Zombie games have been done to death, literally. Every few months another one shuffles onto our screens promising a new spin on the apocalypse, but after decades of outbreaks, infected cities and gloomy survival horror, it's getting harder to surprise anyone.
So when Stupid Never Dies turned up at The Game Awards in December, I, like many, was wowed, because GPTRACK50's debut game doesn't look anything like the usual zombie games we’ve become used to. It's loud, bright and proudly weird, throwing together comic book exaggeration, skate culture, chunky character designs, graffiti, punk fashion and monsters that somehow look both disgusting and oddly lovable. The trailers almost feel like someone dared the artists to use every colour left on the palette.
That's exactly the reaction the team was hoping for, shares art director Gensa Kitanaka through a translator, saying, "We wanted players to think, 'What on earth is this?'". Interestingly, fear wasn't the goal; Stupid Never Dies isn’t a game designed to terrify. Yes, there are zombies – and werewolves, goblins, vampires – but the team wanted players to notice the game's energy first, and then embrace horror weirdness.
How Stupid Never Dies became a love letter to weird ideas
That thinking runs through the whole of the game’s development. You play as Davy, an underdog zombie who's more interested in smashing monsters than worrying about becoming one. He collects outrageous weapons, transforms into hulking creatures including werewolves, vampires, cyclopes and golems, and barrels through levels with the kind of reckless enthusiasm that feels increasingly rare in modern action games. Even the food has personality – one beautifully rendered burger exists simply because Davy loves burgers, and the photo used for it was apparently taken by Kitanaka's wife.
The game's visual style came from two words scribbled down at the very beginning of development: ‘zombie’ and ‘punk’. That sounds simple enough until you hear how GPTRACK50 actually tackled it. Rather than just opening Pinterest boards or digging through reference books as usual, the team started by asking themselves a surprisingly basic question: what, actually, is punk?
"We defined both punk and zombies from scratch," the translator explains. The game’s development team literally listed everything that makes up punk – the fashion, the badges, the pins, the attitude – then did exactly the same with zombies, writing down every visual cue they associated with the genre before mixing the two together to see what happened.
It's such an old-school design exercise that it almost feels refreshing. Instead of copying other games, they stripped two familiar ideas back to their ingredients and built something from there.
You can see that thinking throughout Stupid Never Dies, in its lively characters that don't settle for familiar stereotypes. Dr Frank looks exactly how you'd expect a videogame scientist to look, right down to the white lab coat, then you notice his beard has been braided for absolutely no sensible reason. Kitanaka says every character needed some small twist players wouldn't have seen before, something that makes them stop for half a second and look again.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that those characters weren't originally created by artists at all. Studio head Kobayashi explains that GPTRACK50 was still a tiny studio when development began and didn't yet have a dedicated art team. Instead, designers and engineers built the story first, figuring out who these characters were before artists ever started drawing them. The visuals grew out of the narrative rather than the other way around.
A game that bucks modern trends
That willingness to ignore convention doesn't stop with the artwork. Modern action games have become obsessed with timing. Perfect parries. Dodge windows. Waiting for the right opening. It’s something we see everywhere, whether it's 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.
