully on difficulties the lower difficulties White Chocolate and Milk Chocolate, continuing will let you spin a wheel which will grant you a temporary buff which could be increased attack or increase bloodletting. Once Romeo destroys this time-space anomaly, obtaining a chunk of Star Omega, he can return the Space-Time Division’s flagship, Last Night.

First Night on the Last Night.

Unlike on the field, when you’re on the Last Night the visuals will become 2D and pixelated. The ship will contain members of the Space-Time Division, a man named Deputy Director Kimberley, but before you think that’s as weird name, all the other agents of the division have names that usually have a color incorporated into it such as BlueMountain, RedBrown, WorstPink, SilverSox, Shiroyabu (Shiro being Japanese for “white”), GreenRiver and TheBlack. Some of your family members also found their way onboard this law enforcement ship as your mom works in the galley and your sister Luna.

When you’re not in a briefing or traveling to your next destination, you can do all sorts of activities on the ship. Buy/Sell Supplies, Unlock or Enhance your weapons, cook up some curry which can be eaten in the field to give you positive effects and even raise some bastards which will aid you in combat. I unironically find myself enjoying a lot of the mini-games found on the ship, be it the timing based curry cooking game which will determine how effective the created item will be, to the “Rally-X” mini-game which has you spending Emerald Flowsion, the game’s currency to collect power ups for Romeo, and I definitely had a mild chuckle when I realized flying the ship to the next singularity was kind of like Kingdom Hearts’ Gummy Ship segments.

Keep Grasshopper Manufacture weird

While I can’t say I was always a Grasshopper Manufacture guy…I hopped on when No More Heroes came out, I can say I’ve never strayed from the company since. Romeo is a Dead Man definitely feels like something the studio created. From the outlandish look of Romeo, to the fact that your grandfather lives on as a patch on the back of your jacket, if any other studio pitched that to a publisher, they’d be laughed out of the meeting. Most of the gameplay feels good, but there’s some stuff I wish were better, but generally I had a good time playing the role of a Time-Space Cadet and I can’t wait til the game’s full release to earn that agent status. Let’s hope unlike the Shakespearean couple the game’s leading couple will have a better end than a double suicide.

Romeo is a Dead Man is set for release on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 on February 11th, 2026.