Dead Cells (2018)

man is a simple creature. if you ask me why i love this game, i could list all kinds of things. its perfect soundtrack, its sense of humor, its tease of a story that's deep enough to be interesting and hidden enough to be a puzzle you need to put together but not a puzzle with its pieces so scattered that the effort isnt worth it. its environments and aesthetic, its level design, its variety of enemy types and difficulty curve

but at the end of the day? the game is fun. it's a roguelike metroidvania. im a guy who loves both roguelikes and metroidvanias. of course i love this game. it is fun to play!!!!!!!!!

I have a lot of playtime in this game but I can't honestly say I enjoyed my time with it. I feel bad saying it because it was gifted to me by my cousin (if you're reading this, this review is just a joke teehee).

I really wanted to like it, in fact at first I did. There are a lot of fun weapons and finding interesting synergies was a highlight. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to beat it the first time, and honestly it got pretty tedious for me. When I started with the 2 core (I forget the name of the modifier) difficulty and learned that the healing flasks were just going to keep decreasing it was pretty demoralizing. I mean there were new enemies and stuff but the fact that the game expects you to play perfectly is pretty frustrating. I wanted to rush because it takes so long to get to the end, but then I'd make a little mistake and the run would die. It just go too frustrating for me and I stopped playing.

Maybe rougelikes (lites? idfc) just aren't for me.

I feel kinda weird about this game. I dont quite feel like I've trult played it, even tho I have beaten it. But I've decided I'm done with it and I kinda want to put out my thoughts on it

Dead Cells is a game of contradictions. It is heavily akill based, with fast, twitchy combat and massive damage to you if you mess up, with few opportunities to recover health in each dungeon. But it also has various randomly acquired equipment that can be incredibly more powerful or easy to use than the average fare you'll normally get, which can let you break the game with some simple combinations. The game is very silly and lighthearted. Your character, headless, communicates thru jaunty gestures: a goofy thumbs up, an aggressive middle finger salute, an irritating pounding on a locked door. The weapons and equipment are filled with references to other video games with no regard for tone or atmosphere, and often err on the side of novelty. But the world implied by lore and writing is dark and tragic, the atmosphere intended to be oppressive and melancholic. This leads to some real whiplash of tone. I remember one run in which I talked to a shopkeeper, dressed as a chef, who offered me silly equipment such as a frying pan and Gordan Freeman's famous crowbar, only to next walk into a room with a womans corpse hanging from the ceiling. Upon inspecting it, I found a note she'd written about how she would not allow the undead plague to take her children. Her children's bodies lay in the bed next to her, there throats cut by their own mother. That kinda brought the mood down. At least until Goomba-stomped the next enemy into paste. The game is clearly meant, like most roguelikes, to be a long affair, with a slow and gradual advancement. My first few attempts certainly fit that mold. But I managed to create a build in my second sitting that was so overwhelmingly powerful that I breezed thru the second half of the game with zero difficulty, and defeated the final boss without much of a struggle. It wasn't random either. I chose 1 specific starting mutation because I thought I could make a pretty good build out of it, and I was correct. But without such an overpowered build, I often die quickly from a simple mistake. I'm not a big fan of Metroidvanias. I've played a lot of them now, and there are several I've enjoyed, including Dead Cells, but I never quite get to the point of loving any of them, or really wanting to see them thru to the end. So it's not really a surprise that I find this game kinda underwhelming. However, the gameplay is extremely well made, fast paced, fluid and responsive. It is fun just to move, jump, and roll in this game, all of the core mechanics perfected over what I'm sure was a long time of reiterating. The weapons are generally very fun, except for the ones that just dont suit my playstyle. I can easily see this game being absolute crack to the right player, a game they would play over and over and never get bored of. But unfortunately I'm not that player. Overall, I think this is a good game, probably an absolutely great one for a lot of people. But it has a lot of little grievances in it for me personally, and I dont really feel compelled to keep playing, especially if I need to purchase DLC to get more out of it.

Note: I really dont like the way the DLC is implemented. The route thru the game is semi-randomized, with several exits to each level that to to alternate areas. But several of these exits will frequently appear, only to be jarringly told YOU NEED TO PURCHASE DLC TO ENTER THIS AREA. The developers could obviously code it so these exits dont appear unless you have the dlc. I assume it's meant to regularly prod the players towards purchasing them, which I dont much care for as a consumer.

