Suicide Guy review

Reviewed on: PS4

Do you like puzzles? Or, since we’re in Brazil, do you like solving riddles? Then give Suicide Guy a chance.

Suicide Guy is a first-person game where you control the protagonist (I’ll call him Joe Nobody, since he has no name) in the most varied dreams, and have to solve the riddles to make him wake up. As simple as that.

First impressions / Audio and visuals:

Let’s go, the game is first person, as already said above. The graphics are cartoonish and quite average, but they work well.
You only see Joe’s arms, and if you look down, you can see the card-player’s belly that he cultivated for long years.

The shadows Joe casts in the game are weird in some stages, but considering the game was made by two people, that can be overlooked, and it doesn’t get in the way of solving the riddles at all. There are also framerate drops on some screens, which get a bit annoying because of their frequency. Thankfully this doesn’t happen in every setting.

Story:

The strong point here is the motivation and the construction of the character, since Joe was half-drunk and falls asleep on his sofa. But then, in a big twist, he wakes up in a totally different place, and his only alternative for waking up and leaving that world is killing himself in his own dream.

After waking up, Joe sleeps again, only this time he wakes up inside a diner, and sees an alert message on the establishment’s TVs, showing himself falling asleep and letting a beer bottle slip from his hand. The video on the TV freezes right at the moment the bottle slips from the sleeping Joe’s hand.

Obviously you will rush to solve all the riddles as fast as possible to avoid this gigantic disaster, making Joe wake up and grab the beer bottle before it falls to the ground. During the missions, there is no kind of story or anything like that, just complete the riddle and move on to the next.

Mechanics:

Suicide Guy uses the square button as the action button, and the circle button as the grab button. Holding this button you will throw the object you are holding, if it isn’t too heavy. The X button triggers the jump, and with these functions you will solve all the game’s riddles.

The diner works like a Lobby, with each table in the place giving access to a riddle. The tables are numbered and you can’t move on to the next riddle before solving the previous one. There is a statue of Joe hidden in each setting, which is an extra challenge for completing the game, but it is entirely optional.

Each table/puzzle is a world totally different from the previous one, and there are several tributes to famous games: there is one based on Super Mario, on Portal, on Fez, one from Moby Dick that is very reminiscent of the start of BioShock, and several others.

There are some bugs in some settings, especially when it involves placing one object on top of another. In one of them, one of the boxes simply flew off and vanished. And that happened more than once. In my case, I no longer needed one of them and managed to finish the stage fine. But there were cases where it was necessary to restart the stage. It’s frustrating when that happens.

In the last dream, there is a kind of Boss Battle, which, although quite simple, adds a touch of novelty to what you found during the rest of the game.

Conclusion:

If you like puzzle/riddle games, I believe you will like this one too. The game’s price is low, and the game entertains you despite being short and having some bugs.

Honestly I found Suicide Guy short; the game has 24 riddles plus one extra, which appears after completing the game. But most are quite easy, and only a few riddles proved harder to solve, though nothing absurd.

If you take it seriously, I believe you can finish it in about 4 or 5 hours with no trouble. If you are some kind of genius, you will finish even faster. For trophy hunters, the game is quite easy to platinum.

On the Brazilian PSN, the game is being sold for R$ 24.50, and has been available since February 22.

Story: 6

Audio and visuals: 7

Mechanics: 7

Final score: 6.5

The version reviewed was the PlayStation 4 one.