Suicider is a 2D Puzzle Platformer in where we play as a girl suffering from amnesia. She awakens next to a coffin and is eventually able to remember that her name is Tetra. After exploring her surroundings while reading up on any scattered notes she can find, Tetra comes to an eventual truth. In order to escape this underground prison, it is necessary for her to kill herself. With much fear and understandable hesitation, she finally decides to jump into a row of protruding spikes coming out of the ground. Once the anxiety and pain of death is over, Tetra finds herself back at the entrance of this room and left staring at her own corpse. It can now serve as a platform to allow her to cross.
This inexplicable immortality has its limits. While she can destroy a number of objects and create bridges by sacrificing her body, she has a limited supply. On the top right of the screen, you can see the number considered an acceptable death ratio. It serves to keep you always trying to clear a stage as efficiently as possible, but it isn’t a hard limit, or does it punish you for going over. The one directly under that stat called “Elimination” is the one to look out for and dictates how many deaths you can have. It resets once you complete an area, and the supply given varies from stage to stage. Some require you to make much greater use of corpses, while others are closer to regular platformer gameplay in where you try to survive and it only hands out a few.
Minus moving and jumping, there is one other action you can perform. It won’t take long for your character to find a knife. As much as Tetra doesn’t like self-harm or the act of killing herself, there are moments where she needs to slice open her stomach to make a corpse in specific locations. The objective of every stage is to reach a portal that is usually found on the other side of the room. This path towards progress is often impossible without creatively using your dead bodies. Your corpse will stay where you’ve met your end, and the laws of physics don’t apply to them as usual. Making macabre Jenga-like towers out of your past disemboweled selves soon becomes pretty routine.
As extreme as this all sounds, it isn’t all that graphic. You’ll see some blood splattering, but not much else. There are massive guillotines, spikes shooting out, and other deadly hazards. Most of them merely have your character slump over upon death without any visible bodily harm. Speaking of all those traps and obstacles, it is possible to get them accidentally jammed up with a corpse and left unable to complete the level after. There is a reset button that’ll clear all of your prior bodies, yet on that same token, it won’t refill your supply to the amount you had before. You need to plan things thoroughly and have the platforming skills to pull it off as your stockpile keeps dwindling. It gives you enough to power through if you aren’t good at platformers, though jamming up machinery is often a more costly error.
If you burn through all your chances, it isn’t a big deal. You’ll just receive a game over CG of Tetra, and be sent back to the start of that level with a full stock of corpses to make use of again. It is a punishment in name only. This title wants you to get through all of its 47 stages. I wouldn’t call it without challenge, though don’t expect it to stress either your brain or reflexes all that much. Where Suicider tempts the player to achieve better is with its ‘Per’ corpse score. If you don’t complete a level below that goal, it will mark it as red in the stage selection menu. It doesn’t have any effects on the game itself, yet seeing random blotches of red on your progression record encourages you to replay it and attempt to do better.
Suicider has a significant focus on its story. A few stages solely contain lore notes or dialogue events, meaning that not each of the 47 feature actual gameplay. I can’t speak about the plot’s quality or pacing. This has never been translated from Japanese and does not work with The Textractor program to convert it to English. I’ve pointed my phone at it to get a gist of the narrative via a translation app, though it’s not an ideal way to play. This is no fault of the game. I’m just detailing what experience you can expect if you don’t understand the language. If it’s a story worth telling, I do not know, but there is a good volume of it throughout. I would argue there’s a bit too much of it in the first few stages, however. It was constantly interrupting the gameplay for overly simple mechanics.
Thanks to its simplicity, it is easy to pick right up, and the menus are in English. All you’ll be missing out on is the story if you don’t understand Japanese. If you haven’t noticed the R18+ tag, this is an adult title. There are a few occasions where your character will appear naked in all her pixelated glory. It is hardly what I would call lewd. Her character sprite doesn’t possess nipples, nor does she have any suggestive animations. Completing the campaign does allow you to replay it with Tetra being nude, oddly enough. There aren’t any gameplay changes or anything of the sort. All it does is give you a variation of the game over CG, where Tetra is now shown naked. Considering you will be replaying familiar old stages, it is possible you would never even die enough to discover that. In my opinion, this nude form should have been an option from the beginning.
Suicider features full controller support. Whether you choose to play with a gamepad or just a keyboard, it is a responsive title. It does have a few situations where the camera is too zoomed in, causing you to take a leap of faith or get hit by something off-screen, so I won’t go as far as saying all deaths feel fair. There is also the unfortunate fact that there is no full-screen mode. You’ll need a program like Lossless Scaling to simulate it like I did for this review. With all that said and done, I had a good deal of fun in this 1-2 hour adventure. It makes great use of its suicide gimmick to produce memorable moments, such as clogging up a machine-gun turret with enough bodies that it can’t shoot through them. On the flip side of that, you can die in a place where you’ll later be cursing your old corpse as it impedes your way as a deadly laser rapidly approaches. Suicider is a jolly entertaining time, whether you’re failing or doing well. At $3.60, it is an easy title to recommend.
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