Relatively early on I found a crowbar that does critical hits for several seconds after smashing through a door, which was funny but didn't seem all that useful—until a dozen or more runs later when I unlocked an item that lets you summon a door.

It's stuff like that which had me still intrigued by the game even after rolling credits, and while at this point I'm moving on to other games I'll probably still come back to Dead Cells every once in a while. There's not a whole a lot of story, but there doesn't need to be, and the little bits of worldbuilding you get from the loading screens and find scattered around various secret areas definitely builds a vibe.

What keeps you coming back for more are the mechanics. The main draw is the variety of weapons, items, and randomly-assigned effects, but there are also various traits ("mutations") that you assign over the course of a run that let you hone a playstyle, and an ability you get after you first complete run that completely changes how you can approach the game. The game also goes out of its to encourage either hack-and-slash speedrunning or careful completionism, such that you can kind of go either way on any given level depending on your loadout and how well you know that map (though the levels are procedurally generated to an extent, each one has a certain level of consistency, particularly in the earlier levels). And with a few upgrades, you can start each run with a random loadout rather than the defaults, making every run fresh right from the start, unlike Enter the Gungeon or Hades, where you start with the same basic loadout every time (or I guess one of 5 basic loadouts).

Also, speaking of those games, Dead Cells has a surprisingly large world, with most levels branching off in at least two directions, so you're not just playing through the same 5 levels every run.

All of which makes Dead Cells one of the most replayable and least exhausting rogue-likes I've played.

Also there's a katana that lets you do the anime slash-through-the-enemy-and-then-they-get-hurt thing for a critical hit, which is very fun.

That's right, it's another one of those games where you have to start from the beginning when you die. They made a bunch of cool weapons, items and abilities then decided that instead of creating a balanced game where you grow stronger gradually they would just make you grind. And you lose all the upgrade items when you die so it takes longer, what amazing and clever design.

There's this little-known game called "Diablo". Diablo had many of the same elements as roguelikes. Randomised levels. Randomised loot. Randomised enemies. But Blizzard used these elements to create variety, not to artifically lengthen the game. You could replay levels you had already completed and have a somewhat different experience each time - especially beneficial for a game with 6 different classes to try out. But in Diablo you didn't lose all progress upon death, you could just keep going.

Blizzard released Diablo almost 25 (!!) years ago. Lesser developers still haven't figured out how to properly copy elements from the original Rogue. Pathetic.

PROS

• Solid, satisfying hack-and-slash combat
• Nice variety of weapons and abilities
• Attractive pixel art and smooth animation
• Responsive controls make navigation a breeze

CONS

• Doesn't fix any of the core problems of rogue-lites: grindy, repetitive, and overly random level designs and character progression
• Weak lore and story
• Out of place attempts at humor
• Lacks any sort of artistic vision of a world to immerse its players in

I feel like this would be the perfect game for the Nintendo Switch. You can jump in and out at any point. Play, die, grind your way into some butt-kickin' weapons, and repeat...

Even after you beat it on the normal difficulty, it gets its hooks into you, and tempts you to try again at the next highest difficulty. Or, heck -- you can just replay it at the same difficulty again. Since there are multiple routes you can take in the procedurally-generated levels, there are stages and bosses that I still haven't seen, even though I "beat" the game.

I rarely replay games once I beat them, but even after beating Dead Cells, it will probably live in a little corner of my PC's hard drive for quite awhile.

There are tons of different weapons you can use, all of which play completely differently. On my winning run, I started with a slow, clunky sword and a shield that I could use to charge into enemies and stun or knock them off ledges. Then I swapped the sword out with a Heavy Crossbow, which is basically a crossbow-shotgun for blasting enemies in the face. And then, just as I went into the final boss fight, I replaced my shield with an Impaler (quick, stabby spear) that inflicted poisoning. Along with my Heavy Crossbow (which I was able to spec to do an extra 175% damage on poisoned enemies), I was able to wipe the floor with the Hand of the King without even needing to use a healing potion.

Fun times.

