In short
*Stupid Never Dies*, the zombie-punk action RPG roguelite revealed at The Game Awards 2025 and out on 21 October on PC and PlayStation 5, turns an abandoned mall into a hub and a monster dungeon into a timed ten-minute dive. This review covers its first four hours: Davy’s story and the frozen Julia, the eleven-style transformation system, the Stupid Parry and bite-based combat, receipts, OT Parts, the mall’s shops, and an art direction and soundtrack that make the whole thing cohere.
Story, systems, aesthetics and music: what’s in Stupid Never Dies from The Game Awards teaser to Julia waking up
When I first saw Stupid Never Dies I didn’t understand much of it, but I was more curious than confused. It was the pre-show of The Game Awards 2025: what appeared on screen wasn’t really a trailer, it was a pop-punk music video with two gorgeous leads, a catchy song and incredible visuals. Nobody explained what the game was, and for a while I thought it was a rhythm game. What stuck with me most was Davy, both as a character type and for the look: a new generation of urban street punk, baby-faced and with a very stylish outfit.
The rest arrived at a leisurely pace: the gameplay trailer in March, the release window in June, the First Bite demo in September. The game comes out on 21 October on PC and PlayStation 5. Even back then the demo felt generous to me; now I know it showed a very small slice of what’s inside. Moving on to the full game is easy: you just open the full version and find your latest progress from the demo already saved.
There’s also a question of order. In Stupid Never Dies most of what matters happens between one dive and the next: runs, the hub, materials that pile up slowly. So as not to throw everything into one pot, I’ve split this piece into four blocks: story and characters, gameplay, the shops in the mall, and finally aesthetics and music.
The world after KOM
The world of Stupid Never Dies is inhabited by monsters. KOM – the King of Monsters – declared war on humanity and wiped out 98% of it in less than a month. When the monsters left the surface, the zombies were what remained: human corpses used as cannon fodder during the conflict, sent to the front line with no say in the matter.
Davy is one of them, and he’s no better off than the others: he sits at the bottom of the hierarchy. Monsters find him too human, humans find him not human enough, and neither world wants him back. He fled the battlefield in a panic and hid in a shopping mall, where at some point, inside a freezer, he finds love. Since then his life has been a routine of checks on the freezer and aimless laps around the mall with its shutters down.
Then one day, looking for something to eat that wasn’t human flesh – having promised “his girl” that he would no longer direct his devouring intentions at human beings – he finds an egg, strange and shiny, which he will later discover is something else entirely. He wolfs it down, and right after that an old half-robot turns up shouting: that mouthful contained unfathomable power, the same kind of power KOM used to wipe out humanity. That’s where everything starts: if Davy eliminates KOM and takes his Overtech, he’ll be able to thaw his ice girl, and above all he’ll help restore humanity, which he has not the slightest interest in. Still, if it means saving his love, he reluctantly yet stubbornly accepts the cause.
The girl in the freezer
Until she wakes up, Julia, Davy’s fabled frozen girl, is a body curled up in the freezer of the ice cream parlour. The game doesn’t hide the unease of the situation, but it doesn’t turn it into morbidity either: it treats it with a clumsy tenderness, the same tenderness that marks Davy’s every gesture.
Two channels give her substance. The first is the Kitsch Monster tablet, which on one side collects the recovered data – the girl’s social posts and her mail, with glitches corrupting the characters as if the archive had been reassembled piece by piece – and on the other holds Davy’s Diary. What tells her story are the posts: the one where she boasts about her grandfather the marksman and his medals, the one where she despairs over a professor and an exam she has to pass if she wants to go to New York, and then Bruce the dog, the little nephew she’s very attached to, the trips to the mountains, the ring with the blue stone that belonged to her grandmother, which her father handed over two years late relative to the twenty promised because she’s already twenty-two. That’s where the game gives her a name.
The second channel is presents. Every time you come back from the dungeon with something she might like – necklaces, rings, shoes – you hand it over through the Gift List, and the cell comes alive: the glass heart floating in front of her fills with pink liquid and the game shows a memory: a yellowed Polaroid with the faces of the two of them cut out and glued on top, surrounded by marker-pen hearts and torn stickers.
The “couple” memories Davy imagines are soaked in ironically stereotyped romance. Which highlights how little life experience the protagonist has, giving him an innocence that is at times touching, at times irritating.
