Suicide Guy

If you spend any amount of time following the games I cover, then you may remember a title I reviewed a few weeks back called A Collection of Bad Moments. It was basically an escape room simulator where you had to puzzle your way out of a bunch of sticky situations. Suicide Guy from Italian-based developer Chubby Pixel is the complete opposite. Instead of getting yourself out of sticky situations, the goal here is to puzzle your way into death. It's a theme that is every bit as morbid as it is clever, but does it make for a fun puzzle game?

Before you get the idea that this is some gruesome horror game, Suicide Guy is actually a light-hearted romp through a bunch of silly scenarios. You play a schlubby Homer Simpson type that drinks beer, eats donuts and watches TV. The adventure begins when he realizes that he has fallen asleep and is about to drop his beer. With the fear of missing out on the rest of the delicious brew, he sets out to wake up by purposely killing himself in two dozen imaginative stages.

Instead of simply being able to jump off a building or get run over by a car, you'll usually need to complete a bunch of steps in order to trigger the deadly trap and move on to the next stage. For example, you can't just ram the zeppelin into the side of a building, you first need to run into a flock of birds, liberate the few that have pierced the balloon and then steer the craft into the city now that you've reduced the elevation. Simple.

The 25 stages will have us trying to wake up a sleeping dragon, working overtime to start a nuclear war, getting smooshed by a car crusher, running a spaceship into the sun and getting run over by a speeding train. A lot of the puzzles are tongue in cheek, such as video game-inspired stages based on both Portal and Super Mario Bros. If nothing else, the developers should be commended for loading the game with an impressive variety of stages and puzzles. All the locations look completely different, to the point where I couldn't wait to see what goofy scenario they would toss me into next.

If the unpredictability is Suicide Guy's biggest strength, then its weakness has to be the awful controls. At best, they get the job done. You would think that since the puzzles usually revolve around picking up and using items that the gameplay might not be that big of a deal, but that's wrong. There are a lot of puzzles that require precise 3D platforming, something that is made difficult by the unresponsive controls. There's just enough of a lag to the gameplay that I found myself constantly falling off of platforms when I should have been jumping. This may only impact a third of the stages, but it's enough to sour the experience.

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I was also frustrated by how busted some of the stages are. There were a bunch of times when I had to start a puzzle over because I misplaced an important item. Sometimes the stage will literally gobble up an item, especially the floating boxes that can be placed just about anywhere. I made these boxes disappear at least a half dozen times, probably more. Couple that with the occasional crash and you're left with a somewhat rocky adventure.

While these problems would normally make a game hard to recommend, I found that my complaints were largely overshadowed by both the theme and variety. The idea of offing yourself in dozens of ways may sound morbid, but it proves to be a killer concept that is rife with possibilities. I liked its goofy sense of humor and probably could have played another 25 stage without batting an eye.

Don't let the title fool you, there's nothing dreary or depressing about Suicide Guy. This is an ingenious little puzzle game with bite-sized stages that are constantly changing. It's not particularly hard and I have some issues with the gameplay, but this brand new game from Chubby Pixel more than delivers on variety and humor. It's to die for, but only in your dreams.