Suicide Guy: Deluxe Edition Review
The first thing I had to set aside diving into Suicide Guy: Deluxe Edition was its unsavoury title. Past that, what awaits is a lukewarm first person puzzler where the main goal is offing our beer-guzzling main character to bring him out of his dream state before he spills his drink. Each level plays out like a cheeky cartoon gag, prodding you to find creative and funny ways to die. It’s essentially an escape room-like puzzle game that attempts to contrast its morbid undertones with cartoon-ish aesthetics and silly humor, although it does so with a blasé approach that’s fun for a short time but leaves no meaningful impression.
You start the game as a hefty bearded dude, beer in hand, sitting in front of his TV dozing off. Soon after, you find yourself dreaming and on top of a building. The only way to wake up from this bizarre world is to yeet yourself off the roof. A sloppy swill of beer later, our vest-clad hero nods off once more to awaken in a diner. A warning flashes across the diner’s TV alerting our dude that his beer has slipped out of his hand and will eventually fall to waste unless he escapes the diner and wakes up for real.
The diner represents a state of limbo for our protagonist and serves as the game’s main hub where you unlock levels in a linear way. Once you beat a level you can revisit as many times as you want or move on to the next one. You do this till you beat all levels after which, you can escape the diner to meet your end one final time and wake up in time to catch your beer. And that’s all there is to the game. How well it resonates with you will depend on how you connect with its sense of humour that ranges from dude jokes to goofy gags padded with light references to beloved games and pop culture favorites. My response was pretty tame, never rising past a sensible chuckle but I can see some people getting a kick out of the numerous quips the game offers.
Just be done with me already
To its credit, Suicide Guy (ugh, that name) does its best to keep things fresh across its 30 or so levels. Each level is its own little world: a themed sandbox varying in size and complexity where you can get up to all kinds of antics while trying to off yourself. To beat a level you need to explore and interact with objects till you find a way to die. More than the puzzles, I found myself looking forward to the quirky deaths that awaited me. You’ll get crushed, impaled, yeeted and electrocuted and all manners feel oddly satisfying – not something you can say about many games. Wherein most games you actively try to avoid a character’s death, here you find yourself rushing to meet your maker. Death screens are thankfully clipped to a black screen accompanied by an exaggerated sound effect that feels more funny than gruesome. Some levels seclude you in a small space, atop a lighthouse, for instance, while others are more expansive, with hidden areas requiring you to jump across platforms and maneuver through tunnels to uncover clues before making your way forward.
Puzzles are an uncomplicated affair, so you can keep your thinking cap tucked away. It’s a short romp too, taking around 2 hours to complete. Since there’s minimal interaction with objects – usually limited to push, pull and throw – it’s fairly intuitive to figure out what needs to be done. In that way, it’s a chill puzzle platformer. Some larger levels can get tricky with multiple objects sprawled around the vicinity, but never to a point where it gets frustrating.
These levels also let you fiddle with new objects like cars, Mario-like mushrooms and even a portal gun suggesting another layer to peel and figure out. Sadly, the underlying premise are similar throughout; larger levels just take more time to complete, which gets boring. The ragtag physics and floaty character movement don’t help in these instances and make simple interactions like stacking objects feel like a chore.
Awfully superficial
The deluxe edition brings some visual improvements for PC and next-gen consoles but this is my first time playing this game, so I can’t attest to said improvements. Though I will say there’s a pleasant offbeat charm to the game’s 3D cartoon aesthetic, and it’s polished enough to glance over some of its rough edges. I enjoyed the game’s wacky use of colour and shapes accompanied by amusing soundtracks that shifted with a level’s theme – from hilariously over-the-top dramatised scores to synth-ful bops.
There are cheeky references sprinkled across the game alluding to old favorites like Mario, Portal, The Simpsons, Ratatouille and more, but the game doesn’t really go anywhere with it. In fact, it doesn’t really go anywhere. There is an interesting premise in here and an opportunity to build upon our simple beer-guzzling belch-prone protagonist by giving him more than one dimension that we peel off one level at a time. I understand that sometimes a chill light-hearted romp is exactly what one might need. But even so, I like mine with a tad more substance, something this game hints at but never fully realises. It leaves a lot to be desired.
As distasteful as the title is, it doesn’t seem particularly triggering for most people. The game’s comical tone and frivolous approach stave off any potential triggers its gruesome title might suggest. When you approach the game as a virtual escape room, wherein every time your character dies, you get one step closer to the real world, the whole affair becomes more palatable. But without a potent narrative and puzzles that increase in complexity, Suicide Guy ultimately doesn’t offer anything new to the genre.