In my demo preview I read a double marginality in Davy – a zombie among monsters, a deserter among zombies. With more hours of play behind me, that reading becomes the engine of the story: Davy belongs to neither world and doesn’t want to belong to the new one, which he considers an empty promise.
The mall crowd
The abandoned shopping mall, the Mall, is the game’s second protagonist. The game builds it piece by piece, and every shop has its own function and its own look. The people who live there – and work there, or would like to come back to work there – are just as distinctive.
Doc (Dr. Frank Steiner) is the scientist with robotic parts and a long braided blond beard, the man who gave Davy the job of saving the world, whose lab is carved out of an industrial laundry. He describes himself, without modesty, as the supreme intellect of humanity. From him come the style ability badges and the Frank’s Database at Jupiter Target.
Acelino is the chihuahua-man (he insists on pointing out he is not a werewolf) who runs Ink on the Brain, a tattoo studio that is really a mechanical surgery workshop: he’s the one who grafts OT parts into Davy’s body. He’s characterised by the swagger of a self-declared playboy, with his stories about Emily the cocker spaniel and Anna the Samoyed, and by an attitude that seems impatient, above all towards Davy.
Bessie is the zombie biker at the neon-green stand, and she brings Davy back to the surface at the end of a run on Dullahan’s bike, tuned by Doc to over 400 horsepower; unlike Acelino, she treats Davy with care and a friendly tone, also because by now they belong to the same species.
Goyle is the stone gargoyle who can’t move on his own but sees and hears for miles, parked in a shopping trolley in the Security Room, among monitors, candles and a chalk circle.
Mino, the ice cream man, is mostly a function for now, but his shop is quite iconic: the ice cream machine has bloodstains on its casing and a knife stuck in the swirl of cream, and the contrast between the sweet and the splatter is perfectly in keeping.
Outside the group are the two strangest. Bob Dullahan, the headless knight who proclaims himself Knight of Freedom and sings verses about a maiden of inestimable worth, about the sun he no longer fears and about the wind that grins twice: a character defined by a romantic obsession and an almost philosophical contempt for corpses that ask to live; and Phoenix, whose cosmic carelessness is described, without beating around the bush, as stupidity.
Drugoya and the Four Generals
KOM – whom Dullahan calls Drugoya – moves between layers at random, turns a portion of each into a dungeon and keeps it under control in person, with replicas of his own brain installed in the structure. Goyle and Doc supply the geography: the dungeon is both a tunnel connecting the layers and a complex nest, and its expansion isn’t simply a land grab. The real goal, according to Dullahan, is to reach the central layer of the Earth, the source of all layers, and devour Gaia’s Core. Destroying human society isn’t enough for KOM: he wants to eat the planet.
Around this threat a hierarchy is built piece by piece. Almost all monsters obey Drugoya; among them are the Four Generals: Surtr R.S., the Cursed Witch Takiyasha-Hime, Wolfgang the Wolf Chancellor and Duke Dragul the Impaler. They aren’t loyal for the same reason. Surtr worships the strength that beat him once. Dragul got a promise about vampires and the sun in return. Takiyasha carries her father’s curse. Wolfgang bent his pride before something greater. So the werewolf elites are “Wolfgang’s wolves”; the vampires are “Dragul’s servants”; the Harpy Amp explains that the feathers they shed serve as litter for KOM and the four generals.
There’s also the question of the Homunculus. Doc starts from the ouroboros, from the bones reduced to ashes that supposedly hold the secret of immortality, slides into the uniqueness of every human being and arrives at the point: KOM has duplicated the strongest soldiers, so enemies already defeated can reappear in that form. It’s a classic device for the genre, but here it’s also a thematic image: a world where identity is a reproducible commodity, and the only one insisting on the value of a single person is a zombie who has never counted for anything.
After defeating what he believed was KOM, hoping the mission was complete, Davy discovers that it isn’t enough to restore humanity’s intelligence, just as it isn’t enough to save Julia, just as defeating Count Vlad, the second-in-command vampire, whose blood is impure, isn’t enough. So he has to go to Castle Blanc and try to get the Vampire Oil: which only a pureblood like Duke Dragul possesses.
