Like all white, middle-class Londoners, I subsist on a diet comprised mainly of salted caramel and katsu curry. It appears Grasshopper Manufacture, makers of maximalist action adventure Romeo is a Dead Man, appreciate that delightful marriage of rice, breadcrumbs, and carroty sauce as well. Our lad Romeo can gather up katsu ingredients before delivering them to his waiting mum, who’ll turn them into one of ten mouth-watering, buff-applying curries.

But can those recipes nourish us, fleshy humans of IRL make, with the same benefits? To find out, I prepped, cooked, and taste-tested all ten of Romeo’s mum’s katsu creations in my own kitchen.

Katsu Stargazer

Tasting notes: This is straight-up pork katsu curry, and as such, is marvellous. Warming and comforting, with a tickle of heat from the cumin and some balancing acidity from the tomato puree. Best eaten immediately after coming indoors on a face-shatteringly cold day.

Effects: Increases Amount of Emerald Flowsion obtained. Emerald Flowsion is a currency in Romeo is a Dead Man, but after consulting with IGN’s HR department, I learned that eating this curry has not convinced them to pay me more. In fact, even with Nectar card discounts, I estimate this dish put me around £6 in the hole.

Katsu Max 95

Tasting notes: Also delicious, even if – in spite of the in-game description – it’s about as Indian as sumo wrestling. The butter does make the sauce beautifully smooth, though, and the stacking of the breaded chicken creates a pleasant optical illusion of having more breaded chicken. Just don’t expect, if you make this yourself, to achieve the same yellowish colour as in Grasshopper Manufacture’s artwork. On the basis of this experiment, that would require so much butter that your curry would legally become a croissant.

Effects: Increases defence. I caught my finger while loading the dishwasher with curry-smeared plates and it still bloody hurt. Failure.

Katsu Tech

Tasting notes: A threefold disappointment. One, the aubergine (or “eggplant” if you don’t live in a country for grownups) unleashed a burst of unpleasant wateriness when bitten. Two, even a small dollop of yoghurt saps the flavour from what is already a relatively unspiced recipe. And three, I have no idea how to get those circuit board markings. If anyone does, email me.

Effects: Prevents DeadGear glitches. In Romeo is Dead Man, these glitches manifest as temporary speed and strength ailments, accompanied by as much on-screen technowank interface spam as a modern gaming monitor can fit without exploding. The real-life equivalent of these is obviously a migraine, which I haven’t had since eating the Katsu Tech, but then I’ve also never had a migraine in my life. Inconclusive.

Katsu Flight 89

Tasting notes: The coconut milk makes this an unusually runny sauce by katsu standards, though unlike with Katsu Tech’s smothering yoghurt blanket, it’s still a very tasty liquid. Good shout on the cloves, Romeo’s mum. Regrettably, tofu tastes like farts to me, though it does have great visual appeal as a panko dredging platform – look how satisfyingly blocky it is, even with my uneven browning work.

Effects: Increased ranged weapon attack power. My residents’ association says I’m not allowed to test stuff like this any more.

Katsu Lift

Tasting notes: Holy fuck. The soup stock in this – I used powdered Dashi, which I’m told is socially acceptable – is a fifty kiloton umami bomb, which makes the otherwise conventional sauce even more urgently scarfable. There’s a slowly building (if still quite light) spiciness, and the chunky vegetables are as satisfying to munch on as the meat. I don’t even like mushrooms, but when they’re coated in this thick, rich, sticky sauce, they’re a welcomed guest. Superb all round.

Effects: Muffles your presence, making you undetectable to enemies. Despite the toothsomeness, or perhaps because of it, I must deem this unsuccessful. I became not lighter but heavier upon this curry’s consumption, an effect that persisted until the following morning.

Katsu Moab

Tasting notes: Another enjoyably sweet curry, as you’d expect from one filled with bee milk. That plays very nicely with the corn and is joined, mostly harmoniously, to a mild back-of-the-throat burn, courtesy of the cumin. The unsliced pork cutlet presents a rice-smushing risk when cut into, but this can be sidestepped by lifting it up and giving the whole thing a tasty gravy bath.

Effects: Helps the legs and feet, making it harder to stagger. I’m notoriously, perhaps even infamously staggerable. The Katsu Moab didn’t noticeably help in this regard, though one could argue that by providing basic nutrition, it did ward off death by starvation by slightly longer than if I’d eaten nothing at all. In that sense, it did keep me upright.

Katsu Force One

Tasting notes: This is a smooth and not unpleasant rice-and-sauce dish, but the red wine takes it too far away from curry – let alone katsu curry – for my tastes. It also drowns both the cloves and the garlic, two of the recipe’s three big seasoners.

In its defence, I did make two mistakes on this one. Firstly, what looked like uncredited red chillies in the picture are, in hindsight, more likely to be Julienned tomatoes, meaning I surrounded the rice aircraft carrier with scorching hot sea mines for no reason. Secondly, I cheaped out on the steaks, ending up with meat that was even less edible than it was easily cuttable into B-2 bomber shapes. Should have got sirloins, stupid boy.

Effects: Increases melee weapon attack power. As with the Moab, I’m forced to conclude that this does work on a fundamental biological level. Especially if you can chew through the protein.

Katsu Pulse

Tasting notes: While the sight of this (and the Max 95) might bring Anglo-Indian relations to an all time low, the Katsu Pulse is good eatin’. The spinach provides a freshness to what initially looks like a darker, heavier sauce, and my improvised cheese heartbeat – made by Mouli-grating imitation parmesan through a crude paper stencil – ended up blending in unexpectedly well. Yes, fine, this both looks and tastes more like chicken parm than saag paneer, but it still delivered the vibrancy that a katsu should.

Effects: Prevents virus-type status ailments. I mean, I feel okay.

Katsu Presto

Tasting notes: Coffee in a katsu? I was prepared to hate this. I was fully expecting to swear revenge on the man who would dare mix the devil’s bean dust with my beloved katsu, making a blood oath to track him down and kick him so hard between the legs that he becomes Suda49. But no – it’s decent. The coffee merely serves up a touch of bitterness and earthiness, without the whole thing tasting like a double espresso, while the fennel and turmeric build yet more flavour layers on top. I only wish I’d gone with with bigger mushrooms – not to solve any taste problems, but to liven up the rather plain presentation.

Effects: Reduces Bastard cooldown time. While applying the appropriate Sean Bean impression, I averaged three “Bastard”s per second (or 10,800 per hour) both before and after eating. Ineffective.

Katsu Python

Tasting notes: The dominance of the chocolate means this should really be served, sans beef, as a kind of post-curry dessert, rather than a katsu main in its own right. Nevertheless, it’s perfectly edible: deep and rich and not overly sweet, with the naturally sugary carrots a fitting veg choice. The added chillies are again inspired by the picture before the recipe, though I reckon they’re essential, the heat cutting through the stickiness of the chocolatey sauce.

Effects: Increases the amount of blood obtained. I’m satisfied that this “curry” helped, in some small way, to tell my peritubular cells to start secreting erythropoietin, which melted into my bone marrow to fuel the birth of new stem cells, that would in turn transform into red blood cells in an invisible yet wondrous dance that underpins the unparalled miracle we call life. Unfortunately, the curry in the game increases blood collected from enemies, so this is pointless.

Some verdicts, then:

Best tasting curry: Katsu Lift

Most effective curry (real life): Katsu Force One, if largely in theory

Most effective curry (in-game): Also Katsu Force One, it’s a hack ‘n’ slash

Flat with the least cooperative lighting for taking photos of food: Mine

Romeo is a Dead Man is out now on PC.