Stupid Never Dies review: No braiiiiiins, lots of heart

GPTRACK50's debut game is a wacky love story in a world dominated by monsters

Davy is in love. But he has two problems. One, Davy is a zombie - the lowest of the low on the monster totem pole. Two, the love of his unlife froze to death in the back of an ice cream shop. He doesn’t even know her name, but in this case it was love at first sight. Davy, a cowardly zombie who refused to eat human flesh and ran away from the frontlines of the war, now has a calling. Figure out how to bring his love interest back to life. Luckily he ate a Phoenix Egg, and now has the power to eat monsters and get stronger. With the help of a mad scientist and a were…chihuahua, Davy might be able to save humanity, unfreeze the girl, and maybe ask her out on a date.

Stupid Never Dies is the debut effort from new developer GPTRACK50, led by ex-Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi and apparently comprising many ex-Capcom developers. That said, I wouldn’t blame you if you glanced at this and thought it was a Suda51 game. When it was first announced I almost thought a new Lollipop Chainsaw was showing up (that’s also happening, but the less said about it the better). But the vibe here is actually quite different. It’s more of a pop-punk, early 2000s kind of energy, with lots of collage art, neon colors, notebook scribbles, and raw, brainless, heart-driven energy. It’s got a little Troma in there, sure, but it’s also got the aura of simple power cords, nasally vocals, and raging hormones.

Zombie boy

There’s charm here, especially because Davy is actually quite endearing as a very stupid zombie boy, although I could do without the literalization of the woman in refrigerators trope. I’m not convinced it’s a deliberately ironic thing, and it’s a bit skeezy in a way that doesn’t feel intentional. The joke seems to be that Davy is oblivious to the dead girl’s complete lack of agency, but that’s… uh, gross? Like, you’re partially rewarded by working your way through with chances for Davy to go through her phone to browse and like social media posts from before she died, so he can get to know her. While she’s just a dead body in a freezer. I feel icky just typing that out! Tromeo and Juliet, this is not. That theme is a banger, though.

The comedy works a lot better when it’s about Davy being a loser zombie who becomes a hero through a winding array of bizarre circumstances. With humanity almost wiped out, monsters have left the main “layer” of existence, and exist in various other layers while the mastermind behind the war lurks in the background. By flushing himself down a scientifically enhanced toilet, Davy can enter the monster layers, where his zombie-like drawbacks vanish, letting him speak normally, move fast, fight, and use his Phoenix-given powers to their fullest. But he can only be in the dungeons for so long since zombies are still part human, meaning he has to go back to the human layer between runs, and be stuck back in his true lumbering, speech-slurring form. Luckily he has one of those little vacuum robots to ride around on, otherwise you’d have to awkwardly shuffle from destination to destination. Which you can still do, and is funny for a bit. But the vacuum helps.

Time attack - literally!

As you may have surmised there, Stupid Never Dies is a run-based action game that is fully governed by familiar roguelike-style systems and mechanics. You have a growing list of statsy, temporary upgrades you can choose from when you level up, you have lots of equipment drops with all kinds of minutia text bolted onto them to take with you on runs, and there’s a few different layers of permanent progression you can play with as you unlock them and are given gimmicks to grind for. The main gimmick, though, is that each time you attempt a run, you’re given a permanent experience modifier based on how many enemies you take out. The more you play, the faster Davy levels up. Each run is also on a timer, and combat itself is very scrambly and based almost entirely on offense. Of course, each run is also on a timer, and your little teddy bear buddy lets you know how much time you have left before you have to bail.

Davy’s biggest tools are his biting powers and his “Stupid Parry.” Biting lets you get health back from enemies, and lets you absorb powers from smaller baddies, and “Styles” from stronger foes, which let you transform into Davy-fied versions. Stupid Parry lets you rush straight into oncoming damage, giving you a powerful counterattack in exchange for eating enemy offense. Like I said, it’s a scramble. Stay in the mess, chase the danger, eat the damage, then bite your way back to health. Davy’s abilities are quite simple (he’s not a skilled fighter), but his survivability is what keeps him going. It’s more apt to compare Stupid Never Dies to something like Final Fight rather than Devil May Cry, but with an amped-up pace thanks to the timer and lack of conventional defensive options. It’s an interesting pitch, designed to keep the action going constantly.

Inconsistencies

In some ways, the roguelike stuff works against that flow. You’re going to get outmathed, because otherwise what’s the point of the cumulative experience system? You simply can’t be strong enough to get far enough in enough time until you’ve built your leveling speed up. I do appreciate that you don’t start from scratch each time (defeating a boss acts as a milestone, expanding the dungeon and letting you go further without having to face them again), but that feeling of having to grind your way past brick walls persists and “artificially” pads the run time. There isn’t really a good sense of build-crafting in Stupid Never Dies either, since so much of the things you unlock and tinker with are a scattershot of numbers rather than powers or abilities.

A number of the Styles you get access to also kind of contradict the intended flow, as you get slower transformations that are more evasive or use ranged abilities. Davy’s in your face combat style matches all the rules surrounding him, and the more combat-oriented styles work within that framework as well, but others just aren’t fun to use when their trickiness doesn’t seem to do much but burn time. But you can just discard them and they’re temporary anyway, so the half-baked ideas don’t really make much of an impact. There’s kind of a dart board vibe to a lot of this game’s pieces, with some stuff working better than others. But things go by so quickly it’s hard to really get hung up on stuff that doesn’t feel as good, since they don’t get in the way of the fundamentals.

Stupid Never Dies is an adrenaline rush, something that explodes with colors and silliness and action and pizazz, but doesn’t really aim higher than junk food. Its combat doesn’t have a ton of tricks up its sleeve, although its fast pace and scrambly energy means it doesn’t give you time to care that much. It’s not until you get tripped up by the roguelike progress grind that Stupid Never Dies’ seams start to get stretched, and even then it still manages to be fun to blaze through a run and watch the numbers go up. It’s a brainless kind of experience with a lot of systems that seem to suggest depth but aren’t worth the bandwidth to seriously engage with, and will be easily forgotten by the time you’re done. The silly story and characters, zany pop-punk soundtrack, and basic brawling are much more compelling. I wish the romance at the center wasn’t so ugly, and wouldn’t be surprised if that part turns a lot of folks off who would’ve had a good time otherwise. But hey, if you like to shop at Hot Topic, you might have a fun weekend or two with this one regardless.

Stpid Never Dies is available on October 21, 2026 for PC and PlayStation 5. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Stupid Never Dies
7
Pros

• Fun setting, goofy characters, cool visuals, rad music
• Action moves at a breakneck pace and really captures "scrambling"
• The physical comedy is very good

Cons

• Roguelike stuff isn't interesting
• Leveling system is interesting, but feels grindy after a while
• The story's core relationship thing is Not Cool