Romeo is a Dead Man - Creativity isn’t Quite Dead, Man
During two months in the early ‘90s, Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai took a hiatus from filming Ashes of Time, a sword-swinging epic for which the production just seemed to keep on dragging out. During this time, he made the entirety of Chungking Express, which is very possibly his definitive work and likely the reason I know who he is at all. The story was written in one day. The actual script wasn’t even completed when filming began.
I don’t know if I can properly express how easily that film got under my skin when I was exposed to it during the middle of my university studies. That was back in 2004. Rockstar Games would release three games before the fireworks exploded over Sydney Harbour to usher in the decade’s latter half.
*ahem*
This was supposed to be a review of (the Steam release of) the latest game from Grasshopper Manufacture, Romeo is a Dead Man. There are reasons why it isn’t. One stands on the shoulders of all the others, though: sometimes the game would just hitch up, dropping frames at first, then gradually lurching into full multi-second pauses that would render it basically unplayable. Rebooting didn’t seem to help. I don’t know what the cause is, but searching around since the release, it seems that all sorts of performance issues are popping up, both on PC and console.
This sucks. Not because Dead Man is a contender for the greatest game of the year (it isn’t), but because it’s the kind of thing that I wish we saw a whole lot more of. Even if it sucked (it doesn’t), it would still be a thing that I would like more of. It brings back memories of a worse time that was also a better time.
Romeo is a Dead Man is a creative swing, and it’s one that’s easy to pinpoint in no small part because it has Suda51’s name attached to it. Suda has been active in game development since the early ‘90s, but (in the West, at least), he is viewed somewhat as bursting onto the scene with 2005’s Killer 7, a heavily stylised and unconventional late-era release for the Gamecube and PlayStation 2. Since then, he’s been known for games (inclusive of No More Heroes, Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, among others) that are irreverent, experimental and just kind of weird. Creative swings are basically what he does.
But perhaps I’m steering down the wrong lane a bit. It’s not the aura of bizarre that surrounds Suda’s work that I want to get at here; it’s that his work is creative. It’s creative in the sense of madcap ideas exploding all across the game design, certainly, but it’s also creative in that his games are often limited in scope, but don’t feel it. In other words, his work is also creative in the boring way that an accountant might use the word. Nobody’s going to give him Grand Theft Auto money, but he’s going to find ways to do what he does with what resources he does have to work with.
It should be noted that Grasshopper’s output is anything but boring. Frustrating, certainly, but not boring. It always finds ways to stand out, either by the apparent insanity of the presentation, madcap mechanics, or a mixing of columns A and B. It’s… oddly nostalgic at times.
What follows may seem a bit ironic considering that, as per this not being a review, Romeo is a Dead Man clearly has significant issues with optimisation, but nonetheless…
We’ve reached a point in gaming where just about anything a developer might imagine could be achievable, so long as enough money gets thrown at the problem. The graphics card that powers the PC I was playing Romeo on has 16GB of Video Ram. Take a moment to compare that to the aforementioned Gamecube and PlayStation 2 hardware mentioned above, where such things were still measured in megabytes. There is just an insane amount of processing power on tap these days, something that has led to diminishing generational returns. There are still areas to push forward in (yes, path tracing can be quite transformational), but compromises are borderline microscopic compared to what they used to be.
The main issues today are the classics of modern society: time and money*.
It’s hard to express to people, even just a generation younger than myself, just how wildly powerful the PlayStation 2 seemed when it was first unveiled. Shiny eyes! Shiny abs! Shiny… everything, really (skin rendering apparently still had a ways to go). Still, that original long-form trailer for Metal Gear Solid 2 caused people to stop in their tracks, such was the impact of the spectacle on show, the gulf between it and the previous game released well under a half-decade before. But the hardware still had huge limitations; compromises had to be made, and often this forced creative solutions that led to fun new ideas. More reasonable production costs allowed a whole tier of games that we retroactively refer to as Single-A to flourish. Ideas were thrown against the wall, and while this resulted in games that were frequently less refined, they were also more interesting. At its functional best, Romeo is a Dead Man reminded me of this.
I don’t know what kind of money Grasshopper had to work with, but I do know that Romeo sells for what could be thought of as a Single-A price, and I imagine that the development budget follows suit pretty closely. And yet, for all of its missing fine-tuning and extravagance, for all of what could be perceived as cut corners, Dead Man never feels like the gaming equivalent of the schlocky straight-to-VHS horror and sci-fi movies from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that it clearly draws inspiration from.
This isn’t despite wild stylistic swings and switches so much as it is because of them. Dead Man practically vomits ideas for how to present itself to the player. The most notable (or at least, easiest to point to) divide, though, is perhaps between the core action stages and the spaceship where Romeo frequently returns in between time-travelling missions. This entire location is rendered in chunky, top-down pixel-art and it likely saved a good sack of cash. Not just because the ship would be one more thing that needed 3D modelling, but because this is where the story happens, and by mixing up lower-fi styles (yes, plural), the team at Grasshopper has managed to sidestep the problems that come from staging story conversations without making them look cheap… ironically, because they probably actually are.