Dead Cells is a roguelike-metroidvania video game developed and published by Motion Twin. Following about a year in early access, Dead Cells was released for Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on August 7, 2018. (reference: Wikipedia)

Dead Cells, in addition to my stolen and referenced paragraph, is a pixel graphics, side scroller, and platform in one, just to call out some of the defining qualities of a game in the metroidvania genre.

My first run ever (following PAX East 2019 when I bought the Signature Edition on PS4) was not pretty, falling to the lowly zombie, and being stricken down by arrows and exploding orbs. I found the learning curve steep.

Each run garnered cells which could be used to unlock skills, mutations, and other special tricks and treats which are yours to keep after each run. However you have to find them during subsequent runs, or they may not appear at all. It's completely random. When you died, and I mean when because I died a lot, your cells become lost and you start over from the beginning in your prisoner cell. This is permadeath to those who don't know. No checkpoints or quick saves, your run is over.

I began my mountain climb up this learning curve and eventually got past the first procedurally created level (no two levels are the same with random weapons and skills).

Each run was a little easier until I hit a plateau. It seemed I got far into the game, runs would last over an hour, then I just couldn't progress from the clock tower or castle.

Then all of a sudden I got gud (a little easter egg hidden in the game) but really, I became familiar with the behavior of each enemy, confronted the Hand of the King.

I died.

I reached the summit then fell off.

My next run I effortlessly climbed the mountain, got the the boss, and took him down. It felt amazing.

This mountain climb is over and I'm venturing down savoring the journey.

For a game to make me feel so many emotions I have to give it a 5/5.

Now on to the next mountain: Hard Mode.

Dead Cells toys with the idea of roguelike elements in its 2D side-scrolling format, creating a mechanically tight and thrilling first few hours and then increasing amounts of boredom and frustration for dozens of hours afterward.

Taking place in a kingdom where there seem to be rot, decay, dead bodies, and bunches of enemies everywhere, the player is a blob that possesses a dead body and fights to reach the Throne Room (and beyond). The story wavers between macabre darkness and very out-of-place humor, but doesn't really grip the player with anything rich or interesting, so we can move on from that.

The gameplay consists of 2D action exploration (a-la Metroidvania) with a set of weapons, subweapons, abilities, and stats raised via scrolls. The catch? Nearly everything is reset after player death, with a few upgrades and weapon unlocks available to encourage a grind for some small amount of improvement. Roguelike/lite elements are usually tricky business, easily turning into frustrating slogs or grinding for the promised upgrades that may help with encounters. Dead Cells falls into that trap headfirst, with runs that can take up to an hour but will turn into many hours.

For a game like Dead Cells, variety is key to satisfying runs, and I assure you that areas and enemies will start mushing together after a few runs. Areas look gorgeous with vibrant uses of color (which work well with specifying stat bonuses and gains on weaponry) but they blend together sooner than necessary. Music is also not too impressive, but stays in the background and doesn't interfere with the action.

Weapon layouts are especially cruel in this game, as players will often gravitate towards optimal builds but get stuck with a large amount of unlocked weaponry if they do exactly what the game encourages them to do. This is a game where random generation can truly work against the player's enjoyment - luckily the game offers custom modes for locking these weapons in place, slightly improving the experience.

As for mechanical balance, most weapons feel much too slow, and gameplay requires speed and taking advantages of a flurry of well-implemented modifications. Poison, bleeding, burning, and the wondrous freezing - this and more help players strategize with modifiers on their weapons. Many builds are viable, but ranged weapons and intimate knowledge of blocks and parrying may be recommended. This requires a lot of skill and can get very difficult to train over lengthy runs.

Dead Cells is at odds with its dance with roguelike elements, making a solid action experience with many bits and pieces working together but still falling into boredom amidst the frustrating deaths and suboptimal random items. Going for one last shot may be addicting and the game has many challenge levels for players who can trivialize its systems, but I can't say it was a whole lot of fun to surmount these challenges once the initial gleam wore off.

+ Addicting and satisfying combat, both melee and ranged

+ Interesting settings and visual style

+ Huge variety of weapons to choose from, each with a unique, randomized quirks and traits

+ Great design for characters, enemies and bosses

+ High replay value that rewards both players who take their time to explore and those who rushes through the levels

>>> One of the best indie game released this year