Julia wakes up
After recovering the duke’s pure blood, Doc announces that Julia has woken up. Davy runs to her with hearts coming out of his eyes, and finds her standing, in the red West Coast Sunset Slayers jacket. Julia turns, doesn’t smile, and shoots him in the head.
“And so I took a bullet to the head from my beloved Julia… the love of my undeath.”
Afterwards it’s him who comforts her: the girl is terrified because she fell asleep during the Great War and doesn’t know what happened to the world, and the only one who can explain anything to her is a zombie.
Julia carries the trauma of the war with her. The flight from the monsters, the awareness that she would have died frozen in that cell, and when she wakes up in front of a walking corpse her reaction is that of someone still in the trenches.
Her still half-frozen heart melts at the sight of Acelino in his canine form, and from that moment she stops being a body to be cared for and becomes an ally.
The mall grows in parallel with the dungeon. We get access to the lift that takes us to the second floor, where the Ark Right Cinemas are, the cinema Julia used to go to, the place that replaces the freezer for Davy’s romantic pilgrimages.
Ten minutes of dungeon
Stupid Never Dies is an action RPG roguelite with a hub: you go down, you fight, you collect, you die or you collapse, you come back, you spend, you go down again. That’s the structure; the difference lies in how the game makes each individual piece interesting.
The first strong choice is time. Every dive has a limit, and the countdown on the HUD is handled by a plush bear with the alarm clock on its belly: the green sector of the dial shrinks as the seconds run out. In my dives the timer started at about ten minutes, and it got longer by picking up the Timer Cells scattered across the floors, by biting Cores after a successful Stupid Impact and by stopping at Landing Areas, where the count is suspended. Layer 10 also gives back three minutes, as a board hanging at the Landing Area reminds you.
When the time runs out, though, the game doesn’t throw the player out: Davy enters a weakened and extremely vulnerable state. The real collapse comes when you die: Bessie recovers Davy and takes him back to the mall, with the resulting loss of OT Energy, OT Parts and other items collected since you last left a Landing Area. It isn’t a run reset, then, but giving up what you’d put aside in that stretch of the dive, and it’s a distinction that changes everything: the anxiety is no longer “I don’t want to lose my progress” but “I don’t want to lose what I just picked up”. It’s the right kind of pressure, the kind that keeps the tension up without making you feel punished.
The dungeon’s structure is very readable. Every floor has a door, and the colour tells you where it leads: to a normal floor, to a floor with a Gatekeeper, or to a Landing Area. Gatekeepers are groups of powerful enemies, sometimes a boss, guarding the last floor, and you have to beat them to reach the next Landing Area.
There’s also the abyss: if you fall in you don’t die, you come back on the spot with some recoverable damage on you.
The penalties, though, don’t end there.
Certain layers impose extra penalties, such as the Mephitic Miasma Layers, where Davy fights under harsher conditions but the end-of-layer rewards are better: you get special abilities and Curse Receipts, receipts that give a strong advantage in exchange for a permanent negative effect. The game invites you to weigh risks against benefits, and in fact these are the layers where I took the most risks. Under the Intense Miasma status the hourglass runs faster and the dungeon turns more hostile, with less room for error.
Deciding where to go when you leave a Landing Area is the layer selection: for each destination the game shows depth, suggested level, biome, boss, completion rewards and time of day, because some passives only work at night and the time of day changes how you approach the layer.
The exits, finally, have two different prices. From a Landing Area you choose Back to Mall and return to the shopping centre with everything: OT Energy, OT Gear and every other item collected stay yours, but the next dive starts again from layer 1. Outside Landing Areas, only Leave Dungeon is available, and there the game warns that you lose OT Energy, OT Parts and the other items collected since you left the last Landing Area: the same things a collapse costs you.
The number next to a style isn’t a level: it’s the Style Limit, meaning how many floors you still have left to use it, and it drops with every floor you cross. Next to it is the Sync Level, which goes up every time you get the same style and boosts its bonuses, and the interesting thing is that those bonuses apply even when that style isn’t the active one: turning into something new doesn’t erase what you’ve already learned.
Bite, Rip, Rise
The heart of combat is biting, and it’s a resource to manage. Attacks fill the Bite Gauge, the five-notch bar with the skull and shark fins at the bottom centre: when the meter is full you can chomp, and every bite uses one notch and gives back all the recoverable damage accumulated, plus a share of health. This is where the system ties into the Stupid Parry, because the damage you take while parrying isn’t lost, only postponed, and biting is how you take it back.
