Vanran, a fast-paced soulslike action game with Shadow of the Colossus-sized boss battles, is getting a playable demo later this month. Check out the new trailer above, and the reveal trailer below.

If this is your first time hearing about Vanran, it's an indie-developed, faster-paced-than-usual soulslike that features random dungeons, and whose developers at Becuzus describe its fantasy world as such: "Vanran is a dark fantasy action RPG where a fallen human slave wields a sealed blade to spark rebellion. Players walk a brutal path toward freedom in a world of despair."

A playable demo will be available on Steam from January 23-30, and you can wishlist it on Steam if you're interested.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

You can’t always describe Goichi Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture’s games, but you know them when you see them. Examples like Let It Die and Lollipop Chainsaw might not resemble each other on paper, but spend any length of time with them and their specific high energy, off-the-wall style, brash tone, and script that's just wall-to-wall one-liners and you'll see that could really only ever come from one place. Just a few minutes with their latest slasher, Romeo Is a Dead Man, and yeah the boys are definitely back in town. But after playing the first two chapters, the latest mad science experiment of an action game helmed by Suda51, it clearly takes some big steps forward in art design and presentation that really raises the “Wow I didn’t see that coming” bar. Even the action, though not revolutionary, feels like a real commitment has been made to evolve the studio’s image from “crazy fun games to watch clips from” to “crazy fun games to spend countless hours with.”

There are a lot of Grasshopper-style things that are to be expected in Romeo Is a Dead Man: relentless absurdist humor, gore galore, killing the past, etc. But the signature erratic tone set as far back as Killer7 feels turned up to 11 here. The breakneck pace at which exposition gets sort of vomited at you, scenes change from focused narration to chaotic combat, and more is pretty intense. It’s not necessarily hard to follow, but more than once in my two or so hours with the game did I have to take a minute or two to simply digest what the hell was going on.

You play as the titular Romeo, who does have himself a Juliet, but the only way this game showed any resemblance to your favorite play from high school is that both of them die. Romeo is a deputy sheriff who gets his face ripped off by an interdimensional zombie ghoul and is transformed into a sort of Space Sheriff Gavan-style superhero that keeps him in a state of undeath and is drafted in to a sort of space time division of the FBI to hunt the sort of monsters that tried to kill him. Juliet, who arrived in Romeo’s little Appalachian town through mysterious circumstances, is actually some kind of extradimensional being who seems to keep popping up in people’s dimensions and mucking up the place, and is one of Romeo’s first targets.

That’s the simple version, completely glossing over things like the fact that the guy who saved Romeo is allegedly his time-traveling grandfather – who is also killed by face eaters but now just lives in a patch on Romeo’s jacket, for starters. Romeo Is a Dead Man’s story might be among the most ridiculous and far flung of Suda and Co.’s gameography, but it holds tightly to its fourth wall-breaking sense of humor and over the top characters that define the studio. It’s relatively easy to follow, and told in such a way to purposefully cast doubt on if what you’re attempting to decipher is even real. But it is engaging, if not always well-written or acted. And even then, it's told through a collage of mixed media that really kept me enthralled.

The opening sequence is a flyover of a tilt-shifted, handmade diorama. From there, we transition into a standard cutscene rendered in full 3D as one would expect, and the next scene might be a vividly detailed comic strip. Inside levels, small televisions appear with pixelated animations on them that serve as portals transporting you to spaces that look more like the Street Fighter training room with a stock jungle image in the background. When teleporting to your FBI HQ – a ship called The Last Night – you navigate it like a top-down 32-bit Sega Genesis-style RPG. When you die, the “game over” screen is an FMV of a human-like prosthetic face getting melted off. It’s all jarring, and frankly, pretty awesome.

Grasshopper games have a bit of a reputation for having stories and presentation given texture through tons of references to pop culture, classic literature, and raucous music, but not having the same sort of depth when it comes time to beat ass, the misunderstood Killer Is Dead excluded. Romeo Is a Dead Man isn’t Devil May Cry, but it has a lot of layered systems that create a combat experience that I really came to like quite a bit. You have basic light and heavy attacks with their own attack strings that can be stopped early but not canceled out with a dodge or something like that, so every swing is a commitment. When surrounded by enemies, even the simple cannon fodder basic zombies, it can be tough to make it out unscathed since these attacks don't stun enemies very reliably, meaning they're often free to slap as you slap them. I spent a lot of my time trying to stay outside of mobs, picking away at the edges with melee attacks or shots with guns at range and avoiding getting overwhelmed until I built enough of my blood meter through my attacks to use a special Bloody Summer attack for big damage.

This pretty simple loop was a bit of a let down for me early on, as Chapter 1 lacked attack and enemy variety, or really any challenge or pushback at all. And if I would have stopped my time after slaying the pretty straightforward end-level boss, a towering giant spawned after a Juliet clone ripped off her own head and threw it into a campfire, I would have missed the metric ton of new stuff that drops right after that gives Romeo so many more toys to work with. After flying back to HQ to report a job well done, I could buy more and different weapons – all which add their own sort of approach to regular combat – and could be swapped between in the field. I don’t think the melee weapons forced me to change my playstyle in the way a heavy greatsword, set of robot gauntlets, and spear that split into dual blades should, but the ranged weapons did. The pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, and machine gun all forced me to work around their strengths way differently, if I was going to choose to lean on them.

Romeo is a Dead Man’s weirdest and best feature, though, are bastards – zombies that you can grow like plants that have special abilities that you can equip to use in battle, like one that spits poison or one that blows itself up on enemies. This gives you so many more ways to control crowds and keep your offense effective against a cohort of bad guys that also grow more deadly. Basic foes with guns (at least on the 3 out of 4 difficulty I was playing on) provided a significant jump in danger when they repeatedly shot at me while being tucked behind hordes of zombies. Mix that with the spicier sort of mutants that ram you with their giant tomato heads or scorpion-shaped bomb lobbers that leave toxic trails, and any given scenario could become a death trap. Even the second boss, a giant mutant head you fight between two floors of a mall food court, is a huge step up in quality from the first.

It’s a pretty old-school action game. There aren’t a lot of nuanced mechanics like dodges cancels. There's not even a parry or a block – at least in the beginning. But I enjoyed the relatively simple push and pull of each stage with the systems that exist quite a lot, even if the camera became a monster on its own. With everything properly in frame things still get very busy on screen very quickly, mostly due to the truly egregious levels of blood and particle effects that come off of enemies as you slash them up. Mix that with the text bubbles that pop up from characters trying to give you some unvoiced dialogue usually fight in the middle of combat and it can be hard to focus on the task at hand.

Sometimes despite itself, Romeo Is a Dead Man is shaping up to be a frantic action romp worthy of the Grasshopper Manufacture pedigree. Its somewhat traditional action mechanics don’t really test your reflexes and make an underwhelming first impression, but does pay off patience when rewarding good positioning and smart use of your bastard skills to get a leg up on the more eccentric enemies past the first chapter. It’s crazy throughout, using strong humor and marvelous art direction at a breakneck speed to make its truly bonkers space-traveling love story one worth patiently waiting until February 11 for.