I don't say what I say to make enemies. But I don't know what people see in this. I don't even know what there is to see. Dead Cells is one of the most off-putting things I've ever experienced. I would only normally review a roguelike after completing at least one run, but I cannot, in good faith, siphon more of my immortal soul into this grotesque husk. 

Dead Cells is, at least at this advanced stage in its spread, a purge liquid of level un-design, obnoxious key-jangling meta-progression, and Weekend-at-Bernie's-ed references to better, richer experiences. Let's take those one at a time.

I get part of a roguelike is the inherent randomisation of a procedurally generated run-by-run experience. Still, I cannot get over how not designed anything in this is. This spits in the face of a curated experience. Yet, its variance is profoundly unexciting. The level design is both indifferently composed and micromanaged. This seems like a paradox, but it comes from approaching your random and set elements with equal disinterest and incompetence. Each area has a series of stock buildings and pits and tiny gimmicks attempting to give it something, anything, to stand out as its own thing. This time, you jump on plants instead of climbing chains (though they're blatantly replaced one-to-one by the almighty level designing algorithm), and the completely brainless punching bags are mushrooms instead of goop people. Sure. That's something. Let's use the Fractured Shrines as our case study, which I'd credit as about as close to interesting or unique as any area of the game gets (and is also apparently fucking DLC, so take that for what it is). It's an obstacle course through the clouds, with birds, saws, and hidden floor traps constructing bridges between these larger structures throughout the map. Most of these are opportunities for equipment boosts (shops and such), one of which is the exit to the next area. Sounds great! But the traps and enemies are the same every time. They will be placed in slightly varying orders, but you will interact with them all in the same way. Every gap is effortlessly cleared, every trap placed and dodged in the same manner, and every enemy handled the same way. The experience within the area feels redundant upon revisit. It's the same buildings that you'll navigate through in the same way. We have a theoretically random area that feels functionally the same every time. There is nothing to learn, nothing to master. Its cards are all on the table before you even sit down. And Yet. What is effectively randomised is done so thoughtlessly. The worst offender is the randomised exit position. Sometimes, your visit lasts two seconds. Sometimes, you're stuck forever. The way the random elements are integrated is completely indifferent to game flow or pacing, making every run feel slapdash in construction. It is completely uncurated but without compelling variety. They have somehow dodged both the joy of a set experience and the thrill of a varying one. It is a worst of both worlds that doesn't even seem possible.

And I'm not even done complaining about this part yet. 99.9% of this game is spent running through non-descript tunnels against non-descript enemies who pose no threat. No effort has been put into encounters—both in design (visual or mechanical) or positioning. Boss fights (one of the few set things in the game) exemplify this by being universally rubbish. I know it's not fair (though the game explicitly begs the comparison), but look at how much more dynamic and legible Hollow Knight's bosses are. Then look at the fucking Hand of the King. That dude is just fucking standing there! Your roll + jump moveset feels energising for the first hour (the on-kill speed-up is one of the few things stopping this from an actual 0 out of 10) but is legendarily superficial. I'd love to get a breakdown of the I-frames on that roll because it registers as nonsense to me. Either way, your moveset is completely ill-fitting to the ahem ""souls-lite"" (I'll get to it) boss fights. I assume they're referring to their attacks doing half a health bar every hit because I cannot figure out what else they could mean. The touch-of-death attack-pattern learning experience is like pulling teeth when you get one try every 2 hours. This is why profoundly similar experiences like Hades make the runs more explicitly structured and the bosses more generous. And dying is not the issue! Dying without learning anything is! If the interstitial segments are without intrigue and the bosses are so volatile, the entire game becomes one bad Dark Souls runback. Which it is.

The only exception to this is The Bank, the game's one novel set-piece, with a fantastic parkour segment to boot. Unfortunately, I got to the end of this segment without having yet unlocked wall jump, so I was gated from being able to progress in this run. Completely. I just crashed into a cement column. Why would you allow this to occur? Because you've put no thought into encounter structure or (and) how the various areas cohere together as a whole. So, I guess we have no exciting sections. Embarrassing.

I chatted briefly in my Dicey Dungeons review about my general disdain for meta-progression in roguelikes, and this is probably the most horrid example ever. What I just said is that I oppose the roguelite sub-genre on principle. If you think I will qualify that, you're dead wrong. This entire type of game misses the fun part of being a roguelike. Outside of a 'card game, but you (quickly) unlock new cards through playing' sense of meta progression, I want none of it. All I want to unlock by playing one of these games is the knowledge of how to do better with what's available to me. But this is where all the thought has gone in. What you get is a mass of little blue orbs that unlock new weapons (all of which feel identical to use), perks, abilities, cosmetics, healing, shops, and re-rolls. There is no game at the beginning! There is nothing fun about panning all day for virtual gold in the hope I'll become strong enough to beat the final boss guy to death with the pan. Not only do you have no chance to begin with (without healing, weapons of actual utility or the many, many upgrades you acquire to empower your builds), but you just can't access a ton of areas from the start. Yes, it's, of course, technically possible to win on an initial run, but get a fucking grip. By the time you've sunk 2000 of your dark souls into bonus abilities, you're playing a different game. To reiterate this point, I want to touch back on another element of meta-progression that I find completely indefensible: the permanent runes. Lets look back on the fucking wall jump Bank fiasco. If you can seriously look me in the eyes and tell me it's fine that a roguelike has offered me a genuinely unwinnable situation, not from a failure in build or planning or performance on my part, or even just bad dumb luck (this is a fault with the genre I'm willing to forgive!) but because I have not yet done enough runs for the game to dane me 'allowed to progress,' then I don't get you. What do you even like about these games?

