Stupid Never Dies Review Stylish Roguelike Combat

Stupid Never Dies drops players into the shoes of Davy, a young zombie battling through an ever-expanding dungeon to reclaim love and power. This action-packed roguelike is all about style, speed, and devouring enemies to gain their powers. It’s a fresh twist on dungeon crawling that’s turning heads for its clever mechanics and pacing.

The heart of Stupid Never Dies lies in its combat, which at first glance feels straightforward. You control Davy wielding basic light and heavy attacks alongside special moves that shift according to equipped items, plus a big button for impactful strikes. While his moves may look slow, each hit lands with surprising force, allowing you to outlast foes on par with your level.

The game’s standout feature is the Style Eat mechanic. When you defeat stronger enemies, you gain the ability to absorb their fighting style, triggered by tapping left or right on the D-Pad.

Instantly, Davy can morph into vastly different forms—whether a hulking colossus whose slowness is balanced by devastating power and knockback, or an agile ice fairy whose rapid strikes charge a freeze meter locking down enemies for massive damage.

Each style brings unique attacks and passive boosts, making it worth devouring as many foes as possible to cycle through forms and experiment with varied playstyles.

The potency of each absorbed style depends entirely on the enemy’s strength. Sometimes you snag a pitiful werewolf copy with weak attacks; other times, a powerful version lets you mow down foes effortlessly.

However, this mechanic comes with a twist: styles expire after three dungeon floors, even if you don’t use them. This ticking timer compels you to switch styles frequently and keep the action dynamic and fast-paced rather than settling into one build.

Playing with this limited-time transformation system encourages bold moves. After clearing a floor, you can choose to progress step-by-step or leap down multiple levels to accelerate the run. That choice hinges heavily on your current style’s strength and your confidence.

When equipped with a strong form like the harpy, which excels at ranged damage, you might dive into challenging boss levels well above your current level, cutting down run times and testing your mastery.

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.

Beyond combat, Stupid Never Dies shines as a roguelike thanks to its intense, rewarding gameplay loop and time management pressure.

Every dungeon run is a race against the clock. You have only minutes to clear floors before the timer forces you to take massive damage and die. This constraint pushes you to blitz through enemies and floors quickly, balancing risk and reward every step.

There are ways to stretch your time: every ten floors you clear adds three bonus minutes, incentivizing skipping floors for speed. Chests at each floor’s end sometimes grant an extra minute as well, rewarding thorough exploration without delaying progress too much.

While running out of time isn’t a frequent threat if you keep moving forward, its presence adds tension that forces you to judge when to fight or flee, keeping gameplay intense and strategic.

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.

Gaining experience isn’t just tempting; it’s essential. Leveling up within runs makes progression smoother, but it also strengthens you across future attempts.

Stupid Never Dies has an intriguing progression system where the EXP you earn in a run carries over to future runs, making enemies grant more experience over time. This steadily powers you up, so dying isn’t a setback but a step toward mastery.

Even after a tough boss defeat, the promise of starting stronger next time creates a compelling urge to play again. It’s a refreshingly fair roguelike progression that softens frustration without removing challenge.

Level ups present players with three upgrade options, ranging from passive buffs to swapping out active skills, similar to many modern roguelikes. This choice adds tactical variety and allows you to tailor Davy’s abilities to your preferred playstyle.

Despite my usual weariness with roguelikes due to reliance on RNG, Stupid Never Dies won me over. The way upgrades unlock quickly after just a few enemies means runs become engaging early, rather than dragging on until you’re lucky enough to get something good.

This early empowerment shifts the pacing positively, giving you a solid sense of direction right away. I found it eliminated the awkward trial-and-error phase where outcomes feel purely chance-based, which is often a sticking point in the genre.

That’s not to say Stupid Never Dies is perfect. The opening hours are a bit slow and can feel like a slog due to how the early game unfolds, testing patience before the full experience clicks.

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.