There's something lovable about the indie game hit, the labor of love that sells millions of copies. Even more amazing is to see one come from Motion Twin, a small, worker-owned studio from France that has a long history making flash games. And what a stylish game did they come up with: Dead Cells is a slick and recognizable action platformer that went on to sell over 10 million copies. As I set out to see if it delivered on everything that it promised, however... I found myself a bit underwhelmed.
I normally like to open a review with a small synopsis, but to begin with Dead Cells's premise feels paradoxical, as Dead Cells itself does not do so. Its opening moments are so abrupt, I restarted thinking I'd accidentally skipped a cutscene. You play as a prisoner (referred to as the Beheaded outside of the game) in an unnamed kingdom who wakes up in a dungeon missing all of his memories and, well, his head. You quickly learn that you cannot die, instead returning the Prisoner's Quarters whenever you're killed. And... that's it. Go out on your merry way and explore the kingdom, aided by all of these random NPCs that also show up unexplained.
There is a story to the game, of course, but it is told in small fragments through lore rooms found throughout the randomly generated maps. In essence, the kingdom where Dead Cells takes place is all but destroyed, ravaged by a plague called the Malaise that either killed or turned into monsters the majority of the population. Multiple story threads give more context to your adventure, like how an alchemist made a failed attempt to find the origin of the Malaise and create a cure, how the queen disappeared, how the king repeatedly abused his powers and made the crisis worse... the structure of the game, however, makes it a pain to piece together the story, so most people will just watch a Youtube video on it instead.
It's unlikely you'll pick up Dead Cells for its plot, anyway, as it's most famous for its gameplay style: the game promises to combine metroidvania with roguelike. My biggest question was "how", seeing that one of those genres must be carefully hand-crafted, while the other is procedural. Surely, though, such a highly regarded game would have an answer for that... right? It did, actually, and it's a very straightforward answer, too: they don't mix. In fact, "they don't mix" is a bit of a theme in Dead Cells, as the crux of its issues lie in how it has multiple aspects that are fantastic in isolation, but work against each other in practice.
Dead Cells enjoys mesmerizing 2D sidescroller action: the Beheaded can equip up to two weapons and two skills at once, and can deftly slice through enemies with them in fast, fluid motions. There's three categories of weapons that each scale with one of the Beheaded's stats, and you'd better get comfortable with one of them, because enemies are relentless. It's important to know each enemy's behaviour and tells, because if they get you, it will hurt. This goes double for bosses, which require intense focus to get by their barrage of attacks and whittle down their health. There's even achievements for defeating all bosses without taking damage to encourage thoroughly learning the fight.
This would be great in a metroidvania, but if we consider that genre's definition, though, Dead Cells barely tried to be one. That one is a type of game defined by a dense, interconnected map meant to be explored in a back and forth manner as new power-ups of some kind are obtained, which is completely unlike what we see here: the kingdom of Dead Cells features a series of biomes, each of which is an isolated, procedurally generated 2D map built around a certain theme. There are branching paths at the ends of each map, but crucially, the world can only be traversed forwards, and there's no reason to explore any other paths. If this is a metroidvania, so are most sidescrollers on the SNES, like say, The Mask (1995).
"But there are items that add movement skills!", one might say, referring to key items that are retained between runs and open up optional areas. It's important to realize that those, at most, earn extra items or allow for alternative paths during runs. They are entirely optional do not affect progression in any way: the final boss can be reached from the very first run without the need for any of them. Furthermore, these upgrades are way off the beaten path, found in hidden rooms in areas one never has to enter. This further complicates the map design as nothing can ever be created under the assumption that a player will have any given ability, and failsafes for such cases can be found well into the endgame. Crucially, these items suit the needs of the roguelike, not those of the metroidvania.
Incidentally, if Dead Cells wasn't a roguelike, it would be a much better game already. The brand of punishing gameplay it tries to establish would have been fun to deal in-between save points, but has no place in a game where dying means going back to the beginning of the game. This goes double when taking into account that the player is forced to explore every nook and cranny of each map to gather stat-boosting scrolls and guarantee they're at the power level the game expects them to be. The hunt for level-ups makes runs pretty long, and thus, all the more annoying when an enemy or boss that hasn't been fought before wipes the floor with the Beheaded, yeeting them back to the Prisoner's Quarters. Being able to take the time to deal with one thing at a time would have been a much better use of the player's time.