You can also eat the Core of defeated enemies, which gives a good dose of health and a different bonus depending on the type of creature: Instant Skills from weak enemies, styles from elites, Boss Receipts from bosses. Boss Receipts are the special dishes at Bessie Burger, and they later let you choose powerful receipts when you bite the cores of other bosses. This is the Style Eat system, which turns every fight into an opportunity for a build as well.
Biting an elite’s core without killing it doesn’t give full health, extra time and experience. What you get depends on the type of creature.
The Stupid Parry works the opposite way to what you’d expect: the damage you take doesn’t vanish, it becomes recoverable, and the health bar never drops to zero. The flip side is that recoverable damage, if you don’t eat it, eventually turns real.
The game, though, has two ways of taking away your sense of being invincible. When an enemy glows yellow it’s about to launch a heat attack: there the parry works, and if you time it right you open the window for the Stupid Impact, the counterattack that changes shape depending on the active style. When instead it flashes red, the attack is an overheat attack, and no parry will save you: if it lands, it hurts for real and eats your recoverable damage too.
I’ll add that some enemies have proper weak points: hitting them does more damage than attacking elsewhere, and the number that appears is the immediate reward for aiming well.
Enemies, then, aren’t interchangeable targets. Skeletons have no flesh, so biting them doesn’t give health back. The Skeleton Gold carries valuable items, but after a while it runs away, so it has to be taken down first. Lichs can give Resurrection to other enemies, who come back with their health restored: leave them to it and the fight drags on forever. Snow Fairies create ice crystal barriers, and they have to be destroyed if they block your way.
The bosses all have an exclusive mechanic. Surtr R.S. builds up a magma level that gives him new attacks and surrounds him with fire as he strikes, and the only way to bring it down is to freeze him. The Afreet generates gravity spheres that hold Davy in place and stop him moving, and to get out you have to fight carefully, not run away. The Harpy Amp fires feather volleys as heat attacks, and the Stupid Parry sends them straight back. The Wyvern, finally, can be ridden: you jump into its tornado, rise into the air and hit it in the face for heavy damage.
Status ailments don’t just take away health points, and resistance varies from enemy to enemy and from style to style, so studying them is how you get the upper hand. It works the other way too: an offensive damage buff strengthens whoever receives it, and it can end up on the enemies.
Burn is damage over time, the most predictable of the group. Freeze stiffens the target and leaves it defenceless, and you break out faster by hammering the movement commands. Shock lengthens ability recovery times and can make enemies lose equipment or disable their special moves, and the initial jolt interrupts whatever action is in progress. Then there’s poison, which has a peculiarity: Poison and its nastier version, Deadly Poison, can only be inflicted by Zombie Davy, which makes it the one style that pays off by staying in its base form instead of transforming. The second adds periodic reactions that freeze enemies in place, and Davy is immune to both.
No Appetite reduces the healing Davy gets from biting. In a game where eating is survival, removing appetite is the most elegant way to put you in trouble. And the list doesn’t end there: there’s Fragility, which increases damage taken and can make an otherwise survivable hit lethal; Dissolution, which makes hit targets stagger more easily and therefore harder to respond; Rot, Blindness, Bind, Fatigue, Amnesia, and on the other side Regeneration, Resurrection and the boosts to resistance and stagger.
Styles and passives
The game has eleven styles: Zombie, Werewolf, Harpy, Golem, Vampire, Will-o’-the-Wisp, Cyclops, Snow Fairy, Merfolk, Lich and Demon. So far I’ve unlocked eight.
Zombie is the starting point: on the surface he’s a shambling nobody, in the dungeon the miasma activates his monstrous cells and boosts his speed and agility. The Werewolf is the one I most enjoy playing: claws, wall jumps, last-instant dodges, exploiting openings in enemy defence. The Lich is the most tactical, because it commands skeletons: enemies killed with the scythe become sacrifices that summon allies, the summon limit rises with level (six at 3, seven at 5) and the passives boost skeleton health at night, let you pass through sealed portals and keep Davy suspended, immune to elemental pools and ground attacks. The Harpy flies and fights at range with exploding feathers. The Cyclops is the slowest and heaviest, and rewards taking hits, because its strength grows with damage taken. The Will-o’-the-Wisp makes Davy spectral, without a lower half: he floats over traps and avoids damage. The Snow Fairy freezes enemies and absorbs the cold to boost sword attacks. The Vampire commands bats and needs blood, but the memorable detail is another one: Davy isn’t used to giving orders, so his requests to the bats come out as timid “pleases”.
