- The combat in Stupid Never Dies might look straightforward at first glance, with Davy wielding basic light and heavy attacks plus a few unique specials from equipped items. His attacks, while seemingly slow, pack significant damage that makes even mid-level enemies a good challenge.
- A Roguelike To Die For
- Bizarre Pacing
Stupid Never Dies throws you into a relentless dungeon crawl as a young zombie named Davy, combining stylish action with roguelike unpredictability. How you manage the combat and transformation mechanics can make or break your run, especially as you race against the clock to win the heart of your love.
The combat in Stupid Never Dies might look straightforward at first glance, with Davy wielding basic light and heavy attacks plus a few unique specials from equipped items. His attacks, while seemingly slow, pack significant damage that makes even mid-level enemies a good challenge.
But the real twist comes from its signature Style Eat mechanic. Every time you defeat a non-trivial enemy, you absorb their style—allowing you to transform into that enemy’s form by tapping left or right on the D-pad.
This instantly switches your form and fighting style: you might become a towering powerhouse with slow but devastating blows or an agile ice fairy whose rapid strikes freeze foes solid. Each transformation carries unique attacks and passive buffs, deeply altering your combat rhythm.
It pays to regularly absorb different styles even if you don’t use them immediately, as they boost your stats in subtle ways. The variety keeps combat fresh and rewards aggressive play, encouraging you to feast on a variety of enemies to stay powerful.
The power of the style you gain is directly tied to the enemy’s strength. Taking down a minor werewolf gives you a weak version of its style, but hunting a stronger variant bestows a formidable set of attacks and buffs that can clear rooms quickly.
However, these transformations aren’t permanent. Each style lasts for only three dungeon floors, forcing you to frequently adapt and test new abilities. This time limit keeps gameplay dynamic and prevents any single strategy from becoming too dominant.
While it may seem frustrating at first, the style expiration encourages you to experiment and take risks. Each floor completed lets you choose to proceed cautiously or leap ahead, gambling on your current style’s strength and your own skill to handle tougher foes swiftly.
For example, if you’re wielding a potent harpy style with ranged damage, don’t hesitate to jump to a boss floor several levels above. It’s rewarding to see how far your current abilities can carry you and it shortens run times dramatically.
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
​Now that we’ve gone over the base gameplay and combat mechanics of Stupid Never Dies, let’s take a few minutes to look over the game’s roguelike mechanics and the gameplay loop which makes this game really stand out amongst other games in the same genre.
You’ll likely have noticed that during my praise of Stupid Never Dies’ gameplay, I put quite a heavy emphasis on how much time actions take and how you’ll want to style-eat enemies so you can clear floors faster. That’s because this game has a time limit that is always counting down whenever you’re in a dungeon.
Each time you challenge the dungeon, you’ll only have a few minutes to clear it. If your timer runs out, you’ll immediately begin to take a huge amount of passive damage and die within seconds. So make sure you rush through each floor as quickly as you can.
There are ways to mitigate the game’s time limit, of course. Every ten layers you clear in the dungeon will give you an extra 3:00 of time, further encouraging you to skip as many layers as you can to speed toward the end. If that isn’t enough, each layer also has a reward chest at the end, and one of these rewards is an extra minute of time.
Losing a run because you run out of time is honestly something that rarely happens, as long as you’re always moving forward, of course, but the mere presence of the timer and knowing that there is an ever-looming threat makes for great motivation to always rush through each room at high speeds and consider if you really should be killing every enemy for the EXP.
Grabbing that EXP will always be tempting though, as not only will leveling up make your current run go by easier, but it will also make you stronger in all future attempts thanks to the game’s incredibly intriguing level-up system.
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
While the gameplay of Stupid Never Dies is fantastic once the game finally gets rolling, it takes quite a bit of time for it to actually get to that point due to the game’s unfortunate pacing issues. The opening hours of the game can be a bit of a slog to get through because of how they’re structured.