If you went back in time and asked my teenage self to picture what video games would look like in 20 years, my vision would likely resemble Stupid Never Dies. In many ways, it feels like the logical evolution of the games I loved as a kid: a colorful brawler with snazzy visuals, a juvenile sense of humor custom-made for a teen boy, and, of course, zombies. But after spending 26 miserable hours with Stupid Never Dies, I’m so glad that video games have mostly moved past my dumbest desires.
Dated doesn’t begin to describe the debut action RPG from GPTRACK50, a new studio founded by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Style points only count for so much in a downright regressive action game that’s saddled with a supremely uncomfortable story, a repetitive faux-roguelike hook, and unresponsive combat that wastes some good RPG depth. It’s the kind of game I might have loved as a kid with a low bar for quality, and one that I’d have to make a lot of excuses for loving as an adult who knows better.
Cold bodies
Stupid Never Dies aims to crack the underexplored concept of a video game romcom. It takes place in a dystopian future where a zombie outbreak left humanity vulnerable to a wider monster uprising. Werewolves and vampires inherited the Earth, pushing zombies to the bottom of the social totem pole. You play as Davy, an undead peon who joins the war against the King of Monsters alongside a resistance group holed up in a mall. But Davy’s real motivation is love. In a story that takes clear notes from zombie romance comedy Warm Bodies, Davy is out to win the affection of a human woman who he has yet to meet.
That’s because the cute blonde-haired girl is dead. Or, she’s at least frozen solid inside the backroom of a mall restaurant.
The premise is so tone-deaf that you have to wonder if it was designed to drum up low-hanging controversy in our current culture war era. It confidently stumbles into a trope first identified by writer Gail Simone in 1999: fridging. The term refers to media’s long history of subjecting female characters to harm and trauma as a means to create high-stakes motivation for a male hero. (The term has its roots in an infamous Green Lantern comic, in which Kyle Rayner discovers his mutilated girlfriend dead inside a refrigerator.) Plenty of games have fallen into the exhaustively documented “woman in refrigerators” trap over the medium’s lifetime, but none as brazenly — and literally — as Stupid Never Dies.
Julia, who we come to learn is the human popsicle’s name, has the dishonor of being an object of affection and a damsel at once. Davy’s goal is to find a way to save her life so that the two can fall in love and live happily ever after. That already creepy story is supported by even creepier systems. Davy can offer gifts to the body, which are displayed on the shelves around her like a murderer’s shrine, in order to fill a heart meter and earn skill points. Leveling up that meter also earns you a photo of Julia, with Davy’s head glued into the frame. While Julia’s dead body can’t speak, you can learn all about her by scrolling through her old social media posts and liking photos of her in her cheerleading uniform.
A misguided narrative that desperately could have used another set of eyes.
It sounds like a game built for serial killers, but it’s all meant to be cutely morbid — a sincere teen comedy draped in a Hot Topic t-shirt. Davy is portrayed as an awkward mall rat, dressed in a baggy hoodie and crooked baseball cap, with a heart of gold under all that gray flesh. We’re supposed to chuckle at the impossibility of his obsession, but still root for the lovesick puppy dog enough to fight through his battles and get the girl. It’s a terrible motivator. Stupid Never Dies lands as a one-sided love story with a manic pixie corpse that’s downright violating to engage with. (Even when Julia gets a bit more agency later on, she’s still played as a one-dimensional side-character to be saved.) It’s so grotesque that laying out my problems with a story this transparently dehumanizing feels like a trap; any outrage is bound to turn a certain kind of reactionary into an uncritical fan on insincere principle.
It’s not exactly surprising that the premise is so thoughtless considering the thematic territory GPTRACK50 wades into, ass-first. As its title suggests, Stupid Never Dies is a celebration of, well, stupidity. It advocates for a world where everyone can turn their brains off and act on instinct — fitting for a mindless action game, perhaps. I imagine that will connect with a certain audience, one who can put the story out of their mind enough to ooh and aah at Stupid Never Dies’ stylistic flourishes. Magazine collage aesthetics do a lot of work to inject some blood into regular old UI elements, making everything feel as lively and colorful as No More Heroes.
Though I can appreciate the gleeful craft in isolation, the mold always seeps through the wallpaper. I’m always left gritting my teeth every time Davy swoons over Julia’s lifeless body. It’s a relief anytime the love story takes a backseat to inane lore about mashing monsters. That an eye-rolling fantasy race war seems palatable by comparison speaks to how little there is to cling onto in a misguided narrative that desperately could have used another set of eyes.
“I wish I didn’t have to think so hard,” a character tells Davy late in the story, the closest Stupid Never Dies gets to laying out a hare-brained thesis. Yeah buddy, me too, but there’s a reason I fight that desire every day so as not to make an ass of myself.
A faux roguelike
To anyone who is tempted to show up for Stupid Never Dies out of an obligation to stick it to a sensitive critic, know that stupid prizes await you. Even if you strip away the gross story, the best you can hope for is a slog of a game. While it looks like the kind of linear action game Capcom might have dished out in its 2000s heyday, Stupid Never Dies stretches itself out as thin as it can, with a roguelike structure that does little but add more hours to the runtime. The idea is that Davy needs to jump into a multilayered dungeon (via toilet travel) and fight through ever-changing floors to vanquish The King of Monsters’ henchmen and pick up resources that can help revive Julia. Between attempts, Davy gradually unlocks permanent boosts back at the mall.