Every style has a Style Skill and an action tree that opens level after level: the Lich, for example, has seven levels with a normal staff attack, a special scythe attack and progressive skeleton upgrades. Passives change the way you cross a floor: the Werewolf’s Wall Jump opens otherwise unreachable passages, the Lich’s Floater makes whole categories of traps harmless. The real depth of the system lies in the combination of active style, passives and bonuses.
My order of preference, for what it’s worth so far: Werewolf ahead of everyone, then Cyclops and Snow Fairy tied, then Harpy and Vampire, and the other three at the bottom. The Lich is objectively very powerful and the summoning is a spectacle, but it’s a style that “shuts down all bodily functions and dulls all desires”, and Davy comments on it with a “Handy as hell! But boring as hell” that’s hard not to share.
Receipts: rarity and choices
Receipts are what builds the run, much more than styles do. At the end of a layer, and at other reward moments, three come out of Bessie Burger: long paper, faded stamp, barcode at the bottom and the words “THANKS FOR CHOOSING BESSIE BURGER / NO TIP, NO SERVICE”. You pick one. Every receipt has a rarity (common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary: white-grey, green, blue, violet/magenta and orange paper), a category (Tech, Defence, Attack, Special, Agility) and an effect with the values highlighted in pink.
What makes the system interesting is that the effects aren’t generic. There’s the receipt that raises the crit rate of every attack type, the one that speeds up how the bite bar fills, the one that boosts hits while airborne, the one that makes enemies drop more OT Energy, the one that adds defence against bosses and the one that shortens Style Skill recovery when you land a crit. The interesting thing is that they stack, and one run differs from another by the combination that came up and the one you chose to keep.
There’s also a reroll, but it’s a resource and not a habit: the chances to regenerate the choice are limited and you earn them as you go. Choosing among three receipts when you’d like all three is, in miniature, everything a roguelite does.
OT Parts
Acelino handles the other half of the growth: OT Parts, the overtechnology Davy steals in the dungeon and the tattooist turns into wearable equipment. Four slots – head, right arm, left arm, legs – with rarity inherited from the parts used to develop them. Rarity also decides how many abilities a piece carries: from the white one-star card with no passives up to the orange five-star with three lines of bonuses, with power values (PWR) climbing sharply. In my game the best pieces were all three-star, with PWR between 102 and 169, and no epic or legendary: the sense of scarcity is there, and so is the awareness that the catalogue is much bigger than what I’ve seen.
OT abilities come in three types: active, triggered by the player; passive, which activate on their own; automatic, which fire under certain conditions. Active ones change the way you hold the field – Gatling Barrage from the rotating Barrel that sprays a burst at several enemies in front of Davy, Homing Missiles from the Missile Pod, Charging Bladefall with the greatsword slash in a straight line – while automatic ones are more situational and more characterful: Shock Wave from the Lapis Lazuli releases a shockwave when you’re on the ground, Star Mine Barrage from the Bourbon head fires fireworks when you’re hit by a status ailment.
The risk was a labyrinth of menus, and instead the game keeps it in check: filters, sorting, favourites (which you can’t turn into scraps), savable presets. And then scraps, which become currency for extra slots and for upgrading Landing Areas. The limit, for now, is that the system is much deeper than what I can exploit: I’ve changed equipment a couple of times, but I haven’t yet had the material for genuinely different builds.
The mall workshops
The dungeon is where you fight; the mall is where you build. And every shop is a small game within the game.
The wishlist
At the Shutter Shop, next to Kitsch Monster, a zombie who looks like a clown keeps an open, blood-stained notebook: it’s the wishlist – Missions, Ingredients/pots and pans, Presents, TickTock Bears, Stun Gun Battery. Every task has a progress bar and a reward. The tasks are never alike: a hundred kilometres travelled in the dungeon, twenty Lich cores devoured, three hundred enemies defeated as a Werewolf, ten attempts at the Viking layer, forty types of receipt unlocked (twenty-two at the moment), but also things you’d never do spontaneously – twenty turrets in a single dive, two hundred stupid parries, enemies knocked into the abyss or killed using environmental hazards.