Then there are the parts where this game turns into fucking Free Guy for PC indie games. It's not cute. It's not even that it's ruinous to the genuinely successful and overbearing aesthetic design (the literal only nice thing I have to offer this game is that it looks good, and not just in a 'wow so many pixels' way, but it has a unique and enjoyable look with a nice colour palette). Though to be so clear as to be rendered imperceptible, it is ruinous, as are the funny little notes and dialogue boxes and rooms referring to these games. How many times do I have to run into rooms that are just empty? Just epic reference rooms for the epic fans? Why would I want these? Putting that aside, the real problem is how genuinely embarrassing it is to put yourself in conversation with these games. You get the Hollow Knight nail, and you bounce around on top of enemies (much like in the hit video game 'Hollow Knight'); it's awkward and clumsy and reminds me of how profoundly tactile, innervating and precise the movement and combat of Hollow Knight is. The Hotline Miami and Half-life melee weapons are there, ready to instantly fire off your neural pathways to connect the fact that, yeah, other games do have personality and humour to their writing without coming across as desperate to impress. Gotta get that Katana Zero skin because after rolling around like an idiot for 10 hours through nothing corridors, I definitely want to be reminded of that game's exceptionally animated pace of gameplay and palpable momentum in motion. How could I forget the Starfury from Terraria, ready to remind you of a game that completely upstages even the nerdy epic references to other games! Terraria integrates that stuff so naturally that it barely registers it's what's happening. It's all within the world. Here every crossover weapon is imported off of fucking Etsy.

And that's it—no clean conclusion to this. I loathed everything about this game. The only thing Dead Cells ever did for me was let me briefly talk to the guy at EB games that I have a crush on, but even that's a double-edged sword. How can I, in good conscience, try to scam my way to getting a refund now? Way to go, Evil Empire. I hope you use my money wisely when you literally remake this game beat for beat with a Prince of Persia skin.

The review is over now. But I need to talk about genre terminology again. I can't help myself!

I just have to draw attention to the synopsis on this page. 'Souls-lite combat'? SOULS-LITE?? Soulslike is already a completely dysfunctional term that was invented only to make a specific series of action RPGs their own genre for no reason. It has ballooned into a non-word to describe every hard game with over-the-shoulder melee combat, bosses, and, I don't know. Checkpoints? I watched a YouTube video essay where someone tried to convince me Hollow Knight is a soulslike. This word means nothing! So what the fuck is souls-lite combat? I've played this game. Is it that you have a checkpoint rechargeable healing item? And that enemies do a lot of damage? And you can roll? Just like Dark Souls, where you do that stuff? Should I extrapolate from there? Lego Star Wars lets you roll, heal, fight melee-boss fight encounters that kill you in less than a handful of swings, and it forces onto you janky platforming segments that throw you into instant death pits. Clearly, then, it is a souls-lite! Hell, give the levels fewer checkpoints, and it might as well have been made by FromSoftware themselves! I can't take it anymore, man. These fake marketing genres give me fucking hives.

I didn't like Sonic Mania. This isn't anyone's fault. Tee Lopes absolutely annihilates with an impeccable collection of synth funk bangers. Whitehead and Co's reinterpretation and expansion of the classic Sonic aesthetic and structure is sublime. The bells and whistles of its revivalism are a glorious siren song that, for years, distracted me from the very simple truth that I don't actually like classic Sonic! At all!

As platformers always are for me, it's down to the level design. In my mind, 2D Sonic is very mechanical. What they lack is not so much player agency but player input entirely. I recognise that the level design is quite open on paper. There are secrets, shortcuts, and all the regular shebang, but I can't tell because the games are so visually stuffed. It often feels like I'm smashing the right side wall down until I knock my head on another slideshow button. The game will then briefly play itself for me (this is the fun bit) as Sonic moves at maximum speed until I slam into a concrete wall and die. Then, I have to restart from the previous level because we still haven't recognised the futility of a lives system in platformers after a half-century of their existence. Did I mention I'm really bad at 2D Sonic games? That doesn't help.

The problem is, fundamentally, Sonic (and, by extension, the player) is a non-factor. I don't feel like I'm doing any of the cool stuff as much as the cool stuff is happening to me. The levels are a series of exceptionally overdesigned locks that the spin-dash key opens. Many people find this fun, but to me, it's nothingburger gameplay in service of crackerjack aesthetic design. I do not enjoy being a small-scrunched-up ball of paper tossed around a wind tunnel.

You can take the man out of the Sonic, but you can't take the Sonic out of the man. Penny's Big Breakaway wins and loses all the same battles as Sonic Mania, with one major change. Penny herself has a dazzling moveset, probably the most varied in any of this decade's 3D platformers, and it is a joy to unravel. But that one change is all the change in the world. They also added a third dimension. I am a sucker for the z-axis.

Do not show up for the story. Or restrained visual palettes. Or compelling collectables. Or functional hitboxes and boss fights. Or even really the level design itself, which is far more Sonic Adventure than I'd consider ideal. Show up for the swing into dash into roll bread-and-butter combo that feels like a million bucks. Show up for dropping off a cliff and swinging with such immense momentum at the bottom that you shoot yourself up even higher than you started. Show up for DIY movement tech so impactful that you end up dying by knocking into the other side of invisible walls. Show up for spending an entire level platforming out of bounds because why the fuck not?

This could never be a personal favourite. And that's not even because it's a total mess! I am Mr Mario Galaxy 2. Level design trumps all, and I can confidently say that Whitehead and I are out of sync w/r/t what good platforming level design is. But movement accounts for a hell of a lot. I don't just get to do cool stuff. I have a monopoly on cool stuff. You're doing something right if I'm mentally filing you away on the Super Mario Sunshine shelf.

The speedrun for this is going to whip so insanely hard.