Stupid Never Dies Review

With bizarre transformations, aggressive combat, and a progression system that makes you stronger at ridiculous speeds, Stupid Never Dies has plenty of personality, even as its dungeon crawling starts to feel repetitive.

Action RPGs have experimented with plenty of unusual ideas over the years, but Stupid Never Dies takes things in a direction that is hard to compare to anything else. Developed by GP Track50, a studio led by producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi and featuring veterans who have worked on franchises such as Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, and Dragon’s Dogma. 

Stupid Never Dies combines fast-paced action with roguelike mechanics, monster transformations, and a progression system that lets you get ridiculously powerful fast. Instead of taking itself seriously, it embraces an exaggerated punk-rock aesthetic and a world where zombies eat monsters to steal their abilities.

You play as Davey, a weak zombie on an increasingly ridiculous journey to save the human girl he's fallen in love with.

The premise sounds absurd because it is, but the developers clearly understand the appeal of letting an unconventional idea breathe. Stupid Never Dies does not try to imitate a traditional character-action game or a conventional dungeon crawler. Instead, it brings several familiar systems together to create something with its own identity.

Stupid Never Dies's central idea is what the developers call blazing-quick growth. At first, he’s a pretty defenseless zombie, but after defeating enemies, gaining new powers, and upgrading his equipment, he becomes a monster and mows through progressively more dangerous encounters.

Stupid Never Dies accelerates your development after every dungeon dive rather than forcing you to grind the same levels for hours for a handful of stat points. This method gives you a reason to keep coming back to fight even if you don’t succeed. But Stupid Never Dies isn’t without its problems.

Occasionally, Stupid Never Dies’s roguelike structure can feel needlessly prohibitive, the story takes a little time to get going, and some combat encounters expose inconsistencies in targeting and movement. That said, the game has enough creativity to make it worth checking out, especially if you like action games that reward aggression and experimentation.

Stupid Never Dies takes place in a world devastated by a war between humans and monsters. Humanity initially turned the tide against its monstrous enemies, leaving zombies and other creatures at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Zombies are considered particularly pathetic because of their human origins and physical weakness, making them outcasts even among monsters.

Unfortunately, the relative peace does not last. KM, the King of Monsters, eventually leads an uprising and uses supernatural overtechnology to equip his forces with powerful biomechanical upgrades. Humanity is nearly wiped out, and the monsters subsequently disappear, leaving a strange world populated by the remnants of civilization and whatever creatures remain on its surface.

This is where Davey comes in.

Unlike the powerful monsters he encounters throughout his journey, Davey is a weak zombie who spends his time trying to survive. After hiding in an abandoned shopping mall, he finds Julia, a human girl frozen in a freezer. Davey immediately falls in love with her, despite knowing practically nothing about her.

His solution is straightforward in the most ridiculous way imaginable: he wants to bring her back to life and then ask her out. Dr. Frank Steiner, an eccentric scientist who dreams of restoring humanity, convinces Davey to travel into a monster-filled dungeon, reclaim humanity’s stolen knowledge, and devour KM to gain the power needed to save Julia. 

Davey is accompanied by a colorful cast of characters who help him prepare for his increasingly dangerous expeditions. Dr. Frank provides the scientific motivation behind his mission, while Bessie, a biker zombie who runs a restaurant called Bessie’s Burger, helps him unlock and improve his abilities.

Goyle is a stone statue with clairvoyant abilities that gather useful information, and Ocelino, Dr. Frank's Chihuahua-like assistant, develops the overtechnology that lets Davey upgrade his body. The writing shines when it embraces the absurdity of this group and their bizarre circumstances.

Davey’s wild fantasies about Julia also highlight the fragility of his obsession, while information about her life before the events of Stupid Never Dies provides a more revealing look at the woman he’s turned into an idealized figure. Unfortunately, the narrative often breaks the action with long conversations, tutorials, and explanations.

Some world-building ideas are interesting but too often bog down in exposition, and Davey’s repetitive declarations of love get tiresome. It’s a fun ride when it leans into its absurd tone, but the execution doesn't always match the premise's creative ambition.

Stupid Never Dies is an action RPG with a roguelike system that has you diving into dungeons over and over.

The abandoned shopping mall is your central hub, and the dungeons beneath it hold increasingly dangerous monsters, powerful bosses, and the resources you need to make Davey stronger. You reach these places by taking a weird route through a toilet, descending through different layers, and completing story objectives.