Tasks reward the use of styles (pushing you to try forms you’d otherwise ignore), environmental mechanics and boss cores.
From the same counter come the two present channels: the collection for Julia and the TickTock Bear skins. The bears belong to different series (Animal, Sports, Monster, Glitzy, Musician, Freaky) and unlock by completing tasks or as a gift from Doc; you equip them at the DJ table, and the Standard one is the first to end up on the turntable.
The glass heart and the Davy Burst
Julia’s frozen heart fills with Davy’s love. That love is made of presents that our hero collects and brings back after a successful run.
So you find them in the dungeon or get them from tasks. Every present raises the “power of love” and gives back hearts, which you spend in the Davy Burst Loveforge, where you can upgrade the Davy Burst: attack power, damage resistance, duration, charge speed, speed and cooldown reduction.
The Davy Burst is a temporary condition – rather short, which is why it’s worth increasing its duration and power – in which Davy gains a super-powered state capable of dealing considerable damage and with very high defence, and you get there through a series of repeated bites.
Mino’s ice cream
Mino’s Ice Cream is where the boss giblets end up, divided into red, blue and yellow. Each colour has its own separate menu.
The red menu works on offensive power: Stupid Counter power, cooldown reduction for active OT abilities and Style Skills, stronger status ailment buildup and Style Skill power. The blue one is defensive and regenerative: shorter duration for debuffs you suffer, healing from biting, defence, buff duration and bite bar buildup. The yellow one is the most interesting, because it steps outside combat: discount on boost pits, more Skeleton Gold encounters, wishlist expansion, more OT Energy and dungeon timer extension, which starts at +30 seconds and can reach +45.
The ceilings are high and clearly stated: every entry goes up to rank 8, and depending on the entry the maximum runs from +25 to +100%, with the pit discount dropping as far as 75%. The “LIMITED TIME ONLY” on the sign is a fake promo that adds another layer of parody.
The technical point worth flagging is that these upgrades are permanent and concern base abilities, not individual styles: they’re therefore the part of the system that matters most in the long run, because it doesn’t reset after a run. It’s the classic meta-progression of roguelite structures, but declinated in such a lunatic way that it doesn’t feel generic.
A note on the cost, because it isn’t trivial: the ice creams are paid for with giblets, and giblets only come from bosses, so permanent growth passes through the combat the game considers most demanding. It’s no accident that the yellow menu is the one with the most useful entries outside the dungeon: the longer timer and the extra Skeleton Gold encounters are a tasty reward.
The garage, Goyle and Frank’s database
Bessie’s garage, next to Bessie Burger, is where you spend scraps and OT Energy: boost pits, Landing Area outposts, next-layer bonuses (+16 that become +23), Davy Burst charge from 120% to 150%, drop rate from 110% to 120%. The Landing Area shop inside the dungeon is the temporary version of the same thing: you pay in OT Energy and the bonuses last for a single layer, which makes those 2,335 OT Energy points a decision to take quickly.
Goyle closes the circle: in the Security Room you check the results of the last dive: layer reached, play time, time limit, length of each floor, enemies defeated by type, cores eaten by style, OT Parts by slot and rarity, giblets, presents.
Doc, finally, is the librarian of all this: in Frank’s Database at Jupiter Target, among floppy disks and a CRT monitor, you can look up styles, weak enemies, elites, bosses and layers. The database also unlocks statues, pins, badges and stickers based on progress, and the statues we find displayed, as we earn them, in a specific wing of the mall: the Museum.
Graphics and music
The aesthetics deserve a separate discussion, because it’s the part of the game that struck me most and that I consider the best made, given that even the gameplay has no real flaws and that I consider Stupid Never Dies a ludic experience in the strictest sense of the term.
A game of this level, with this attention to detail and this fluidity of movement, runs on Unreal Engine 5, and the credit goes to an art direction that has done excellent work. The interface is curated to a maniacal degree and doesn’t betray the visual taste of the whole work at all, in fact it enhances it.
