Romeo is a Dead Man’s most beguiling spectacle is its astral fish tank menu

Romeo is a Dead Man, Grasshopper Manufacture’s eccentric new hack ‘n’ slash, is out today. I quite like it. I especially like its main menu screen, a strangely hypnotic fish tank in which captive planets float alongside a coral ballet trophy, and the menu’s text strings try to escape when you’re not looking. There is, precisely, one fish.

Using boring old words to capture the ethereal atmosphere of this screen, which is something like a halfway-lucid dream of visiting Brighton Sea Life after a hearty dinner of paint, may be difficult. The fish, for instance, has transcended the need to swim, instead disintegrating and reforming itself around different corners of the tank. Sometimes, it’ll arrange itself right up against the glass, a single, ink-black fisheye staring out at the confused human before it, as if to ask why you’re not playing the science fiction action game you bought.

The planets and the dancing coral keep a lower profile, not counting how the close grouping of the former would wipe them clean of sapient life through gravity-induced ecological disasters. But the menu text waits for mere seconds before it, too, begins breaking apart into pixelly atoms, any option not currently selected taking advantage of your disinterest to spread itself like star dust across the underwater cosmos. Press something, and they do snap back into selectable form, but this obedience only lasts for a few more moments before they scatter once more, filling the tank in a glittering, slow-motion fontsplosion. All the while, a procession of J-Rap verses play in a loop, their aggression blunted by the airy synths that otherwise score the experience.

Unlike a lot of memorable main menus, Romeo is a Dead Man’s aquarium lacks any kind of interactivity – there’s no pulling on noses or dragging of eyeballs. If anything, it’s reliant on you keeping your hands off, lest the dissipated text return to the humdrum functionality of being a menu. Even so, I’ve repeatedly found myself lingering on this screen, following the travels of the teleporting fish and watching individual word-particles drift into empty water.

Maybe because with studying, comes understanding; the boxed-up galaxy and “Half a Person” embossing make sense in relation to Dead Man’s multiverse plot and cyborg hero, but what’s the deal with the fish? Does it even have one? I must know, and thus, I must stare.