Retrofuturismĭead Cells’ art is pixelated, but the game looks anything but retro. Unlocking more variety for subsequent playthroughs indirectly increases your power with more opportunities for synergy (like a sword that coats enemies in oil combined with anything that sets them on fire), while still maintaining the same general balance and difficulty curve. It’s a great system for inter-game progression.
You lose everything that hasn’t been delivered to the Collector, so even when it it’s clear you may not be able to complete the game on a given run, the desperate drive to keep what you’ve earned always pushes you forward. Having a wide array of tools, which complement each other well in different ways, makes each piece of gear more valuable: That, in turn, ratchets up the tension as larger collections of cells and blueprints. There’s a satisfying range of tactics available in the growing range of tools at your disposal. Your headless warrior has two slots for primary weapons - melee or ranged - and two slots for skills (grenades, traps, etc) and you’re off to the races. Over time, you can also collect blueprints from enemies, which expands the pool of weapons and items that could appear in the future.ĭead Cells’ art is pixelated, but the game looks anything but retro.Įach run is defined what you find along the way. In exchange, the collector unlocks persistent upgrades that make your character more powerful and better equipped to survive, ranging from the chance to keep some of the gold you earned on your previous run, to randomized starting equipment.
DEAD CELLS GAME ON SALE SOFTWARE
It isn’t a quite 2D translation of Dark Souls, but fans of From Software should certainly feel at home.īetween each area, you always stop for a chat with “the collector,” a creepy guy with a giant syringe on his back who collects “cells,” blue orbs you collect from fallen foes. As far as Souls-like games go, Dead Cells most closely resembles the fast-paced and aggressive Bloodborne, from which it cribs the mechanic of allowing you to “reclaim” health you’ve just lost by doing damage just after getting hit. Each weapon has its own timing to master, and your dodge rolls provide precious invincibility frames, solidifying the inspiration. You can see the Dark Souls in Dead Cells in the flow and feel of its combat, which is based around dodging and adapting to enemies and boss fights that telegraph their attacks.
Dead Cells’ levels riff on the classic “Metroidvania” structure - distinct, interconnected zones that have metal names like “Promenade of the Condemned.” While the zones share the same overall configuration every time you play, each time you die and start back in the Prisoners Cells the details of each area changes, including the locations of items, weapons, and secrets. From there, your task is to explore the labyrinthine castle, slaughter lots of zombies and monsters, and presumably escape. At the start of your run, the green glob drops from the ceiling of a dank prison cell and slithers into a freshly decapitated soldier’s corpse, giving it the ability to run and fight. In Dead Cells, you control a slithering glob of necrotic goo. Far from derivative or pandering, Dead Cells takes some of today’s most iterated-upon genres and teaches a master class. It’s fast-paced, addictive, fun, and brutally challenging. Reducing Dead Cells to a matrix of influences, however apt, sells it short, though. Add a dollop of Dark Souls influence, and a pixelated, faux 16-bit presentation, and you have a very zeitgeist-friendly stew going. Looking for a single point of comparison is 2013 “rogue-lite” Rogue Legacy, which added a persistent, RPG-like progression to the dynamic repetition of modern Rogue-likes, such as The Binding of Issac and Spelunky. Developer Motion Twin describes the game, which is currently available through Steam Early Access, as “a roguelike Castlevania-inspired action-platformer.” That hodge-podge of callbacks puts it in good, if plentiful company.
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Head here to read our full, full review of Dead Cells.ĭead Cells makes no bones about what it is. This is a hands-on of our first impressions.
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