In a world where a lot of the biggest games on the market start looking the same, you certainly can’t accuse Stupid Never Dies, the debut game from GPTRACK50, of blending in with the crowd.
This pop-punk zombie action roguelike immediately grabs your attention with its vibrant colors and unique aesthetic, calling to mind games like Lollipop Chainsaw and Hi-Fi Rush. After finding out that studio head and executive producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi had experience working on Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, and Killer7, my interest was officially piqued. Fortunately, I got a chance to check out a demo of the first few hours of the game to see if Stupid Never Dies could live up to its pedigree.
The opening narration of the game lays out the plot in storybook fashion, and there’s a lot going on here. Monsters, led by KOM, invaded Earth, starting the Great War. They wiped out 98% of humanity before disappearing back underground. Our world is now populated mostly by zombies, and actual human beings are rare.
You play Davy, the weakest zombie imaginable, who eats a Phoenix Egg belonging to Dr. Frank Steiner, and they team up to use Davy’s newfound powers as he explores the mysterious underground dungeon to find and kill KOM. During his assault on Earth, KOM was able to eat all human knowledge, and Doc wants to use Davy’s zombie powers to eat KOM and absorb that knowledge to fix the world.
A Weird World Worth Exploring
While all this is pretty wild and wacky, I didn’t even mention that your home base is an abandoned mall populated with a bunch of kooky characters. In addition to the aforementioned Dr. Frank Steiner, who is equal parts irritated and intrigued by you, there’s Goyle, the psychic gargoyle who communicates with you on runs, Bessie, the zombie who runs the burger joint, and Acelino, a little dog who transforms into a roboticist.
Instead of shambling around this mall like the zombie you are, you ride a little Roomba-style device to visit each of these characters. The way you get to the monster dungeon is by flushing yourself down a special toilet. It’s all immensely silly, but in a world flooded with AAA games trying to be prestigious art, it’s fun to see something that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The only part of the setup that gives me a little bit of a weird vibe is Davy’s motivation. As he’s shambling around the mall, he comes across the frozen corpse of a college girl in a cooler and falls in love with her immediately. Doc, seeing an opportunity, promises that he will revive her if Davy can help him defeat KOM. Even though it’s framed as something stupid that Davy’s doing, because how can he know that she’ll love him back, it still feels icky to treat a completely inanimate woman with no autonomy as a prize to be won. Hopefully, it’s a concept that gets subverted as the story progresses, but for now that was the one part that didn’t work for me.
It’s clear from the narrative setup that Stupid Never Dies is an action roguelike at heart. After talking to the appropriate people in the mall to do between-run modifications and narrative beats, you’ll head over to the toilet and delve into the dungeons beneath. Each time you go down, you have a timer, and when that runs out, things will get more dangerous for you. There are a handful of themed environments you’ll choose from as you pick which levels you go to, and these areas are mostly just a series of arenas for you to brawl your way through.
Between levels, you’ll be able to spend currency on power-ups. If you think you’re in trouble, you can always bounce at this point, returning to the surface and keeping everything you’ve collected, as death will cause you to lose rewards you’ve found.
As you fight enemies, you’ll gain experience points, and leveling up will allow you to pick from a selection of randomly drawn upgrades that you can add to your build. When you die, your build resets, but each subsequent run you make into the dungeon will cause you to earn XP at a faster rate. It’s a smart way to have a sense of meta-progression between runs, as you can really feel the effects of leveling up faster.
Eating Enemies to Steal Their Powers
Combat itself is pretty standard fare, mixing in melee-based combos with abilities on cooldown, but your identity as a zombie adds a clever twist. You have access to a bite attack, which the game calls your Style Eat, that not only recovers some health, which is good because the only other way to heal is to buy recovery between levels, but also steals abilities from elite monsters.
Once you add a new style to your power suite, you’ll be able to transform into them, which not only gives you a unique skill to use, but also changes your fighting style. You’re only able to use them a limited number of times, and you can only hold on to two forms at once, so there’s no reason not to continually be swapping and eating new styles.
Even with these cool twists, it still feels like combat could use a little extra tuning. At the moment, it feels a little floaty, especially given the camera that you constantly need to be adjusting during battle. I also never really got the hang of the “Stupid Parry,” which was a reward for well-timed dodges.
The demo was only the first two hours of the game, and if they can tighten up the combat while continuing to add extra layers with new styles and abilities, it could be a star of the show.
Aside from the monstrous forms, you can enhance Davy by getting cybernetic upgrades installed by Acelino. Since KOM’s legion of monsters is often mechanically enhanced by Overtech, you can scavenge parts from them during your dungeon dives, and these can be added to your arsenal, giving you unique abilities or stat bonuses. Not only does it help you diversify your combat capabilities, but it also looks cool as hell as you enhance your zombie limbs with swords or rocket boosters.
A Strong First Impression
The aesthetic upgrades are integral, since a lot of the appeal of the game is its vibrant look. Every frame looks like it’s leaping right off the page of a comic book, with great VFX that make each moment pop. Environments have an exaggerated, off-kilter look, almost like a pop-art version of Tim Burton films, dripping with style. The wide range of monsters allows them to show off their creature design, which gets really neat when combined with the Overtech machinery that enhances them.
What I’ve seen in my time with the Stupid Never Dies demo doesn’t break the gameplay mold in any significant way, but the presentation is solid enough to give it a look. Its fast-paced combat and roguelike variety definitely show strong potential, and I’m interested to see the way it expands in the full release. The demo only gave me access to two of the eleven styles that you can steal from enemies, so it’s exciting to think about what kind of builds will be available as you progress in the main game.
Much like the games of Suda51, who is a clear influence on the Stupid Never Dies’ overall style, the humor and aesthetic may not be for everyone, but I’m always happy to see something different that stands out among the sea of open world adventures.
Preview code provided by publisher. Stupid Never Dies will launch October 21 for PC via Steam and PlayStation 5.