My Friend Pedro’s slow-motion gunplay still lands seven years on

My Friend Pedro is a violent ballet about friendship, imagination, and one man’s struggle to obliterate anyone in his path at the behest of a sentient banana. That is the official description, and for once the marketing copy undersells the thing. DeadToast Entertainment’s run and gun shooter puts a masked, silent gunman under the guidance of Pedro, a floating, talking banana, and then asks the player to shoot, kick, flip and spin through a criminal underworld until the bodies stack up.

Trailer, via DevolverDigital.

A Butcher Shop, a Banana, and No Memory

The game opens with the protagonist waking inside a grimy butcher shop with no memory. The shop belongs to a man named Mitch. Pedro tells him Mitch is an arms dealer and must be eliminated. The gunman does not argue. He escapes the butchery and kills Mitch.

From there My Friend Pedro moves through themed levels — a derelict district called Null, then the sewers — while the protagonist guns down arms dealers, bounty hunters and gangsters. Denny runs Null with an army of bounty hunters. When confronted, he flees and reveals that his sister Ophelia controls the Internet. The protagonist deals with Denny, heads through the sewers, and defeats Ophelia.

Then the game turns. Mitch was his father. Denny was his brother. Ophelia was his sister. He has been killing his own family, one by one, on Pedro’s instructions.

Pedro explains why: the protagonist despised his family for their criminal activities but could not bring himself to kill them, so he knocked himself unconscious and erased his memory to do it without guilt. Pedro then jams himself into the protagonist’s ear and tries to make him shoot himself. The final battle is a visual representation of his mental struggle against Pedro’s influence. He wins. He removes his mask. He was Pedro all along. The banana was a figment of his imagination.

Kicking, Spinning, and Splitting Your Aim

The mechanics carry the story. My Friend Pedro iterates on the Flash game it is based on — MFP: My Friend Pedro, released by Adult Swim Games in 2014 — keeping similar controls, mechanics and weaponry.

What is new matters more. The player can slow time, kick objects or enemies, split their aim between targets, and dodge bullets by spinning. Parkour elements — flips, wall jumps, rolls — raise the point total. Bullets ricochet off frying pans or signs to kill enemies, which also adds points. Every hit scores. Every kill raises the multiplier. Each level ends with a rank based on total points, shared on a global leaderboard.

That scoring system is the smartest thing in the game. It turns butchery into choreography. You are not asked to survive. You are asked to look good doing it.

Ripe for Revenge and Other Ports

My Friend Pedro arrived for Nintendo Switch and Windows on 20 June 2019, and for Xbox One on 5 December 2019. A PlayStation 4 version followed on 2 April 2020. A free-to-play spin-off, My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge, came to iOS and Android on August 5, 2021.

The Numbers

• Developer: DeadToast Entertainment
• Publisher: Devolver Digital
• Released: 20 June 2019 (Switch, Windows); 5 December 2019 (Xbox One); 2 April 2020 (PlayStation 4)
• Based on: MFP: My Friend Pedro, Adult Swim Games, 2014
• Modes: Single player
• IGDB critic aggregate: 7.3/10 (9 outlets)

How the Releases Stack Up

What the Twist Actually Does

The family reveal is not a cheap swerve. It reframes every level you already played. The gunman was never following orders from a piece of fruit. He was following his own plan, dressed up as someone else’s. Pedro is the alibi he built so he could do what he could not do as himself.

That is a real idea, and My Friend Pedro earns it. The combat is fast, the scoring is generous, and the side-view perspective keeps every flip and ricochet readable. The game knows exactly how silly it is and never apologizes.

The weakness is repetition. The levels change their look — butcher shop, Null, sewers — but the loop does not deepen much. Slow time, split aim, kick, spin, rack up points, take a rank. By the time Ophelia falls, you have seen the trick. The twist lands, but the play between the twist and the ending is thinner than the premise deserves.

Where the Combat Runs Out of Road

My Friend Pedro is a tight, strange, well-built shooter with one genuinely great idea and a scoring system that rewards showing off. It is not long, and it does not need to be. The Flash game it grew from is visible in its bones, and the additions — the split aim, the bullet dodge, the ricochets — are the right ones.

What holds it back is that the combat peaks early and the story carries the back half. A game this committed to style should keep finding new ways to be stylish. It mostly does. It just stops a level or two short of the imagination on display in its own ending.

DeadToast Entertainment · Devolver Digital · game review · My Friend Pedro · Nintendo Switch · run and gun