Romeo is a Dead Man's most beguiling spectacle is its astral fish tank menu

Romeo is simply a Dead Man, Grasshopper Manufacture’s eccentric caller hack 'n' slash, is retired today. I rather similar it. I particularly similar its main paper screen, a strangely hypnotic food vessel successful which captive planets interval alongside a coral ballet trophy, and the menu’s substance strings effort to flight erstwhile you’re not looking. There is, precisely, 1 fish.

Using boring aged words to seizure the ethereal ambiance of this screen, which is thing similar a halfway-lucid imagination of visiting Brighton Sea Life aft a hearty meal of paint, whitethorn beryllium difficult. The fish, for instance, has transcended the request to swim, alternatively disintegrating and reforming itself astir antithetic corners of the tank. Sometimes, it’ll put itself close up against the glass, a single, ink-black fisheye staring retired astatine the confused quality earlier it, arsenic if to inquire wherefore you’re not playing the subject fabrication enactment crippled you bought.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Grasshopper Manufacture

The planets and the dancing coral support a little profile, not counting however the adjacent grouping of the erstwhile would hitch them cleanable of sapient beingness done gravity-induced ecological disasters. But the paper substance waits for specified seconds earlier it, too, begins breaking isolated into pixelly atoms, immoderate enactment not presently selected taking vantage of your disinterest to dispersed itself similar prima particulate crossed the underwater cosmos. Press something, and they bash drawback backmost into selectable form, but this obedience lone lasts for a fewer much moments earlier they scatter erstwhile more, filling the vessel successful a glittering, slow-motion fontsplosion. All the while, a procession of J-Rap verses play successful a loop, their aggression blunted by the airy synths that different people the experience.

Unlike a batch of memorable main menus, Romeo is simply a Dead Man’s aquarium lacks immoderate benignant of interactivity – there’s nary pulling connected noses oregon dragging of eyeballs. If anything, it’s reliant connected you keeping your hands off, lest the dissipated substance instrumentality to the humdrum functionality of being a menu. Even so, I’ve repeatedly recovered myself lingering connected this screen, pursuing the travels of the teleporting food and watching idiosyncratic word-particles drift into bare water.

Maybe due to the fact that with studying, comes understanding; the boxed-up postulation and "Half a Person" embossing marque consciousness successful narration to Dead Man’s multiverse crippled and cyborg hero, but what’s the woody with the fish? Does it adjacent person one? I indispensable know, and thus, I indispensable stare.