When you dive into Stupid Never Dies, the charm of controlling Davy, a zombie battling through a dungeon for love, immediately grabs you. This game blends boss fights with quirky transformations that keep the gameplay fresh. The combat is simple upfront but layered with strategic twists that make attempts feel rewarding rather than repetitive.
Stylish Action
The combat at first glance feels straightforward—basic light and heavy attacks, a few specials tied to your gear, and the occasional bit button. Davy’s moves aren’t the fastest, but their impact packs weight, offering satisfying hits that tear through appropriately leveled foes.
The star feature is the Style Eat mechanic. Defeat mid-level enemies and you absorb their style, letting you transform by pressing left or right on the D-Pad. Suddenly, Davy can become a hulking colossus with slow, devastating blows or an ice fairy who freezes enemies in place. This isn’t just cosmetic: each style has its own attacks and buffs, changing how you approach combat on the fly.
These styles add tactical depth. You're not stuck with one power — absorbing multiple enemy styles even if you don't transform lets you buff Davy’s base stats. The strength of the style you acquire ties directly to your enemy’s power, so the excitement of hunting tougher foes for better abilities keeps the exploration engaging.
The catch? Each style lasts only three dungeon floors before fading, pushing you to constantly experiment and stay on your toes. This limitation surprisingly encourages reckless play, as you race through floors deciding if you want to hold onto a powerful style or gamble with new ones by moving deeper.
These enemy styles come with their own attacks and passive buffs to your base stats as well. So even if you’re not planning to transform into one for your current fight, it’s best to eat as much as you can anyway in order to become stronger.
When deciding your path, choosing to skip floors for a higher level challenge can drastically cut run time and test your skills. Holding onto a strong style, like a harpy’s ranged assault, empowers risky choices and breaks the monotony of backtracking.
The strength of each style you absorb depends on the strength of the enemy you took it from. Sometimes you’ll eat a weak werewolf and get a weak version of the werewolf style in turn, which only has a basic attack and next to no buffs, or you’ll get extremely lucky and encounter an incredibly strong werewolf that will let you wipe out groups of enemies with ease.
Style Eating has one major downside, however: You only have access to each style for 3 floors of the dungeon. Even if you don’t transform into them, the style will vanish after you have progressed three floors. This creates a very satisfying loop where the player is constantly switching into new styles and eating many enemies to gain different transformations every few minutes.
The limited amount of time you have access to each style may sound like a nuisance at first, but it results in something I love: Encouragement of reckless play. Whenever you clear a floor in Stupid Never Dies, you have the option to either travel to the next floor that’s only a slightly higher level than the one you’re on or jump down multiple higher-level floors in order to complete your run quicker.
If I have no strong styles currently absorbed, I tend to play it safe and only move on to floors that are the same level as mine. However, if I have a particularly strong style such as a harpy one with the ability to deal massive damage from a distance, then I’ll gladly travel down to a boss floor that is many levels above me to test my skills and see if I can cut multiple minutes off my run time.
A Roguelike To Die For
Underneath the stylish combat lies a tough roguelike core with a ticking clock that keeps tension high. You only get a few minutes per run to progress through the dungeon—a relentless timer that starts to drain your health rapidly once it hits zero, pushing you to maintain a swift pace.
This countdown isn’t just for pressure; it shapes every decision. Clear ten floors and earn extra time, and each level’s reward chest may grant bonus minutes, subtly encouraging speed runs and floor skipping to optimize each attempt.
Running out of time is rare if you’re diligent about moving forward fast, but it’s an ever-present threat that makes every room feel like a race. This mechanic meshes perfectly with the game’s emphasis on aggressive combat and swift-dash floor movement.
On top of that, experience points carry over between runs in a clever way. Davy may die often, but every failed attempt boosts your EXP multiplier, letting even small enemies grant huge XP on future runs. This system ensures you’re always getting stronger, making challenges more manageable and less punishing.
Leveling up not only smooths out your current run but also arms you better for the next. The upgrade selection screen appears regularly, presenting three choices ranging from passive buffs like more boss damage to active skill swaps that can dramatically alter your playstyle.
Unlike many roguelikes where randomness feels brutal and unfair, Stupid Never Dies balances its RNG with fast initial upgrades. After several runs, you'll start most attempts already equipped with impactful upgrades, allowing immediate clarity about your run’s strengths and what to focus on.
This early power breaks the typical grind and frustration cycle, making the game’s roguelike elements feel refreshing rather than tedious. It’s a neat twist for players, especially those who usually shy away from random-heavy progression systems.
Every time you lose a run in Stupid Never Dies, the game will save a record of how much EXP you earned during that run. Every future run will give you a boost in EXP matching your failed run. An enemy that only gave you, say, 1 EXP during your first run will be giving you 100 EXP by your fifth run.
Davy is an immortal zombie; losing a run is never the end of the world, as you’ll always be growing stronger. It might be discouraging to lose to a boss after spending 10-20 minutes running down to his lair in order to bite him, but knowing that the next time you attempt to fight him you’ll likely be a handful of levels stronger than you were last time has an entrancing effect that makes you want to try again immediately.
After every other level up, the player will have to choose between three different upgrades. If you have played nearly any game released within the past two years, you likely understand how this system works. Some upgrades are passive buffs, like increasing the amount of damage done to bosses, while others are more drastic changes, like switching the active skills in Davy’s zombie form to different ones.
It is no secret that I am generally not a fan of roguelikes, as multiple reviews I have put out this year have showcased that I can be a bit harsh on the genre due to my dislike of the random chance mechanics that tend to make or break runs in these games. Despite that, I really enjoyed the gameplay loop of Stupid Never Dies.
Yes, the game does rely on the same random chance to complete runs that most other games in this genre do, but having it be tied to level-ups when one of the game’s largest mechanics is raising the speed at which you level up leads to an interesting scenario.
Instead of waiting until you’ve completed multiple floors to earn enough upgrades to see if your current run is going to be a good one or if you’ve been wrecked by RNG, you’ll instead receive many upgrades after you’ve defeated the first few enemies (after a few runs of boosting your EXP, of course). Being able to start with multiple upgrades and immediately have a clear idea of what my run will look like and what I should focus on takes away a lot of what usually bugs me about this genre and really increases my enjoyment of the game.
Bizarre Pacing
The main downside is Stupid Never Dies’ uneven pacing early on. The opening hours can drag, feeling like a slog as you slowly unlock the mechanics and ramp up your EXP baseline. It’s a gradual build that may turn off players expecting fast action from the get-go.