These goals include killing specific enemies, reaching certain depths, collecting specific items, and defeating bosses. Sometimes you can skip entire layers, letting you move on to tougher encounters instead of wasting time fighting every enemy along the way. Route planning is thus an important part of the experience, especially when your current build can handle a significant ramp-up in enemy difficulty.

Every dungeon dive starts with Davey at a low level, usually with only his basic zombie skills and none of the weapons and upgrades available in a successful run. As you defeat enemies, you gain experience and improve your health, attack power, and defense. You also collect temporary abilities that influence your performance during that particular expedition.

If you die or return to the mall, those temporary benefits disappear, but Stupid Never Dies increases your experience gain rate on subsequent dives. This underpins its blazing-quick growth system. An unsuccessful run still contributes to your long-term development, and eventually, the early layers become much easier to overcome. 

The dungeon structure also has a time limit that makes you think about how efficiently you explore and fight. Davey can't stay underground forever. You will have to decide whether to fight optional enemies, collect more resources, or move to the next layer. Hitting certain checkpoints and picking up timer extensions earns you more time, while efficiently dispatching enemies maximizes each expedition.

In practice, this mechanic creates an interesting tension between exploration and progression, but in the smaller environments this restriction can feel unnecessary.

It sometimes keeps you from collecting as many resources as you would like, slowing permanent progression and pushing you to re-run familiar areas. The timer is particularly frustrating during boss fights, where learning attack patterns already requires patience. You can avoid some of these problems by skipping floors, but that solution can feel like a workaround. Stupid Never Dies created itself.

Outside combat, the shopping mall offers surprising customization and progression. You can visit Bessie’s Burger to unlock and improve zombie skills, speak with Ocelino to modify your overtechnology, and spend materials on permanent statistical upgrades. The mall also includes facilities to improve Davey’s abilities, experiment with equipment, and access additional missions that reward you with useful resources and cosmetic items.

You can even zip around hub locations with a convenient fast-travel system. These activities give you reasons to return between dungeon dives, and the variety of services helps the setting feel more substantial than a mere menu screen. But the story sends you back after only a little dungeon crawling, and frequent trips to the mall can kill the adventure's momentum.

Combat is where Stupid Never Dies shines. Davey’s basic moveset includes light and heavy attacks, jumping, and a parry mechanic known as the Stupid Parry. The game has no conventional dodge, as the developers want you to stay aggressive instead of spending every encounter avoiding damage.

The parry system supports that philosophy by letting you respond to incoming attacks and follow up with powerful counters. Activating the mechanic costs health, but a successful counter creates an opening to deal a lot of damage. When facing enemy attacks, you can't always parry them, so it's still important to learn their animations and know when to attack or reposition.

The bite mechanic underpins this aggressive approach.

As you land attacks, you build a gauge that allows Davey to bite enemies and recover health, including damage that can otherwise become permanent if left untreated. Regular enemies can be debuffed to gain one-time powers, and elite monsters and minibosses can unlock their fighting styles.

This creates a satisfying rhythm of attacking, parrying incoming blows, exposing enemy cores, and consuming them to restore health or gain extra powers. It's more important to keep the pressure on than to avoid every dangerous attack, and good combinations make Davey feel much tougher than at the start of a run. The system rewards you for learning the enemy’s behavior and combining defensive counters with offensive skills.

However, sometimes Davey bites the wrong target or misses nearby enemies due to inconsistent aiming. Aerial enemies can be particularly frustrating, and some boss fights make it worse by forcing careful movement under the dungeon's time constraint.

The Style Eat system adds another layer to combat by letting Davey transform into monsters whose cores he has consumed. There are 11 styles in total, including werewolves, vampires, harpies, liches, cyclopes, and golem-like creatures. Each transformation changes Davey’s movement, size, attack combinations, and special abilities.

Faster forms suit aggressive melee combat, while other forms offer ranged attacks, flight, or abilities that let you reach places you normally couldn’t. For instance, the werewolf can do wall jumps that unlock new routes and reveal hidden rewards. Some dungeon layers even have shortcuts and power-ups that require specific transformations, so you have reasons to choose which styles to bring forward. 

But not all transformations are created equal.

The golem and cyclops are slow but hit hard, and once Davey has enough offensive upgrades, their lack of speed matters less. Faster styles can sometimes do the same damage, but with more mobility. The basic zombie form is useful enough that you may not want to experiment with every transformation.