And a better use of the map, too, as the map design in Dead Cells is fascinating on its own: each level gives two to three options for what the next one will be, meaning that there are multiple paths that can be taken to the final boss. This ties into the game's DLC model which is to simply add to those paths, to add new areas and new bosses that fit neatly into the default experience. The problem is, again, the punishing roguelike: in theory one can take whatever path, in practice, with the only objective being to reach the end of the game, there's no reason to deviate from the path one is already used to and risk getting blindsided. In fact, some areas are disproportionately harder than others, so by going into them, you'd be putting your run at risk for no extra reward.
Similarly, there's no reason to ever change builds. Dead Cells features a wide array of weapons and skills, and there's a lot of creativity in the myriad different effects, but because game must be hard, they end up completely overtuned. Patches often come with puzzling nerfs to weapons and skills, and between "powerful", "fun" and "handy", the majority of the arsenal can't even tick one of those boxes. Making matters worse, it's a grind to unlock new weapons, what with the need to find or drop their blueprints and then farm enough Cells -- a currency dropped from enemies, lost when dying -- to unlock them. It hurts to waste cells on weapons that turn out to be bad as, in the process, you'll permanently lower the chance of getting the preferred ones in a run. Again, the game is designed in a way that strongly encourages being minimalistic instead of engaging with its systems.
I keep going back to the game's central goal, because it has to be said: having the single-minded pursuit of killing the final boss, no matter how, at the core of the game, was a mistake. As has been a trend with roguelikes in the last several years, the goal here is to finish the game over and over again to reach the true ending of the game. Once you've beaten the final boss once, Dead Cells introduces something called a Boss Cell, which, when equipped, transforms the kingdom, making enemies more powerful and maps, harder. These harder modes are generally referred to by the playerbase as 1BC, 2BC and so on. The ultimate goal is to get to 5BC and beat the game twice more to unlock the true ending.
I speak from experience when I say this: don't do it. From 3BC onwards, the game is a complete meme, with enemies that spam the screen with projectiles or teleport behind you becoming commonplace. In both cases, they're almost always able to two-hit the Beheaded from full. This adds frustration to the chore that is beating the game, making Dead Cells into one of those games where people who didn't play it to the end -- say, played a couple of runs and thought it was too hard, or finished 0BC and decided they'd had enough -- are more likely to have a more positive opinion than those who tried to push through it. In that latter group, I suspect only a select group of masochists will even have it in them to see the game to the end. I... I actually have the platinum trophy. I wonder what that says about me. I should probably get my head checked.
On a more serious note, I think what ultimately kept me going was that, as with most games that are less than the sum of their parts, that have great ideas but do not make great wholes, you'll see small glimpses of the game that could have been and keep chasing after them. Listening to the wonderful soundtrack by composer Yoann "Valmont" Laulan also helped. The fact remains, however, that Dead Cells left me wanting a wholly different game: maybe an actual metroidvania, or maybe a roguelike that emphasized the variety of systems instead of a grind mentality, like by using different archetypes of weapons and/or taking different paths. There's plenty I feel could have been done to make Dead Cells a must-play, but as it is, it is something I could have done without.
I normally like to open a review with a small synopsis, but to begin with Dead Cells's premise feels paradoxical, as Dead Cells itself does not do so. Its opening moments are so abrupt, I restarted thinking I'd accidentally skipped a cutscene. You play as a prisoner (referred to as the Beheaded outside of the game) in an unnamed kingdom who wakes up in a dungeon missing all of his memories and, well, his head. You quickly learn that you cannot die, instead returning the Prisoner's Quarters whenever you're killed. And... that's it. Go out on your merry way and explore the kingdom, aided by all of these random NPCs that also show up unexplained.
There is a story to the game, of course, but it is told in small fragments through lore rooms found throughout the randomly generated maps. In essence, the kingdom where Dead Cells takes place is all but destroyed, ravaged by a plague called the Malaise that either killed or turned into monsters the majority of the population. Multiple story threads give more context to your adventure, like how an alchemist made a failed attempt to find the origin of the Malaise and create a cure, how the queen disappeared, how the king repeatedly abused his powers and made the crisis worse... the structure of the game, however, makes it a pain to piece together the story, so most people will just watch a Youtube video on it instead.
