REVIEW / SUICIDE GUY (PC)

• I think that we can all safely say that there is one major rule in gaming. With the exception of certain genres, most games boil down to durviving. Staying alive is a really important factor if you want to stand a chance of completing your goal. But what if a game turned this on its head, making your over-arching goal to die. Interested? Myself and my good friend Will Georgiadis certainly were. Interested enough to have a peek at Suicide Guy, a tongue-in-cheek action puzzler from developer Chubby Pixel, and tell you all about our adventure.

What do you do when you see this coming toward you ? Stay put of course !

• If I had to summarize Suicide Guy without referencing the game itself, I’d say this: just imagine a mix-tape of every time you got bored cruising the streets of Los Santos, the Mojave Wasteland, or any other suitably vast, open world. What happens when the ennui begins to seep into your gameplay? You take a helicopter up as high as you can, and then you jump, reveling in the mess that your character makes of the pavement below. You make a quick save, walk into Caesar’s Fort, and start hitting people with a sledgehammer until they retaliate.
• The small team assisting developer Fabio Ferrara must have realized that virtual suicide is an important part of any real videogame. As a result, Suicide Guy boasts a wonderfully unique premise; kill yourself, using anything and everything at your disposal. Oh, and before you begin hammering me for handling suicide in such a flippant manner, understand this: not one pixel of Suicide Guy promotes, advocates, or otherwise encourages actual self-harm of any sort.

• Your character is a bearded, beer-bellied couch potato. Asleep in front of the television, the game begins the moment his dreams begin to get a little crazy. Dimly aware that something terrible is about to happen in the real world, Suicide Guy’s dream-persona quickly learns that suicide is the only way to wake up (turns out, Christopher Nolan was right all along).
  Twenty-four different dreamscapes stand between you and your literal awakening. Each presents a more complex puzzle than the last. My absolute favorite was a thinly-veiled, legally-ambiguous knock-off of the world’s most famous cartoon family home. In fact, popular culture oozes from Suicide Guy‘s every pore, as it quite unashamedly mocks everything from Indiana Jones to the Portal game series. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, and will always prompt a few laughs, but I have to admit that the game excelled when it wasn’t trying to imitate someone else’s designs.

• Suicide Guy is lazily made. The mantle mechanics were simultaneously massively helpful and painfully infuriating; leaping from platform to platform was easy, whilst hopping up a foot-high step proved impossible. You’re able to manipulate many of the objects that populate each level, but woe betide anyone who accidentally pushes an object through a wall, or attempts to rotate a large object using your character as a pivot. The visual effects – streams of water, fire extinguisher foam – are laughable, as are the inaccessible, purely aesthetic game areas visible from the actual levels. Sure, Suicide Guy was made for a laugh, but these things are the bare necessities. Right?
• If I’m being honest, though, the simplicity did not detract from the enjoyably puzzling feel of the game. Suicide Guy is a puzzle game, and as such, each level is a brain-teaser designed to force you to think outside the box. The answers are not always clear, or indeed possible without bending the game’s physics a little; there is nothing quite like sinking your teeth into a good “how-to-kill-oneself” challenge, particularly when all you are offered is one square room, and a gun that looks suspiciously like it’s waxing lyrical about the cake being a lie.

You’ll be killing him a lot before he wakes up.

• Suicide Guy blends cartoon artwork with a pastel color palette to waylay any sense of the macabre. The levels are goofy, primitively drawn and rendered with a sickly-sweet glow. Sure, it’s a little basic, but I’ll forgive this sin for the simple reason that Firewatch set the community ablaze not so long ago with a similar aesthetic. The audio was equally goofy, taking its cues from the rip-off world around it and in some cases making John Williams grind his teeth in frustration. I loved the fact that each level contained a few red cassette players, playing the background music for the level in question. More to the point, I loved the fact that these little speakers were occasionally required to complete the level in question.
• It’s details like those, that push Suicide Guy from a shamelessly lazy knock-off to a tongue-in-cheek cartooned laugh. And though I may gripe and moan about the low quality and low effort feel of the game, there’s no denying that 24 levels later, I’m sitting here wondering if they’ll make another one. I enjoyed committing suicide, and would happily do it again.

Gameplay - 7/10
Plot - 6/10
Design - 4/10
5.7/10

http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2017/09/03/team-review-suicide-guy-pc/