It also limits how long you can keep certain styles during a dungeon dive, forcing you to choose which monster cores are worth it. This leads to interesting strategic decisions, though it can be frustrating to get an unwanted style or replace a useful ability with a weaker one. Boss fights are similarly inconsistent; their attack patterns are satisfying to learn, but targeting issues and demanding movement requirements can turn otherwise exciting battles into frustrating experiences.

Progression centers on several interconnected systems that let you customize Davey both during and between dungeon dives. As he levels up, you can choose temporary zombie skills from a randomized selection of three options. These passive abilities can boost damage, critical-hit chances, defense, or other aspects of your build.

They disappear when a run ends, so you must adapt to whatever choices become available. You can reroll choices with later options, which reduces the frustration of getting abilities that don’t suit your preferred playstyle. Meanwhile, individual style skills improve through use and carry their development from dungeon to dungeon.

Permanent upgrades are equally important. You can attach Overtechnology to Davey’s head, arms, and legs for weapons, implants, special attacks, and passive bonuses. These upgrades persist beyond a run, and you can create equipment presets tailored to different encounters.

You can also change your setup at certain points before facing a tough boss, letting you prepare for specific threats instead of using one build throughout Stupid Never Dies. You can also employ extra resources to make permanent upgrades to Davey’s stats, while recycling unwanted gear to earn different bonuses.

The Style Meter also rewards varied attacks and transformations by improving enemy drop rates, encouraging you to keep up the offensive momentum instead of relying on the same moves over and over again. It also makes each encounter more rewarding by giving you extra reasons to experiment with different combat styles.

The main problem is that the sheer volume of progression systems doesn’t always translate into meaningful changes to the experience.

Randomized abilities may create less effective builds than previous runs, and permanent upgrades can empower Davey without changing familiar encounters. But the end-game can feel repetitive too, as the story sends you back through dungeons before letting you face the next major boss.

Luckily, if you want to experience the story without the full difficulty and grind, Go Nuts mode is there for you. You can turn it on anytime, so it’s useful if you want to move forward or quickly get back to where a previous run ended. This makes Stupid Never Dies more accessible without forcing you to abandon its core combat and progression systems.

Stupid Never Dies has a unique visual identity that sets it apart from more traditional action RPGs. The punk-rock presentation, colorful environments, exaggerated character designs, and intentionally ridiculous animations match the story's tone. Davey's transformations are fun to watch, and the animations that accompany his attacks and monster-biting powers make combat feel enjoyable.

The abandoned shopping mall also serves as an effective central location, providing a colorful contrast to the dangerous environments below. Stupid Never Dies's interface, character design, and visual effects all feel like part of a single artistic vision rather than separate elements. The sound design supports these elements, especially during combat, when exaggerated effects punctuate attacks, counters, and transformations.

The soundtrack fits Stupid Never Dies’s punk-inspired aesthetic and keeps the energy up as you travel between the mall and the dungeons. That said, the soundtrack isn’t always memorable, and some tracks suit background music more than pieces that truly elevate an encounter. Voice direction can also be uneven, with some conversations running longer than they should because of deliberately sluggish delivery. 

Stupid Never Dies is an ambitious action RPG that succeeds most often when it allows its unusual ideas to work together.

The combination of aggressive combat, monster transformations, body modifications, and rapid character growth gives you plenty of systems to experiment with. The bite mechanic is a particularly effective centerpiece, encouraging you to stay on the offensive while recovering health and picking up new abilities.

Its transformations also offer genuinely enjoyable variety, even if some forms are far more useful than others. Meanwhile, the colorful presentation and absurd story give Stupid Never Dies a personality that is hard to mistake for anything else. Its unique punk-rock style also helps the game stand out from other action RPGs.

Unfortunately, the experience is less consistent outside its strongest combat encounters. Multiple dungeon runs, unnecessary time limits, long story breaks, and random progression can make the adventure more repetitive than it should be. Inconsistent targeting also spoils some of the most gratifying mechanics, particularly in the aerial encounters and challenging boss fights.

Still, Stupid Never Dies has enough depth and creativity to be entertaining, plus an optional easier mode that makes it more accessible to players who want the spectacle without committing to the roguelike grind. Stupid Never Dies is rough around the edges, but that willingness to fully embrace its bizarre identity makes it a memorable action RPG.