Criticizing any Suda51 game for not making sense is a dangerous business. Surrealist, deliberately bizarre narratives are the eccentric developer’s stock in trade. And Killer is Dead’s jumbled mishmash of vague globe-trotting assassination narrative, well-worn eclectic gameplay, and decidedly jarring neon aesthetic is too deliberately incoherent – studiously so, even – for mere accident.
Making this little sense takes effort. And deliberately thumbing one’s nose at artistic conventions has a long and proud tradition in other mediums. Killer is Dead, like several other entries in Suda51’s oeuvre, invokes absurdist artistic movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism in its casual disregard for verisimilitude and its bizarre, almost tauntingly self-aware attitude.
Unfortunately given these high ambitions, KiD only mimics absurdist forms. Its shallow deconstruction fails to compensate for average game-play, forgettable cast, uncomfortable sexism and a completely incoherent narrative. Killer is Dead is a testament to literary techniques not always surviving the transition between mediums.
It’s the unspecified future, and faced with an epidemic of killers and monsters spawned by evil energies radiating from the Moon (just go with it), the nebulous “government” has turned to state-sanctioned assassination for hire. Enter Mondo Zappa, katana-wielding prettyboy in a nice suit, an up-and-coming assassin for Bryan Execution Services who woke up one morning with a prosthetic arm and decided to start killing for a living. Because, well, why not, right?
No, none of this makes a great deal of sense. In fact, it starts out nonsensical and every additional tidbit of not-exposition just makes it even clearer Killer is Dead is deliberately eschewing sense. “What are you doing?” asks Mondo of a villain garbed in little more than wire and busily clipping his nails. “Isn’t it obvious?” the antagonist replies. “I’m acquiring unlimited power!” As if this was the most natural thing in the world – and with a complete lack of either low-key sincerity or glorious melodrama.
So goes the plot: a disconnected series of canned dialogue spouted by one-dimensional cardboard cutouts – the biker chick, the badass black dude, the shrill-voiced faux-cutesy Japanese schoolgirl sidekick – often seemingly drawn from completely unrelated stories. Here, a woman in a surreal Alice in Wonderland house who turns into a horrifying human centipede; there, a record magnate steals a woman’s ears (in a purely metaphorical sense) and speaks only in static.
Next your biker chick character (defined solely by her low neckline and stern attitude) suddenly produces seven pairs of arms with their own pistols. Then your boss fuses his cybernetic body to a turret. There your protagonist sets out to battle a giant who has supposedly stolen the Earth…while standing on the Earth, except it turns out that your employer was actually an alien? Suddenly, you’re assigned to kill a locomotive. Magical realism, in a nutshell, but in service to what?
Because nowhere are there concrete motivations, goals, or character arcs. Things just…sort of happen. Killer is Dead is all too often a collection of non sequiturs.
Grasshopper and Suda51 have a track record that rules out the immediate explanation of simple incompetence. Like their body of work or hate it, this sort of thing is their stock in trade. Like the classical Surrealists they present worlds that shun both our logical expectations and those based in genre tropes. Their protagonists are simultaneously self-aware of, and slavishly devoted to, the fairly one-dimensional stereotypes they embody. They wink knowingly at their irrational worlds, quip about cliché, and gallivant from one dream-world to the next.
Historic Surrealism and Dadaism chose their absurdist methods as an act of protest against stifling philosophical, artistic and political institutions. (One of several reasons they’re so controversial.) But it’s difficult to see the act of protest in Killer is Dead. Outside of its incoherent magical-realism tropes it steadfastly refuses to toy with the conventions of its genre or its medium.
The cel-shaded vistas of KiD settle someplace between “hallucinogenic” and “jaundiced.” At times, I found myself almost nauseous at the bizarre interplay of neon lighting and boldly delineated models. The user interface is simultaneously minimalist and invasive, but also confusing and not terribly informative.
Game-play is competent, but unremarkable. Mondo hacks and slashes his way through lurching neon foes, armed with a katana, a guard-breaking punch, and a set of forgettable and largely superfluous secondary weapons. Although there are various sword combos simple button-mashing will suffice for the most part; none of your foes are terribly bright, and the basic attack routine will send most of them off.
It all feels very rote – not only are none of the core mechanics overly explored, but it’s difficult to say what the central hook of the game is. At no point does the game come together and really sell its battle system; there are no fist-punching boss battles, particularly cunning foes, or memorable setpieces. Nor is there any sort of mechanical “theme” to Killer is Dead, no star feature that stands out and compels you to play. By and large, if you’ve seen any other hack-and-slash title, you already know 90% of what KiD does.
The remaining 10% is where KiD turns from merely forgettable to sleazy. As Suda51 said, KiD is a story of “love and execution” – and so far we’ve only mentioned the execution part. Might you be expecting some passionate narrative of a globe-trotting assassin and the loves of his life? A connective strand of romance between the drunken lurching from mission to mission? Prepare to be disappointed.
Killer is Dead’s “love” component comes in its Gigolo Missions, whose name tells you precisely how much romance is involved therein. Between assassination contracts, Mondo can pick up ladies around the world from bars and restaurants, who will occasionally harass him mid-mission. Mondo has a peculiar form of courtship; rather than talk, dance, or even try out pick-up lines to amuse her, he ogles the beauty in silence while she recites romantic non-sequiturs like a shapely parrot until his brain has enough blood to work out offering her a present.
It’s even worse than it sounds. Not only does this effectively mean staring at a cel-shaded woman whenever she’s not looking, zooming in anywhere but meeting her eyes, you have to do it multiple times because the poor girl is going to get her pound of flesh for putting up with this tongue-tied loser. And this, it must be said, is the sole way that the game offers new sub-weapons.
Ironically, for all of its creators’ absurdist intentions, Killer is Dead is a distressingly mundane game largely devoid of intellectual or technical surprises. Merely irrational or surreal game environments and disconnected plots are older than Super Mario Bros. Its garden-variety hack-and-slash mechanics only evoke other, better sword-and-gun titles, and killing berserk zombies is pretty much the sole activity almost every work of fiction agrees is virtuous and heroic. And its sexist excuse for “love” and romance is the sort of clumsy titillation endemic in modern media: too tame to really push outright into any depiction of casual sex as something healthy and mutual, yet so sleazy its entire notion of romantic activities consists of ogling and bribery with gifts.
Killer is Dead mimics greater works but fails to carve its own creative vision – and yet it also fails as a conventional follow-the-leader game. Though it proudly wears its Surrealist and Dadaist sentiments, it looks only at the bizarre surface and not the context that binds together seemingly disconnected or absurd works. Its feigned incompetence, absent the deconstruction intrinsic to Surrealist works, is difficult to discern from sincere incompetence.
It’s memorable only in how clearly it demonstrates that artistic concepts and themes found in other mediums must often be adapted and reinvented when utilized in games.