A new action role-playing game from a studio founded by a former Capcom producer puts players in the rotting shoes of Davy, a zombie who falls in love with a frozen female corpse he discovers in a shopping center. In the game’s delightfully absurd premise, Davy sets out to resurrect the woman and take her on a date, a mission that requires defeating the all-powerful King of Monsters and, incidentally, saving what remains of humanity.
GPTrack50, led by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, who previously worked on blockbuster franchises such as Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, is the studio behind the forthcoming title. The game imagines a world nearly identical to our own, except that monsters such as werewolves and zombies have always lived alongside humans. That uneasy normalcy shatters when the King of Monsters crushes civilization, leaving only 2 percent of humanity alive. Davy, described as “the weakest of the weak” among zombies, gains the power to fight back after eating a mysterious egg.
Because Davy is already dead, combat abandons self-preservation entirely. Players are encouraged to attack relentlessly, with blocking and dodging taking a back seat to aggressive offense. The game features a “body hack” system that lets players swap out Davy’s head, arms, and legs for equipment such as swords or guns, altering his attack capabilities. Additionally, Davy can consume defeated enemies to steal their skills and transform into creatures like a werewolf, vampire, or harpy.
Kobayashi describes the game’s tone as “funky zombie action,” a phrase meant to capture its fast, colorful, and darkly humorous style. He notes that working on a new intellectual property without an established fan base allowed the team, roughly 30 developers recruited from companies including Capcom, Konami, and Square Enix, to embrace stranger jokes and sharper humor than in their previous work. The studio’s early days were humble, with programmers and designers but no artists, prompting the team to use purchased assets for a rough prototype. Around 20 external companies eventually joined the three-year production effort.
Beneath its monster-eating and gun-limb mechanics lies a simple underdog narrative. Davy rises from the bottom of monster society to challenge its king, but his motivation is romance rather than glory. Saving humanity is almost a side effect, as Kobayashi explains: the character simply wants to go out on a date with the frozen girl. In this world, love may be blind, but it also needs defrosting.