12 hours ago
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Love is blind. In Stupid Never Dies, it is also frozen solid and technically dead as Davy, the weakest zombie in monster society, discovers Julia’s body in a shopping centre and falls in love at first sight. He wants to bring her back to life and take her on a date. Unfortunately, that means defeating the King of Monsters (KOM) and accidentally saving humanity along the way.
This is the gloriously ridiculous setup for this forthcoming action RPG from GPTrack50, a new studio founded by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Its world looks much like ours, except that monsters have always been part of everyday life: whereas we might find a bear in the mountains or a stray dog in the woods, residents here encounter werewolves and zombies.
That uneasy normality ends when KOM crushes civilisation and leaves only 2% of humanity alive. Davy begins even lower down the social ladder. Zombies, says Kobayashi, are “the weakest of the weak”. But eating a mysterious egg gives this particularly unimpressive corpse the power to fight back.
Because Davy is already dead, combat throws out the usual need for self-preservation. Forget defence: guarding and dodging are pushed aside in favour of “attacking, attacking, attacking”. Kobayashi describes it as a game made “by the action game lover, for the action gamer”.
Its two main systems make full use of Davy’s unreliable body. He can consume defeated monsters, steal their skills and transform into creatures including a werewolf, vampire or harpy. The “body hack” mechanic goes further, allowing players to replace his head, arms and legs with equipment. Attach a sword to an arm and Davy gains sword attacks; fit a gun and he starts shooting. Being undead has never looked so practical.
Kobayashi calls the result “funky zombie action”, a phrase coined to give the development team a shared idea of the game’s tone: fast, colourful and darkly funny. It also captures the freedom Kobayashi found after years working on some of the world’s most famous franchises, including Resident Evil and Devil May Cry.
Large franchises bring large audiences and expectations. A new studio making a new IP had neither. As Kobayashi says, “We don’t have a fan yet.” That has allowed its team of around 30 developers, many recruited from companies including Capcom, Konami and Square Enix, to use stranger jokes and sharper humour than they ever could when working on those older series.
The studio itself began almost as scrappily as Davy. In its early months, GPTrack50 had programmers and designers but no artists, so the team bought outside assets to build a rough white-box prototype. Around 20 external companies eventually joined the three-year production, drawn, Kobayashi says, by the chance to create something completely from scratch. He hopes players finish thinking: “This is the experience that I was looking for. This is a new thing.”
Underneath the monster-eating and gun-limbs is a simple underdog story: Davy rises from the bottom of monster society to challenge its king, but he is not driven by glory. Saving the remaining humans is almost incidental, as Kobayashi explains: “He wants to go out for a date [with] this frozen girl.”
Romance isn’t dead; it just needs defrosting.