It makes for a repetitive dungeon crawler, though one that’s at least possible to find a rhythm in. Floors shuffle between a few themes (a twisted European town, an icy tundra lined with canons, a jungle split into floating platforms), tossing you into straightforward arenas filled with skeletons, harpies, fishmen, and more. Brawl through the hordes, gather run-specific upgrades, create a build powerful enough to survive to the objective, repeat. It’s a basic enough idea that’s let down by repeated level layouts, but you can get some typical genre enjoyment out of piecing together an overpowered build.
You’re also on a ticking timer that both forces you to move quickly and ensures that a run doesn’t usually go over 20 minutes, even when you’re picking up items that replenish time. The clock management adds a welcome element of risk, as you need to decide between skipping a few floors to save time or fighting through a few more to level up and gather additional upgrades en route to a boss. It can also be a major pain in the ass when you fight to reach a boss only for time to run out mid-fight and put you in a vulnerable state that spells death.
At least there’s some RPG depth to it all. There are tons of upgrades to unlock, represented by meal tickets that will appear in runs. There’s a looter-shooter gear system where you can pick up armor of various rarities that grant passive perks and stat boosts. Plus, every failed run ups the amount of experience you gain from defeating an enemy. By the end of the game, killing a few enemies on the first floor would boost me all the way to level 25 and allow me to skip a ton of floors, ensuring that runs didn’t drag on as I was tasked with going deeper into the dungeon. Stupid Never Dies does a lot to make sure that you always feel like you’re gaining a ton of stuff, even in a failed run.
That doesn’t change the fact that actually doing those runs is a drag. Despite having all the signifiers of a roguelike — right down to choosing one of three upgrades — it never convincingly feels like one. It always comes off as a typical action game where every mission is arbitrarily stretched into a run you have to complete until you can move on with the story. That becomes especially exhausting every time the story seems like it’s winding down, only to invent a new excuse for you to complete more runs. (That includes a momentum-killing “boss rush” near the end that forces you to complete five separate runs.) It will take you 30 hours to see the ending, but you’ll feel like you’ve done it all after five.
Sluggish action
Stupid Never Dies might have been able to overcome some of its structural flaws if it was powered by strong action, but combat isn’t its strong suit either. Despite the fact that Davy is supposed to enter a superpowered state when entering the dungeon, he still lurches like a zombie. His basic attack animations, including a kick and a health-restoring chomp, are all so slow that it feels like they’re happening on a two-second delay from when you hit the button. It’s almost as if it’s mimicking a FromSoftware game that forces you to commit to heavy attacks, but in the context of a fast action game where you’re supposed to be plowing through enemies. It’s a total mismatch.
The feel is completely off across the board. There’s no lock-on, for instance, which means that you’re left flailing in the direction of enemies and hoping you connect once your attack animation ends. Certain enemies, like mermen that pop in and out of the ground, are especially hard to wrangle due to that omission. Your imprecision and sluggish movement make them a pain in the ass to deal with as they quickly tunnel around you, especially because the clock is ticking down every time you miss.
Trying to fight in midair feels like sinking in molasses; you’ll be lucky to get off three punches as you fall back to the ground. That’s a problem, considering that you’ll often fight flying harpies who tend to move away by the time you’re airborne and winding up a punch. You also don’t have much in the way of evasive tactics, despite the fact that you’ll often need to move away from telegraphed boss attacks that can’t be blocked — expect to just tank the hit most of the time.
The only decent mechanic in the defensive playbook is the stupidly-named Stupid Parry. Rather than deflecting an attack, you can lurch headfirst into one and let out a counter-attack. It’s still risky considering that you’ll still take some damage, but it at least feels thematically appropriate for a game about being an idiot.
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The real missed opportunity comes from Stupid Never Dies’ monster-chomping system. Like an undead Kirby, Davy can absorb a monster’s power by finishing them off with a bite or eating their exposed core. The latter allows him to transform into that monster, with its own set of attacks, a few times before the ability runs out. It’s a sound idea that lets you constantly switch up your moves. One minute you’re a werewolf slashing through enemies, the next you’re a Will-o’-the-wisp spitting out fire. Unfortunately, all of those movesets are similarly slow, and it’s a missed opportunity for Stupid Never Dies to create a needed contrast between the lowly zombie and the powerful monsters holding them down. You’re better off sticking in zombie form than turning into a giant golem who will take dozens of hits before being able to unleash a single attack.
Aside from some stylish visual flair, almost nothing lands in Stupid Never Dies. The time-stretching roguelike structure only amplifies every flaw in a game full of them. But even with some post-launch tweaks that could address low-hanging issues, Stupid Never Dies is a foundationally irredeemable game. Even the most fun combat system on Earth would still feel awful when placed in the context of an ugly story that could not be less suited for our current cultural moment. I could spend a lot of time dissecting the nitty-gritty systems that make a combat system feel competent or not, but it wouldn’t begin to describe the intangible discomfort of playing Stupid Never Dies.
“Rot happens,” a title card sometimes tells me when I die during a run. Yep, it sure does.
Stupid Never Dies will be released Oct. 21 on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PS5 Pro using a prerelease download code provided by GPTRACK50 Inc. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
