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Zombie video games have been accomplished to loss of life, actually. Every few months one other one shuffles onto our screens promising a brand new spin on the apocalypse, however after many years of outbreaks, contaminated cities and gloomy survival horror, it is getting tougher to shock anybody.
So when Stupid Never Dies turned up at The Game Awards in December, I, like many, was wowed, as a result of GPTRACK50’s debut sport would not look something like the standard zombie video games we’ve turn out to be used to. It’s loud, vivid and proudly bizarre, throwing collectively comedian e book exaggeration, skate tradition, chunky character designs, graffiti, punk trend and monsters that someway look each disgusting and oddly lovable. The trailers nearly really feel like somebody dared the artists to make use of each color left on the palette.
That’s precisely the response the workforce hoped for, shares artwork director Gensa Kitanaka by way of a translator, saying, “We wanted players to think, ‘What on earth is this?'”. Interestingly, worry wasn’t the purpose; Stupid Never Dies isn’t a sport designed to terrify. Yes, there are zombies – and werewolves, goblins, vampires – however the workforce needed gamers to note the sport’s vitality first, after which embrace horror weirdness.
How Stupid Never Dies grew to become a love letter to bizarre concepts
That pondering runs by way of the entire of the sport’s growth. You play as Davy, an underdog zombie who’s extra curious about smashing monsters than worrying about changing into one. He collects outrageous weapons, transforms into hulking creatures together with werewolves, vampires, cyclopes and golems, and barrels by way of ranges with the form of reckless enthusiasm that feels more and more uncommon in trendy motion video games. Even the meals has character – one fantastically rendered burger exists just because Davy loves burgers, and the picture used for it was apparently taken by Kitanaka’s spouse.
The sport’s visible fashion got here from two phrases scribbled down on the very starting of growth: ‘zombie’ and ‘punk’. That sounds easy sufficient till you hear how GPTRACK50 really tackled it. Rather than simply opening Pinterest boards or digging by way of reference books as typical, the workforce began by asking themselves a surprisingly fundamental query: what, really, is punk?
“We defined both punk and zombies from scratch,” the translator explains. The sport’s growth workforce actually listed every little thing that makes up punk – the style, the badges, the pins, the perspective – then did precisely the identical with zombies, writing down each visible cue they related to the style earlier than mixing the 2 collectively to see what occurred.
It’s such an old-school design train that it nearly feels refreshing. Instead of copying different video games, they stripped two acquainted concepts again to their elements and constructed one thing from there.
You can see that pondering all through Stupid Never Dies, in its vigorous characters that do not accept acquainted stereotypes. Dr Frank seems to be precisely the way you’d anticipate a videogame scientist to look, proper all the way down to the white lab coat, then you definitely discover his beard has been braided for completely no smart motive. Kitanaka says each character wanted some small twist gamers would not have seen earlier than, one thing that makes them cease for half a second and look once more.
Perhaps the largest shock is that these characters weren’t initially created by artists in any respect. Studio head Kobayashi explains that GPTRACK50 was nonetheless a tiny studio when growth started and did not but have a devoted artwork workforce. Instead, designers and engineers constructed the story first, determining who these characters have been earlier than artists ever began drawing them. The visuals grew out of the narrative reasonably than the opposite approach round.
A sport that bucks trendy traits
That willingness to disregard conference would not cease with the art work. Modern motion video games have turn out to be obsessive about timing. Perfect parries. Dodge home windows. Waiting for the appropriate opening. It’s one thing we see all over the place, whether or not it is a AAA like AC Black Flag Resynced or upcoming indie Duskfade, but Stupid Never Dies heads in completely the opposite direction because Davy is already a zombie, so why spend half the game worrying about staying alive?
“It’s offence, offence, offence – no defence,” Kobayashi says, describing a combat system built around relentless attacks instead of cautious play.
Even the monster transformations – Davy can turn into classic horror creatures – lean into that philosophy. Kobayashi says his favourite is the werewolf because it’s quick and easy to use, while Kitanaka loves the Cyclops for the simple joy of swinging an enormous weapon at absolutely everything in sight.
Watching the latest trailer, it’s obvious the team weren’t interested in subtlety. Every scene is crammed with colour, oversized silhouettes, chunky animations and environments layered with graffiti, stickers and little visual jokes. It’s busy, but deliberately so, and somehow always readable. According to Kobayashi, the studio set itself one challenge from day one: make something bigger publishers probably wouldn’t. The aim was to create a game with an identity that felt impossible to mistake for anything else.
Kitanaka admits there’s a downside to chasing originality, though. He laughs that artists can disappear “into outer space” once ideas start flowing, pushing concepts further and further until somebody has to drag them back to Earth. In GPTRACK50’s case, that somebody was usually Kobayashi, grounding the art whenever it threatened to become too wild. It’s an honest answer, and probably one plenty of artists will recognise. Originality isn’t about making something strange for the sake of it, or rethinking ‘punk’ because you can; it’s about knowing where to stop, keeping the weird bits that make people smile, and making sure everything still works once the controller is in someone’s hands.
With Stupid Never Dies, GPTRACK50 may have found that balance. More importantly, this new developer has managed something that’s becoming surprisingly rare in games – you look at it and immediately know this game couldn’t really be anything else.
With Stupid Never Dies releases on October 21, 2026, for PC (Steam) and PlayStation 5, now co-published by Sega.
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