Suicide Guy Review (PS4)

While the objective in most games is to stay alive, Suicide Guy tasks you with terminating your beer bloated existence. Chubby Pixel’s first-person puzzle platformer could have been vulgar, but there’s enough irreverent humour in this bizarre sequence of bonkers vignettes to make its dark premise work. Still, while it’s not a complete disaster, it never really sets the world alight either.

The plot went right over our heads. You play as a middle-aged nobody in a stained shirt, sipping beer and gobbling down donuts. When you drop your beverage you’re whisked away to a fast food restaurant filled with various suicide missions. Your task is to die 24 times in order to… Save your alcoholic swill? There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but we didn’t care to find it.

Things start out relatively straight forward on a railway track, where you must sprint into an oncoming train in order to smash your worthless ass into smithereens. It’s dark stuff, but the title quickly locates its funny bone and begins taking the piss. One stage sees you performing a satanic ritual in a suburban church in order to summon the devil who’s only too happy to lop off your pathetic head.

The game plays a little like Mirror’s Edge without DICE’s attention to detail, as you sprint through the colourful environments, leaping on platforms and sloppily climbing up ledges. The stages play out like mini-puzzles, with switches that need to be pressed and objects that need to be aligned in order to successfully end your life. To be honest, some of the solutions are quite cunning.

Once you know the answers, you’ll be able to beat the levels in mere seconds, but figuring everything out first time is part of the fun. One magical world sees you brewing a concoction of animals in a cauldron, and then drinking the diabolical dregs. In another you’ll need to use an alarm clock to wake a dragon, who’ll subsequently breathe fire in your pathetic face and burn you to a crisp.

It’s quite a sloppy title, and you can almost see the lines of code making everything work. But each stage is totally unique, and it can be quite a novelty seeing what’s next. As such, you’ll probably work your way through the three to four hour campaign just to see all of the craziness that the title has in store. A slick framerate and bold artstyle means that it looks better than it probably should, too.

Ultimately, though, the release does feel quite disposable. There are some clever ideas here, and it’s random enough to hold your attention – but despite its sense of humour, it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to live long in the memory. And while it is very flippant about the suicide stuff, we’re still not sure it’s quite in taste to be honest. Your mileage may vary on that front.