If you went back in time and asked my teenage self to picture what video games would look like in 20 years, my vision would likely resemble Stupid Never Dies. In many ways, it feels like the logical evolution of the games I loved as a kid: a colorful brawler with snazzy visuals, a juvenile sense of humor custom-made for a teen boy, and, of course, zombies. But after spending 26 miserable hours with Stupid Never Dies, I’m so glad that video games have mostly moved past my dumbest desires.
Dated doesn’t begin to describe the debut action RPG from GPTRACK50, a new studio founded by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Style points only count for so much in a downright regressive action game that’s saddled with a supremely uncomfortable story, a repetitive faux-roguelike hook, and unresponsive combat that wastes some good RPG depth. It’s the kind of game I might have loved as a kid with a low bar for quality, and one that I’d have to make a lot of excuses for loving as an adult who knows better.
Stupid Never Dies aims to crack the underexplored concept of a video game romcom. It takes place in a dystopian future where a zombie outbreak left humanity vulnerable to a wider monster uprising. Werewolves and vampires inherited the Earth, pushing zombies to the bottom of the social totem pole.
You play as Davy, an undead peon who joins the war against the King of Monsters alongside a resistance group holed up in a mall. But Davy’s real motivation is love. In a story that takes clear notes from zombie romance comedy Warm Bodies, Davy is out to win the affection of a human woman who he has yet to meet.
That’s because the cute blonde-haired girl is dead. Or, she’s at least frozen solid inside the backroom of a mall restaurant. The premise is so tone-deaf that you have to wonder if it was designed to drum up low-hanging controversy in our current culture war era.
It confidently stumbles into a trope first identified by writer Gail Simone in 1999: fridging. The term refers to media’s long history of subjecting female characters to harm and trauma as a means to create high-stakes motivation for a male hero. (The term has its roots in an infamous Green Lantern comic, in which Kyle Rayner discovers his mutilated girlfriend dead inside a refrigerator.) Plenty of games have fallen into the exhaustively documented “woman in refrigerators” trap over the medium’s lifetime, but none as brazenly — and literally — as Stupid Never Dies. Julia, who we come to learn is the human popsicle’s name, has the dishonor of being an object of affection and a damsel at once.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
