Stupid Never Dies: ex-Devil May Cry devs condense RPG progression to 20-minute dungeon runs

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Progression that's too slow can make any game feel plodding, especially action-RPGs. The devs behind Stupid Never Dies, a flashy, zombie-themed take on the genre, specifically made stat increases extremely quick to avoid such a pratfall.

"Usually action-RPGs take like maybe 30-to-40 hours to finish all the progression and beat the final boss," Eiichiro Sasaki, the director of Stupid Never Dies, told GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2026 .

"But in this game, conceptually, what we wanted to do was to bring that progression into more condensed time," he continues. "Let's say 15-20 minutes of each dungeon dive, you feel something, you feel the progression."

That's a much shorter window of time. The game is advertised as having "blazing fast growth," and 20 minute bursts that are consistently punching up your abilities would be in line with that.

For me, there's potential here to go too far the other way, where the adrenaline of playing runs out relatively quickly. But that's where the acumen of the studio GPTRACK50 comes in. Sasaki himself directed Resident Evil 6 and worked on the Outbreak games, while the company's founder, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, helped make the OG Devil May Cry , and a bunch of other fine-tuned releases, including the underrated P.N.03.

These devs know what they're doing when it comes to pacing. The central conceit of Stupid Never Dies is lead character Davy is undead, and he has to defeat waves of monsters to get stronger. It's bright and loud and very much my thing.

Sasaki considers it "totally new as an idea," and he believes the team "are successfully able to deliver" this higher-octane progression well. We'll find out when Stupid Never Dies comes out on October 21.

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