Suicide Guy Review: Happy Death Day

When it comes down to it, there are really just two kinds of people on the planet: those who think suicide is too taboo and you should never joke about it, and those of us who come from the camp that literally nothing is off-limits if it’s for the sake of humor. If you’re part of group one, I invite you to click the back button and peruse one of our other reviews or articles, because I can tell you now, this game is not for you. Now, if you’re still here I can only assume you are a sick individual who thinks death is a laughing matter and you’re my kind of people, so kudos to you. Today, we’ll be looking at the new indie puzzle-platformer, Suicide Guy.

If we’re being honest, I went into this game sight unseen and based on the title, I assumed it would revolve around finding a way to kill myself as soon as humanly possible, which in a way is true. I was left on a vacant rooftop to my own devices and since this game isn’t named “Find a quiet spot to take a nap,” I decided to take a flying leap off of the building and was treated with the visual of falling for a few hundred feet or so at a breakneck pace until the screen went to black, setting up what is this game’s version of a narrative. Our hero, the nameless, overweight, middle-aged fellow is breaking the fourth wall by seeing himself dozing in his chair just as his beer is falling. It is up to you to wake yourself up and save your tasty beverage before it hits the ground, thus explaining why he wants to kill himself, because everyone knows this is a surefire way to send you from dreamland to the land of the living real quick. The game bounces you back and forth between puzzles, which take place in various locations and involve using different creative means to end it all, and a restaurant, which works as a hub you can use to revisit past attempts and peruse the collectible statue of yourself that is hidden in each level as an incentive to replay the levels and explore the paths less traveled.

The courses are typically broken down into a few rooms that require you to explore and interact with the world, flipping switches, and collecting keys or other objects to reveal the path forward with very little direction and really encourages you to think outside of the box beyond the normal tools of depression to end your suffering. The simple puzzles don’t require much thought; the difficulty comes by means of execution, and I don’t mean executing yourself. At regular intervals I found items that need to be used, but the game is really unclear as to how to do so, leaving me pushing, spamming, and holding face buttons or moving the sticks about randomly just trying to get the game to function as it should. I would compare interacting with objects in this game to being stuck in a really bad VR port where you have to solve a Rubix cube, but you’re sitting too close to the TV, and the motion controllers don’t register your movements. Oh, and the item in question is sticking out of your chest, not your hands. That’s a thing here as well. This exact issue kept me wandering back and forth early into the adventure during a puzzle where I had to drag a large chest across a few rooms as I placed it on pressure plates to open the pathway forward. The problem here is that a slight difference in the floor was causing the box to get hung up on the transition between rooms. It was only after a half-hour of wandering around, scouring each corner of the map that I decided to try for what felt like the hundredth time to move the box through only to be successful with little to no effort. At this point, I was asking my wife to shoot me because I didn’t have the energy to go forth.

Platforming makes up the bulk of the non-object based gameplay, as your pudgy avatar is a lot more agile than his fatter than average frame lets on. As a general rule, platforming in the first person is rarely done right and this is no exception to the rule. Our fat hero has the ability to pull himself up if you hit the landing pad just right, but is really inconsistent on how close or high you need to be to land the jump. Simple jumps that Homer Simpson could make flawlessly on his way home from Moe’s prove to be a struggle that had me wanting to end it all in the real world on more than one occasion.

I wouldn’t say that the overall presentation makes up for the shortcomings found in the interactive areas, but the dark comedic tones definitely helped, at least enough for me to see it through the end. I loved the ingenuity that went into each means to an end, with a few outlandish ones that I didn’t see coming and believe me, I’ve been in so many horrible situations throughout my life that suicide almost felt like a welcome way out of, that I’ve come up with some real doozies. Throughout the short few hours I spent locked away in this gentleman’s mind, I was often laughing so hard I was crying, only to swing into a bi-polar state of mind as I was cursing everything in this world while trying to make it to my next death only to repeat the loop. It’s almost like someone built the groundwork for each death, animated them as quickly (and ugly as possible), and then built the mechanics around this framework and stamped it DONE before jumping out of a window to get out of their next Zoom call. If we’re being honest right now, calling it ugly is a disservice to ugly games, since this looks a lot like a mod from the N64 version of South Park.

You know those two groups I talked about in my introduction to this review? Well, there’s another group we’re going to segregate those of you who’ve made it this far into. Those who can enjoy broken games (Goat Simulator comes to mind) and those who can’t. This is a tedious adventure that has one lone light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s killing yourself, over and over and over again in some of the funniest and creative ways possible. If the idea of this is something that makes you even somewhat chuckle, I encourage you to pick up Suicide Guy. If you expect your video games to function like a tried and true video game, then I would skip this in favor of something a little more polished.

5 out of 10

Pros

  • Some Hilarious/Devious/Creative Means to Killing Your Digital Self
  • A Decent Variety of Locations and Themes
  • Super Cheap

Cons

  • Pretty Much Everything Else
  • This is a Broken Game Carried by its Dark Humor

Suicide Guy was developed by Fabio Ferrara and was published by Chubby Pixel. The game is available on NS, PC and PS4. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Suicide Guy, check out the official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.

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