Colour does half the work. The mall is all blue and orange neon reflecting off the octagonal floor, shutters down and signs still lit: Jupiter Target, Kitsch Monster, Bessie Burger, Ink on the Brain, Mino’s Ice Cream, Bank of Rich. Every shop has its own light – the acid green of the burger place, the pink and orange of the tattoo studio, the yellow and violet of the comic shop – recognisable and memorable. The environments are full of objects: hung bears, boxes, cables, monitors, trolleys, mirrors. A density the developers admitted they had to rein in more than once. The game is extremely crowded, but readable.
The zombie punk choice is enriched by contemporary details that make it even more peculiar. Davy is, in essence, a perfect mix of a Seventies punk teenager dropped into the present day, where elements of rap/trap aesthetics complete the picture of a character who is in fact an outsider with no ties to time or space.
The worry I had after the demo was about density: too many effects, too many numbers on screen, and the risk that combat would become unreadable. Playing it, that worry dissolved. The graphics are the same, but what looked chaotic from outside, with a controller in hand composes into a harmonious whole in which every signal finds its place. It’s still a system that asks you to aim manually, and against flyers the absence is felt. Art direction, though, which could have been the main obstacle to clarity, works the other way and in favour of readability: skull markers with the level, dedicated boss bars, objectives with a count of enemies still to kill, large and colourful interaction prompts.
At the DJ table
I had very high expectations for the soundtrack and they were more than met: the whole thing is energetic, shifts register between the gloomy prologue and the light-hearted action without losing coherence, and accompanies combat without ever overpowering it.
The music, what’s more, can be collected. At the DJ table in Kitsch Monster you manage the tracks obtained by defeating bosses: there’s a list of Battle Tracks, there are remixes – Inferno Titan (Davy Remix), Climb or Die – you put playlists together and change the TickTock Bears. The turntable is at once a music player, a collection display and a tool for customising the hub.
Collecting, in short, gives weight to something that would otherwise stay in the background: a track becomes something to find, a boss becomes a record, a remix becomes a reward.
Four hours aren’t enough
By four hours I was already planning the next dive. For a roguelite that’s the most concrete proof the game works: it involved and entertained me enough to have me thinking about the next run while I was still finishing the current one. Put that way it sounds like little, and maybe someone reading a review expects a sharper verdict than that. The comparison that comes most naturally to me, though, is with Hades, which this game shares in particular the way it organises desire: a dive lasts the right amount of time, dying is a passage and not a wall, and coming back to the hub is almost always good news, because there’s something to spend, a diary to update, a wall of Polaroids to look at.
The complexity, on paper, seemed a bit unmanageable to me: seven ways of dealing damage, eleven styles with passives and level trees, receipts in five rarities, two currencies inside the dungeon and two outside, plus tasks, presents and ice creams. But during the experience, which has a very well designed progression, everything becomes clear and applicable. Things arrive one at a time, when you need them, and every shop offers its own explanation, above all thanks to the tips you can access at any moment.
Irony, then, is the thread that gives the project coherence: it was blindingly obvious from the teaser, and it runs through the whole game. What strikes you is how it’s dosed. The names of the materials you collect in the dungeon, the ice cream made with boss giblets, the gargoyle in the shopping trolley, the bear with the alarm clock on its belly that serves as a timer. The humour that often and gladly takes over Davy never makes him lose his dignity as a loser, with the jokes circling him without sweeping him away, and never really puts him on the pillory.
Under the jokes, though, something darker begins to show, even if I haven’t yet worked out how deep the game wants to go. Davy’s double marginality, the monster hierarchy replicating the human one, humans used as guinea pigs and then exterminated, the Homunculus as a reproducible commodity, KOM’s promise of a “new world” that is only a copy of the old one. My suspicion is that the serious turn will come when we least expect it.
With only four hours of play there are some limits I’ll be filling in as soon as I can. I’m missing three styles out of eleven, ten bosses out of thirteen, half the layers, and the feeling is that the best is still ahead. Some systems, like presents and the Loveforge, I’ve reconstructed more by deduction than by explanation, and the lack of a lock-on remains a detail to keep an eye on when fights get more crowded.
The story looked simple and linear: the hero – however odd – who has to save his beloved by defeating the villain of the day.
But Julia is no longer a girl asleep in a freezer: she shot the protagonist in the head and became an ally, the dungeon keeps expanding and the shopping centre has one more floor. The next dive starts there, and it looks very long and winding still.
Note: this first part of the review is based on the First Bite demo and the first four hours of play, up to Julia waking up. An update will follow soon.
9/10
