Developer: Fabio Ferrara
Publisher: Chubby Pixel
Platform: PC, PS4, Switch
Tested on: Switch
Suicide Guy – Review
Living with a low wage paying job can be hard. The long hours, limited opportunities, and hard labor can really break a man. Point and case, Suicide Guy. Opening to your character on a chair, asleep and in front of a TV, the stereotype of a person in underemployment starts out extremely hard. Beer is strewn about, you’re chubby, and asleep with a bottle in your hand. You wake up, wanting to die, and because this is a dream, it of course will come true, but with a twist.
Story
As stated before, you wake up at home, with lots of visual stereotypical storytelling. Beer bottle in hand and a rotund, doughnut-filled tummy, you drift off asleep again. Waking up, you find yourself on the roof of a high building, which you find yourself falling off of. Waking up from your dream again and falling back asleep, you now find yourself in a chef position in a restaurant. On the screens in the restaurant you notice your beer falling over and it is now your task to wake up one final time before it spills. How do you do this? By killing yourself of course! There is not a lot more to the game’s story, however, besides that each individual level has some small storytelling features, such as abandoned saw mills and trains traveling through vast, empty deserts.
Graphics
The minimalism helps the game with making the puzzles easy to understand. It is highly stylized and with its smooth surfaces you can clearly see the differences between walls, pillars and other objects. It does leave a little bit to be desired though, on the one hand it makes it really clear what you’re doing, but then on the other hand it sometimes makes stuff look a little weird. Things like boulders used to press switches and crates used as climbable objects, look cartoonish in nature. They’re not necessarily out of place, they just look somewhat off. You’ll never see any graphic violence when you play the game, there is no blood or kill cams when you eventually die, it just cuts to black and then loads the hub world restaurant again. Some minor exploration of the restaurant hub is rewarded, with a giant life-sized beer bottle staring you down from the other end of the street and edible burgers in the display among other things.
Sound
The game has the option to turn off the music per level, by ‘using’ the radio you find in certain places in the game. As you leave the vicinity of the radio, you’ll also lose the background music. This feels rather appropriate and interestingly (un)comfortable, but that also means you’re only listening to the sounds of your own footsteps, any machines and the likes you run up against in your quest to wake up. The lack of music does however underscore the point of the game, it makes the deaths hit home harder and puts a satisfying point to the end of a level, with a loud crack, smack, bang, or whimper when you die.
Gameplay
Suicide Guy is a puzzle game with light platforming elements. Your job is to wake up by means of killing your character repeatedly, because as we all know, if you die in your dreams, you die in real li… erhm, never mind. Apparently dying makes you wake up, (sometimes). Each puzzle gives you a different funny way of killing yourself, ranging from simple things like flinging yourself off of buildings or getting run over by a train, to throwing a rock to get flattened by industrial machinery and flying your abandoned alien spaceship into the heart of a star. Every of the game’s 40 levels has a different theme and other manners of killing the player. The restaurant you wake up in after the ‘tutorial’ also serves as the hub world for the different levels. Each table has an object on it that, when touched, becomes the portal to the next puzzle.
Conclusion
The concept of the game is pretty funny, but due to the aesthetic choices of the game and the involvement of some of the puzzles, the game may become a drag to players. It is a good amount of fun if you play it in short bursts but it can burn some players out a little fast if played too quickly. That being said, for as silly as the concept of the game is, the puzzles are quite hard in some instances. The direct gameplay isn’t difficult or anything and there is enough telegraphing of what you need to do, but it luckily doesn’t hold hands either. Suicide guy is a title that is fun to pick up for a couple of bucks when you have the time for it, but is safe to skip if you don’t.
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