It’s only really the meat of Dead Man’s action gameplay, which takes place in what can really be thought of as dungeons set in differing decades, that makes full particle-obsessed use of Unreal Engine 5 to look like a solidly current-gen game, if not quite a cutting-edge one. The gameplay here feels meaty and substantial, but even then, the structure has a tricky way of using a more simple-looking backstage-of-sorts to both streamline travel between locked-off locations, and to mix things up, and as such make them a little more interesting in the process.
Do I care that the rendering of these areas is likely simpler? Heck no! As with numerous effects in the game, it looks cool, and so I’ll take it. It also happens to be a neat way to shuffle exploration progress. We really are at (or, perhaps, have returned to) a point where art should be influencing these things more than technical envelopes. There may be ground to make, but games no longer need to look better than they did a ballpark decade ago, lest they be ugly and dated.
Dead Man has its flaws, of course. Combat is fun at the base level, and there are some neat ways that players can call on (never mind quite literally cultivate) assistance, but it is here that I have to admit that inventiveness over refinement has its costs. Romeo leans into letting swings of swords and releasing of firearms take their time, often forcing players to stand around completely vulnerable for a moment, something that is at odds with encounter design that is frequently swamping and relentless, often takes place in narrow, enclosed spaces, and is in desperate want of a solid parry system. Buff items are too fiddly and specific for their own good, and weapons perhaps don’t feel distinct enough.
But still, I’m not really upset at the game design; I’m upset that the performance got so bad that I really couldn’t keep playing, because for all of the influences that it draws from, Romeo is a Dead Man comes across as unique and experimental. It makes clever choices to punch way above its weight, and it punches in directions that most games of scale these days wouldn’t dare dream of. Presently, we are swimming in a glut of titles that are absolutely massive in world and scale. In some ways, it’s all the more frustrating that a lot of them are highly refined and actually very good. It’s just that eventually these things begin to blur together; we’re fast approaching the point where Ubisoft turns its entire catalogue into the one, singular game.
Were this to actually be a proper review of Dead Man, it’d probably get stuck with that most purgatory-like of numbers – seven – on Metacritic, a symbol of my reviewer brain looking to divorce itself from my actual cravings. Because I’d sure as shit take it over a lot of titles that might earn a coveted five stars. After all, it is easier to do things well or right when, and a huge part of what appeals about Rome is a Dead Man is that, in myriad small ways, it acts like some game design problems haven’t been solved already and tries to rethink them, so of fucking course the end result isn’t fully nailed down.
There’s a lot of jank that I’ll forgive for reasons like this, just so long as you’re being creative. In much like how perfect is the enemy of good, scale may be the enemy of variety. Later this year, Rockstar may well deliver the biggest, most polishedmost-polished and (hugely-fucking-debatably) best open world game ever made, but GTA 6 will have been the studio’s first release since Red Dead Redemption 2 roughly eight years prior. I guess I’m happy for all of the people who are going to finally get to play something they’ve been anticipating for heaven knows how long, but it’s increasingly difficult for me not to be sad about what we could have instead.
Thank heavens, then, for a robust indie scene, however nebulously defined. Certain storefronts could do a lot more to become absolutely soaked in slop, but amid it all are plenty of excellent games from smaller developers that bless this hobby with desperately needed variety.
Romeo is a Dead Man walks that fine line where definitions of big and little fish begin to blur. But imagine if more games worked to a similar scale, used creative design ideas to flesh themselves out in such a ways as to compete with the monsters that AAA development now has to put out.
At least Grasshopper Manufacture is being given permission and resources to create.
Gaming has a rich history to draw from, despite its relative youth, and there may well be new ideas waiting to be mined and minted. It isn’t new to see bigger publishers mindlessly chase trends – that’s been going on for decades. What is new are the stakes and the time: where once a Doom clone took five months to develop, as I write this, Sony has just shuttered a whole damn studio that it bought back in 2001, that then fruitlessly chased Fortnite and ultimately never released a single game since being purchased.
Had somebody been able to get across the infuriating obviousness of how pointless trying to chase games-as-a-service would be, maybe we could have had a dozen new Romeo is a Dead Man’sMans to play. Some may not have proven successful, but I have to say this much: as much as its performance is an issue to the point where it affects playability for me, at least Rome is a Dead Man, actually fucking exists.
Not every release has to be a grow-rich or die poor gamble.
In 2008, Wong Kar-wai began earnest work on The Grandmaster, a drama based on the grandmaster Ip Man. It was released in the January of 2013. He has directed exactly one TV series and zero feature films since then.
Somebody should probably have suggested a two-month hiatus.
* At the time of writing and for the foreseeable future, an absolutely absurd amount of money. Thanks, A.I.
