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If you’re looking for dungeon-crawling-goodness, Stupid Never Dies may be right up your street. With seemingly endless monsters, abilities to find and use, and lots of levelling up to do, there’s something for everyone here, especially Roguelike lovers.
However, not everything is immediately obvious, so we’ve come up with a few tips to make your life easier, and help you get to grips with Stupid Never Dies a little faster.
More Runs = Faster Levelling
It may sound redundant to say, but you may not understand going in to Stupid Never Dies, but it’s a roguelike where you need to play the same dungeons again and again to get better, stronger, faster, and more damaging. Not only that, but the more times you go to the dungeons, the more your experience multiplier increases.
For example, the first time you enter the dungeons, you’ll struggle to get to level 20, but after a few more times, you’ll be hitting level 20 within the opening moments. There’s no such thing as a wasted run, even if you die before accomplishing your mission.
Don’t Walk, Clean
Davy is far quicker in the dungeons than on the surface level. Moving around the mall can be laborious and frustrating in the early moments of the game. Thankfully, hitting left on the d-pad will summon the Mall’s robocleaner, and you’ll be able to scoot about far quicker on this than you would ambling about.
An even quicker method to getting around the mall though, you can hit Square or X when looking at your destination, instantly teleporting yourself there. It’s a time-saver when you’ll be heading to the same shops again and again.
Pick the Right Zombie Skill for the Right Job
You have access to a multitude of skills as you progress, including those of your default zombie style. It starts off as Vomit Spray, but you’ll be able to change that from the receipts you find during your dungeon escapades. Make sure to change it judging by the enemies you’re coming up against; for example, Vomit Spray is not particularly useful on a level with mostly flying enemies, as they’ll fly over it. Pick the right zombie skill for the right job.
Bite Those Cores
One of the core gameplay elements of Stupid Never Dies is constantly defeating enemies and progressing forward, all while inhabiting the styles of some of them. You’ll very quickly realise you can only store two Styles at any one time, and you may think that any others after that are useless, but you’d be wrong. If you have the spare Bite Gauge filled up, you’d be silly not to see what skills the new Style in front of you has on offer.
Mix It Up With Your Styles
Similar to the Zombie Skills tip mentioned above, you’d be best to use different Styles depending on the situation at hand. There’s multiple different Styles you can find and inhabit as you play, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. One of the game’s earliest Styles is the Werewolf, who is quick to move and very good at killing weaker enemies quickly; or the Snow Fairy, a later-game Style that has a huge ice sword, so is good for crowd control. Mix it up with the Styles and don’t get too entrenched on the same one.
Go to Ink and the Body Tattoo Shop and Upgrade Your Body Hacks Regularly
A couple of hours and runs into Stupid Never Dies, you’ll unlock Acelino’s shop, Ink SHOP NAME. Beyond just being the place Davy and Acelino share barbed insults at whatever, in one of the game’s strongest portrayals of friendship, it’s also the place where you can level up yourself with body hacks.
These are very on theme with the game, and offer a variety of different bonuses and attributes to your character, informing how you play. From circular saws spouting from your legs, to missiles raining down when you get knocked over, as well as numerous different buffs to your finer attributes, it really allows you to create a version of Davy that is yours. Just make sure to head there after every run and upgrade yourself.
Presents
You can’t have played much of Stupid Never Dies if you don’t know who Julia is, the frozen lady in the freezer. In your early runs you’ll have noticed objectives getting completed on the stats page without a rhyme or reason to them, and after a few runs you’ll unlock presents. These are given to Julia to increase her heart meter, which has nothing to do with unfreezing her coincidentally, but instead allows you to upgrade your Davy Burst, the explosive superskill you get from filling your Bite Gauge.
Swap Between Styles
Not to be confused with the mixing up your Styles tip above, but sort of linked instead. As mentioned, you can pick up multiple Styles and store them as you progress, but what the game doesn’t tell you is that while they’re limited in Layers, and run out after a certain amount of layers you progress, they’re unlimited in the amount of times you can swap between them.
