Stupid Never Dies seems to have come to life after a team of Capcom veterans looked at the inside of my MySpace profile circa 2006, with its hot pink text on a lime green background and a song that autoplayed whether you consented or not, and then decided to build an entire game in there.
I can’t confirm that’s the game’s true origin story, but considering its aesthetic looks like a zine collage of marker scribbles, stickers, and torn-out magazine pages wrapped in a neon palette that never once dims, I’m sure it’s not far off.
I’m about 13 hours in and haven’t reached Stupid Never Dies ending yet, and while I’ve had a fun time, “fun” is carrying a suspicious amount of weight in that sentence.
Key Details
- Release date: October 21, 2026 (October 22 in Japan and Korea)
- Developer: GPTRACK50
- Publisher: GPTRACK50, Sega
- Price: $49.99 (Standard Edition), $59.99 (Glorious Idiot Edition)
- Platforms: Steam, PS5
- Review code provided: Yes, for PC
A Zombie, a Frozen Girl and a Mall Walk Into a Dungeon
You play as Davy, the weakest and most cowardly zombie in a world where monsters run everything, and zombies sit at the very bottom of the food chain. Davy finds Julia, a college student frozen inside a shopping mall freezer, and falls in love with her on the spot, which is frankly more commitment than most men I matched with in my twenties could manage.
He wants to bring her back to life, fully aware that she might wake up and want nothing to do with him; a level of earnestness had me rooting for him almost immediately.
How he gets his shot to bring her back to life is perfectly unhinged. Davy wanders into a doctor’s lab inside the mall, finds a mysterious egg, ignores a very small and very loud chihuahua barking at him, and eats it.
Turns out, the egg lets him devour monsters and steal their abilities through a system the game calls Style Eat, so the bottom-tier zombie can suddenly become a werewolf, a harpy, a golem, a vampire and six other forms on the fly. I love a shapeshifter, and on paper this is exactly the kind of system that should make every fight feel different.
Capcom Pedigree, PS2 Expectations
My expectations were sky-high because of who’s behind Stupid Never Dies. GPTRACK50 was founded by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, a former Capcom producer who worked on Devil May Cry, Dragon’s Dogma, and Resident Evil, and he told VGC that this is a title aimed at core action gamers. So I walked in wanting that Dante feeling, where a horde comes at you, and you tear through it with an arsenal that keeps growing until you feel unstoppable.
That feeling mostly never arrived, and I can pin it on two things. For one, enemies barely react when I hit them, with no real recoil and no flinch, so a punch lands and the demon keeps walking toward me as if I’d tapped it on the shoulder to ask for directions. This might seem like a tiny flaw, but in a game built entirely around beating up monsters, hit reactions are the power fantasy, and without them I often felt like I was attacking furniture.
The missing lock-on drove me up the wall too, because Stupid Never Dies is not an easy game (at least not for me, okay?!). Some of my deaths were a skill issue, and I’ll own that, but plenty happened because three harpies were coming at me at once and I lost track of which one I’d been hitting. Locking onto one and finishing it off would have saved me several runs and a fair amount of muttering at my screen. The Stupid Parry, which doubles as your dodge and your parry, feels great when it lands, and that only makes the rest of the combat feel looser by comparison.
Did This Really Need to Be a Roguelike?
The official description pitches Stupid Never Dies as a single-player 3D action RPG, but Davy dives into dungeons, dies, and returns to the mall to spend what he earned, and that’s a roguelike loop by any other name. Bessie’s Burgers turns monster meat into recipes that become your in-run buffs, Acelino grafts robotic upgrades onto Davy’s arms, legs, and head, and Mino’s Ice Cream converts boss spoils into permanent stat boosts. All of it is cool in concept, and some of it is genuinely clever, yet it arrives through such an obtuse UI and such a pile-up of tutorials that I spent my first few hours just trying to understand it, let alone master it.
The fact that the roguelike aspects are rarely mentioned in Stupid Never Dies marketing materials reminded me of a conversation I had with Digital Sun design director Víctor Ribera about Moonlighter 2, in which he told me the decisions behind that game were made back when the market wasn’t nearly this saturated, and that once those calls are made you have to see them through, even if the genre has filled up by the time you ship.
I thought about that conversation constantly while playing, because Stupid Never Dies feels like a game that committed to being a roguelike early on and then discovered how brutally hard it is to make that loop addictive.
I’m tired of roguelikes and only make room for the ones that grab me by the collar, and this one doesn’t have enough sauce or enough variety in its upgrades to stand out in such a crowded genre. I honestly think Davy’s journey would have shone brighter as a linear story, where he simply goes out and does what he needs to do for Julia.
Stay for Davy
The story is light and silly and fully aware of it. The first hour is a slow shuffle of cutscenes and tutorials around the mall while you wonder when things will pick up, and the supporting cast, from the doctor to the misfits running the mall shops, is funny without ever becoming people I wanted to stick around for. Davy is the exception, since his arc from coward to someone with a bit of a spine is sweet and stole a few chuckles out of me.
The bosses are where Stupid Never Dies finally gets out of its own way. Every fight I had felt like a puzzle I was allowed to solve, with big, readable attacks that let me figure out a pattern instead of panicking at it, and once something clicked and I landed a Stupid Parry right on time, I felt cleverer than I had any right to. It’s also where the transformations pay off best, because swapping into the right monster for the right fight is the closest the game gets to that stylish, I-meant-to-do-that feeling I was hoping for from the start.
Verdict: 7/10
Stupid Never Dies is dripping with style, and when it clicks it’s a genuinely good time. I just wish the combat hit as hard as it looks, and that someone had asked along the way whether the roguelike structure was serving Davy’s story or standing in its way. It’s an acquired taste, and I’m still chewing.
**Bonus Action was provided with a PC code for Stupid Never Dies for the purpose of this review**
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