It's hard to know where to start when talking about Stupid Never Dies. An action RPG built on style, excess and punk ideology. I mean, within the first minutes of my demo starting, I am flushing undead protagonist Davy down a toilet in an abandoned shopping mall to arrive in a hellish arena.
Davy, one of very few survivors (can you call a zombie a survivor?) of a worldwide apocalypse, makes his way through and further down into the underworld, all in the hope of reviving his crush Julia — a gorgeous girl who happens to already be frozen to death. Whatever keeps your body warm, Davy. The absurdity continues into the visuals which are based in loud and brash punk stylings, delicately toeing the line of ‘aggressively colourful and busy' and ‘a clusterfuck', and I think it manages to stay on the former side for most of my playtime.
Stupid Never Dies operates on a basis of standard light and heavy attacks mixed in with a Stupid Parry (they named it that, not me), and the crux of the system, appropriate for a zombie: the bite. In his weak base form, biting is essential, as finishing foes off with a chomp is Davy's only way to restore health. More importantly, Davy's bite is what opens the door to his special abilities. If you consume the cores dropped by defeated ‘elite' enemies, Davy can mutate into a monstrous form of the foe. He's basically an undead Kirby. You can keep two of these styles on deck at once and swap between them. These range from werewolves and vampires to mermen and demons. Davy's essentially got the whole bestiary of Universal Monsters to choose from. He even has a mad scientist companion: Dr. Frank. I especially adore the powerful feel of the cyclops, a hulking behemoth swinging around a crude club but mostly using its bodyweight to crush enemies underfoot.
Cycling through these transformations and making the choice to keep or replace them with each elite consumed is essential to keeping Davy alive (undead?) in the increasingly difficult arenas as he sinks further and further into dungeons. While Stupid Never Dies does have an overarching story, its actual structure is that of a roguelite. Run after run, you keep Davy's Forms, minor temporary perks and the weaponised body parts you craft for yourself back at home base. Are you really taking your mission to save your love seriously if you don't fit yourself with chainsaw legs?. Though, you lose all these perks if Davy perishes
In my time with Stupid Never Dies, I find that even with my power increasing, I still have to concentrate and pay attention to the enemies around me to avoid Davy being buried all over again. A few wrong moves, a few missed Stupid Parries, and he's down. But, if you can keep a cool head, Davy turns into a force of pure momentum, biting cores one after another, parrying directly into enemy attacks rather than trying to dodge and in some cases, activating ‘Davy Burst', a super mode that powers up pretty much every aspect of his moveset and turns him into even more of a monster.
If you're finding Stupid Never Dies too hard, each run ends with a choice to enter arenas of varying difficulty. This gives you the choice to jump into a harder dungeon and risk it all, or focus on building up Davy to prepare for later runs by picking an easier dungeon. Director Eiichiro Sasaki lets me know that "it was really difficult to balance that range of choice in the levels after runs, but we think it's something we've done well." In a comparison and compliment that surprised me when it came into my head, it reminds me a little of DOOM (2016)'s approach to combat: offense over defense, never stop moving forward.
A few times during my preview, art director Genseki Tanaka giggles when I unthinkingly mutter "oh fuck" under my breath as Davy finds himself surrounded by enemies with only the slightest chance of getting out in one piece, and jokingly reassures me "There's a lot going on, but you'll get the hang of it slowly". Talking to me after my demo, Sasaki says "There's a lot of pressure from enemies in multiple directions, it's not a one-on-one thing. So, the system we have to help break through that is ‘Blazing' Fast Growth — each time you go on a run, the growth speed inflates, and Davy gets a lot stronger. To match that inflation, there's a lot on the visual side as well. So, maybe we did a little too much, but we wanted to bring that constant excitement to players."
‘Blazing Fast Growth', other than being a cool as fuck name, does work. Davy and the hordes stay on a relatively equal footing, while I never lost that feeling of being an underdog breaking through a crushing, impossible situation. On this note of excitement and doing too much, Sasaki mentions that with the pedigree of previous action game designers working at GPTRACK50, Stupid Never Dies stands apart in being "less planned out and calculated of an action game, and instead focusing on the emotion the player can take away. The approach was completely different. Even if the balance was initially broken at the start, as long as the emotion is strong, it feels good, that's okay. The tone and atmosphere was very important across the whole team, and we think we successfully created [something] new with this."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/zombiepunk-action-rpg-stupid-never-dies-is-a-vibrant-feast-for-the-eyes-ears-hands-and-teeth-even-if-it-is-a-smidge-overwhelming
