Stupid Never Dies

Stupid Never Dies made quite the entrance last December. Its reveal during The Game Awards pre-show wouldn't have felt out of place in a late-aughts Hot Topic; a zombie boy and human girl singing and dancing to a catchy, rocking love song in a music video filled with undead imagery, comic book scribbles, and colorful bursts, with a quick punch of some action gameplay at the very end. But while it set the tone, it wasn't immediately clear how the two parts came together.

After attending a hands-off preview session with developer GPTRACK50, I've got a firmer notion of what Stupid Never Dies is. It is an action RPG, filled with style-switching combat and a roguelite, structured around dives into a monster-filled dungeon. And it is absolutely saturated in pop-punk aesthetics.

I asked studio head Hiroyuki Kobayashi, who has worked on numerous series including Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, and Dragon's Dogma, about how the team created this vision of zombies and pop punk mashed together. "When we talk about pop punk," Kobayashi says. "That's, from the very beginning of the game, as we [started] creating the concept of the game, pop punk was the tone we wanted to aim for."

Stupid Never Dies follows Davy, a low-level zombie in a dungeon that's been overrun by monsters. He discovers a human girl, Julia, frozen in a freezer and is infatuated with her. He wants to see her brought back to life. So Dr. Frank, a mad genius, encourages Davy to dive into the dungeon and get the power to do so by slaying KOM – the King Of Monsters.

Davy, as a zombie, is not particularly powerful compared to the many strange and dangerous beasts of the dungeon. He can, however, gain power in two key ways: he can die and come back, and he can absorb the skills of specific foes to take on their form.

There are myriad forms Davy can take, and we saw a lot of them. Maybe too many. The Zombie is a base form, naturally, and plays with some standard action game tools: normal and heavy attacks, a parry, and a bite. After biting some enemies, though, Davy can turn into them during his dungeon expedition, though he can only carry two additional forms at a time.

The Werewolf offers a blitz of speed and fury, while the Harpy unleashes feathered projectiles. The Golem is tough and sturdy, spinning its arms around to send foes flying. The Vampire spawns in swarms of bats, the Will-o'-the-Wisp can swap between the physical and astral planes, and the Cyclops swings hard with big, all-or-nothing strikes. The Snow Fairy might be my favorite, allowing you to freeze foes and then slice them with an ice blade, enhancing the blade's power in the process. The Merfolk form can dive into the ground and make whirlpools, the Lich is a summoner-like form with skeleton pals, and the Demon warps gravity.

It's a lot to take in, but essentially, these forms make up a base of power for each run. Getting used to how they work, and especially how they can work together as you flip through them mid-combat, is a core part of Stupid Never Dies. Throw in the extra power of Body Hacks, which add weapons that Davy can employ in runs like a Missile Pod or the imposing Massive Edge blade, and you can have a pretty wide variety in playstyles between different dungeon crawls.

"That kind of variety can be much broader if we made this game run-based," Kobayashi says. "That's the reason why we chose this structure."

As part of the roguelite nature, Davy builds up a meter of experience growth. Essentially, each run adds bonuses to future experience gains in the dungeon, so each attempt sees Davy levelling up just a little bit faster. While an early venture might spend some time on getting to, say, level 10, he might hit level 20 in just as much time, or even faster, in future adventures. Runs do have a time limit on them, but that might be a good thing if it means later tries can become explosively, exponentially faster.

"We want the player to experience blazing fast growth," Kobayashi says. "That's a fundamental system of the game, so each run, you feel different."

Layered over all of this is a saturated, exaggerated style that conveys as much character as that first trailer. Davy can even amp it up a bit when he enters his Davy Burst mode, a super mode that comes with over-the-top animations and visual effects.

Stupid Never Dies is a fascinating project, sometimes feeling like the action-brawler Warm Bodies roguelite we never got. But beneath the pop punk veneer, there's a fascinating mix of action combat mechanics and fast-ramping roguelite progression. It's different and strange in all the best ways, and has certainly found a place on my radar for the hidden gems of 2026.