Stupid Never Dies Review: Pop-Punk Zombie RPG Flushes Itself Down the Toilet

Ever wonder what happens when a zombie defector with a pop-punk wardrobe tries to save his frozen cheerleader crush by flushing himself down a toilet? That's the gloriously weird setup of Stupid Never Dies, a new action RPG from GPTRACK50, the studio founded by veteran Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. It's out October 21, 2026 on PC and PS5, and it oozes personality from every marker-scribbled pore.

The game's mall hub is a House of Hades-style pit stop where you chat with a were-chihuahua, a gargoyle in a shopping trolley, and your accidentally cryogenically frozen crush. After you've done your admin, you dive into the underworld—via a toilet flush—to see how deep you can go. The zine collage aesthetic is striking: every cutscene and bit of UI looks like a mixed-media shotgun blast of stickers and magazine clippings. Even the theme song is a genuine bop, complete with a music video you can watch from the start menu.

Combat mixes Devil May Cry's aerial hack-and-slash with the ridiculous enemy crowds of Sengoku Basara, plus a whole new vocabulary: Davy Burst, Stupid Parries, Heat Attacks, Instant Skills, Style Eat. The Stupid Parry is a weird twist—Davy dashes into attacks and always takes damage, but a successful parry converts it into recoverable chip damage. Parry into a gold-flashing Heat Attack and you trigger a Stupid Impact, stunning foes and exposing their glowing core so Davy can take a big old bite.

That bite is the game's defining feature: the Style Eat. Chomp a rank-and-file monster and you get a single-use Instant Skill. Bite an elite—werewolf, vampire, fairy—and Davy transforms into a baseball-cap-wearing version of them, gaining a new move set and a random Style Skill. There are 11 Styles total, including the default zombie, each with five possible special abilities. The lich, for example, summons skeletons and can turn them into spinning tops. The character designs for these transformations are an absolute delight.

But here's the catch: not every Style is created equal. Most are slow and ungainly, which makes sense for a golem or cyclops but less so for a floating will-o'-the-wisp or fairy. The merfolk Style lets you swim like a Splatoon Inkling, but only for a couple of seconds before you have to waddle. It's a remarkable amount of variety for a small studio, but it's hard not to conclude GPTRACK50 bit off more than it can chew. The result is a game that's bursting with personality but ends up dead on arrival.

Will you be picking this up when it launches next year, or does the uneven combat put you off? Let us know in the comments!