Whether the enemies in front of you are weaker to a Werewolf, a Harpy, or your base Zombie Style, you can quickly swap between them with no punishment, and as the Skills are individual to each Style, you can quickly output some huge damage if you swap between them.
Explore the Mall
The mall is no small place. As you progress through the game you’ll unlock all manner of places, from Bessie’s Burger Joint that’ll allow you to upgrade your Zombie Receipts, to a room filled with statues recognising your in-game tasks, and even a cinema for Julia. Don’t just jump straight into the dungeon every time, you could be missing out on making yourself stronger.
Use Bessie’s Purchases at the End of a Dungeon
For the most part, if you’re upgrading properly and not Layer Skipping (see below) beyond your capabilities, you’ll be fine dealing with the enemies in Stupid Never Dies. Your bigger enemy will be time, so with that said, save the purchases from Bessie in the Landing Zone until you reach the final Layer.
Usually this will be a boss, and you’ll likely be short on time, so buy the attack and defense up items, as well as a Davy Burst charge as well. It’s an easy advantage to always have in your back pocket, and considering the price and what you collect as you go, a cheap one at that.
Use Layer Skip to Get Deeper
A few hours into the game you’ll unlock the ‘Layer Skip’ ability. In essence, this will allow you to go deeper into the dungeons far faster. You won’t have to do each Layer in order any more, and as long as you’re strong enough won’t need to either. If you expect to get to the furthest, deepest Layers of the dungeons, especially later in the game, you’ll need to skip multiple Layers at a time, and it’ll also keep the game as a challenge, as you’ll quickly level up higher than each Layer requires.
Don’t Always Skip the Bosses
Almost contravening the tip I’ve just given you, you won’t want to skip the bosses. At least, not all the time. Using the Layer Skip ability you’ll be able to jump ahead, and that means jump past the bosses you’ll encounter in your dungeon dives. Don’t do this every time.
Fighting the bosses like Surtr R.S, Afreet and many more is good for two reasons; you’ll gain a chunk of experience and level up very quickly from one fight, it’s a quicker layer than a standard two floor layer, and you’ll have the opportunity after the fight to choose the Zombie Receipt from the boss themselves, which often works out to be incredibly powerful.
Activate Go Nuts Mode
If you keep dying during combat, be it a due to a boss like KOM or just general enemies, go into your game settings before your next run and activate ‘Go Nuts’ mode, which will make ‘Davy strong as shit’. It’s effectively an easy mode to get you through difficult moments.
You’ll be stronger, get better receipts, and turn most enemies to mush in seconds. Whether you turn it off after those difficult moments is up to you, but it doesn’t affect trophies or achievements, and can reduce game time and the ‘sponginess’ of some enemies quite considerably.
Reroll Your Body Hacks
This is an ability that isn’t unlocked until much later into Stupid Never Dies, but it can be a vital one for the endgame. You’ll no doubt realise you accrue A LOT of Body Hacks throughout your many, many runs in the dungeons below, and they seem worthless if you’re not using them. Wrong. You can scrap them and turn them into currency, which alongside the OT Energy you accrue, you can reroll specific parts of your Body Hacks.
Be warned though, these Rerolls aren’t guaranteed to be better than what you already have. Before I fully understood what I was doing, I turned a Legendary Head piece with a power of 350-odd into a far lower powered Legendary Head piece without an attack bonus. It was not my finest moment, but once I understood, I was powering myself up all over the place, and removing ‘dud’ attributes from Body Hacks pretty quickly.
For your next read, don’t miss our review of Stupid Never Dies, or all the Styles in the game, and what skills they have.
Luke Addison is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Thumb Wars. Having previously been a part of multiple outlets over the years, including building an entire gaming team from nothing to something, he thought it best to forge his own path and answer only to himself. As likely to be found playing the latest game as he is in the kitchen relaxing (by cooking), he always brings the same bold and brash attitude to everything he does, with a heavy leaning on sarcasm and dry wit!
