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Sometimes a trailer doesn’t need to show you anything about the gameplay to do its job. Sometimes, the most important thing is to give you a general vibe of what you’ve got coming. The trailer for Stupid Never Dies is light on gameplay, especially for the first half of its short runtime, but it does a better job of selling the game to me than any gameplay trailer possibly could by promising me the chance to dive into an Avril Lavigne pop punk music video.

Stupid Never Dies was one of the smaller games that snuck its way into The Game Awards 2025. While the world was busy talking about Divinity, the next game from Larian Studios, or the next Star Wars game, I was fascinated by the trailer for Stupid Never Dies. It is bright and colorful and full of early 2000s pop punk energy. If you swapped out the audio with Sk8ter Boi by Avril Lavigne, I don’t think you would notice any difference. It is like someone took all the style of 2012’s Lollipop Chainsaw and turned it to 11.

Here is the thing about trailers: they work best when they are focused on selling you the best bits of the game, and I have no doubt that the best part of Stupid Never Dies is going to be the general vibe it gives off. That music video is slick and sends a clear message – this game is about a guy trying to impress a girl. That, my friends, is a story as old as time if I ever heard one. Everything else, the gore and the colors and the violence, is all secondary to watching these two dumb kids try to figure their feelings out.

The game clearly has style, but it is worth mentioning that the studio behind Stupid Never Dies has some serious undead credentials. GPTRACK50 was founded by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, who worked with Capcom for more than two decades on the Resident Evil series. He also served as a producer on the Dino Crisis and Devil May Cry games. These kinds of action RPGs are his bread and butter, so I don’t think this is going to be a case of all style and no substance, even if the substance isn’t in this trailer.

It isn’t even that the Stupid Never Dies trailer gives away much of the plot. We know, from the description on the Steam page, that it follows a zombie named Davy who finds himself going on a journey of self-improvement to save a human girl who has been frozen in the undead world. That journey is quite literal, as it looks like the gameplay mechanics for Stupid Never Dies will require Davy to add parts of enemies to himself to upgrade his abilities. He’s gonna end up as an amalgamation of everything he’s had to overcome to win his girl’s heart, which is the kind of metaphor I can get behind. Bonus points if he changes himself so much that she doesn’t recognize him to really hammer home what is happening because subtext is for cowards.

I really can’t say if the action-focused combat of Stupid Never Dies is going to be my thing. The small amount of gameplay that we do see feels like an early draft for what GPTRACK50 is going for. It isn’t as smooth or as frantic as I’d like. Still, the splashes of color really pop against the grim, spooky background, and I’m absolutely sold on this Lollipop Chainsaw fever dream that we’re meant to be getting next year as long as it only looks like it came from the early 2000s and doesn’t play like it.

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