Have you ever had a dream where your subconscious was desperately trying to tell you something and the only way you could wake yourself up was to kill yourself in your dream? What? You haven’t? It’s certainly something that myself and the protagonist of Suicide Guy developed by Fabio Ferrara and published by Chubby Pixel get absolutely all the time.
Firstly, and I think it’s very important to say this. Suicide Guy is not a game that in any way makes light of mental illness. Suicide Guy does not show any elements of unhappiness or depression. So, that aside, lets’ take a look at the game itself.
Firstly, what is it?
Suicide Guy is a 3rd person puzzle game where it is your job to wake up the cuddle and lovable main character from his dreams. The only way to do this is to kill yourself within in your dream.
There’s no real storyline to speak off. The game starts with a very sleepy looking guy on a couch. When he drifts off to sleep, you’re put on the top of a building with nothing else to do except throw yourself off it. This wakes you up and life continues, at least temporarily.
Your eyes start to droop again, and as you drop off to sleep again your fingers release their grip on the beer you’re holding. In the dream you end up in somewhere that looks like a cafeteria, with TV’s showing a frozen image of the impending beer bottle drop. The only way to save your beer is to visit 25 different scenarios and ‘wake up’.
As you play the game itself, you get a 3rd person perspective of the sleeping hero. His arms and if you look down, his beer belly and his feet. You can pick up objects, stack, push, and use things. This is all in the name of ending your subconscious dreamlike state.
For example, one of the easier earlier levels has you stuck on a toy train traveling round a circular track. SPOILER: By pulling a lever , you open a hatch to the roof, once up there you can jump off the train and then wait on the track for the train to ‘wake you’. In another level, you get spiked Indiana Jones style, or flown into the center of a sun. Each level looks and feels unique, and the methods by which you commit suicide ultimately ensure you think creatively. In fact sometimes, you don’t even know how you’re going to do it until you get to the end of the puzzle.
Despite, in fact because of the low polygon count and simplistic yet colourful graphics the game has a great cartoony, fun feel to it. Probably for the best because a video game with this concept, that ultimately deals with subconscious suicide, needs to be light and jovial to avoid just being dark and borderline offensive. Graphically you’re as far away from this idea as you could be.
Suicide Guy’s difficulty level increases as you go. There are no steep learning curves. The first few levels as you might expect are tutorial style levels, where each level will add a new action to your repertoire, such as jumping, crouching, and using objects etc. Eventually there is a bit of a difficulty slope, but this is mostly due to the levels solutions become more complex rather than the actions required to complete the level becoming more difficult, though there is certainly some increase in difficulty.
As with a lot of puzzle games of this type, there might not be a huge amount of reasons to come back and play the game once you’ve done every puzzle. Of course, you may want to replay some of the more memorable or enjoyable puzzles but the outcome of the game remains the same.
Jim Franklin is a freelance writer, living in Derby UK with his wife and his player 3. When time allows he likes nothing more than losing himself in a multi-hour gaming session. He likes most games and will play anything but prefers MMO's, and sandbox RPG's.