It's unlikely you'll pick up Dead Cells for its plot, anyway, as it's most famous for its gameplay style: the game promises to combine metroidvania with roguelike. My biggest question was "how", seeing that one of those genres must be carefully hand-crafted, while the other is procedural. Surely, though, such a highly regarded game would have an answer for that... right? It did, actually, and it's a very straightforward answer, too: they don't mix. In fact, "they don't mix" is a bit of a theme in Dead Cells, as the crux of its issues lie in how it has multiple aspects that are fantastic in isolation, but work against each other in practice.
Dead Cells enjoys mesmerizing 2D sidescroller action: the Beheaded can equip up to two weapons and two skills at once, and can deftly slice through enemies with them in fast, fluid motions. There's three categories of weapons that each scale with one of the Beheaded's stats, and you'd better get comfortable with one of them, because enemies are relentless. It's important to know each enemy's behaviour and tells, because if they get you, it will hurt. This goes double for bosses, which require intense focus to get by their barrage of attacks and whittle down their health. There's even achievements for defeating all bosses without taking damage to encourage thoroughly learning the fight.
This would be great in a metroidvania, but if we consider that genre's definition, though, Dead Cells barely tried to be one. That one is a type of game defined by a dense, interconnected map meant to be explored in a back and forth manner as new power-ups of some kind are obtained, which is completely unlike what we see here: the kingdom of Dead Cells features a series of biomes, each of which is an isolated, procedurally generated 2D map built around a certain theme. There are branching paths at the ends of each map, but crucially, the world can only be traversed forwards, and there's no reason to explore any other paths. If this is a metroidvania, so are most sidescrollers on the SNES, like say, The Mask (1995).
"But there are items that add movement skills!", one might say, referring to key items that are retained between runs and open up optional areas. It's important to realize that those, at most, earn extra items or allow for alternative paths during runs. They are entirely optional do not affect progression in any way: the final boss can be reached from the very first run without the need for any of them. Furthermore, these upgrades are way off the beaten path, found in hidden rooms in areas one never has to enter. This further complicates the map design as nothing can ever be created under the assumption that a player will have any given ability, and failsafes for such cases can be found well into the endgame. Crucially, these items suit the needs of the roguelike, not those of the metroidvania.
Incidentally, if Dead Cells wasn't a roguelike, it would be a much better game already. The brand of punishing gameplay it tries to establish would have been fun to deal in-between save points, but has no place in a game where dying means going back to the beginning of the game. This goes double when taking into account that the player is forced to explore every nook and cranny of each map to gather stat-boosting scrolls and guarantee they're at the power level the game expects them to be. The hunt for level-ups makes runs pretty long, and thus, all the more annoying when an enemy or boss that hasn't been fought before wipes the floor with the Beheaded, yeeting them back to the Prisoner's Quarters. Being able to take the time to deal with one thing at a time would have been a much better use of the player's time.
And a better use of the map, too, as the map design in Dead Cells is fascinating on its own: each level gives two to three options for what the next one will be, meaning that there are multiple paths that can be taken to the final boss. This ties into the game's DLC model which is to simply add to those paths, to add new areas and new bosses that fit neatly into the default experience. The problem is, again, the punishing roguelike: in theory one can take whatever path, in practice, with the only objective being to reach the end of the game, there's no reason to deviate from the path one is already used to and risk getting blindsided. In fact, some areas are disproportionately harder than others, so by going into them, you'd be putting your run at risk for no extra reward.
Similarly, there's no reason to ever change builds. Dead Cells features a wide array of weapons and skills, and there's a lot of creativity in the myriad different effects, but because game must be hard, they end up completely overtuned. Patches often come with puzzling nerfs to weapons and skills, and between "powerful", "fun" and "handy", the majority of the arsenal can't even tick one of those boxes. Making matters worse, it's a grind to unlock new weapons, what with the need to find or drop their blueprints and then farm enough Cells -- a currency dropped from enemies, lost when dying -- to unlock them. It hurts to waste cells on weapons that turn out to be bad as, in the process, you'll permanently lower the chance of getting the preferred ones in a run. Again, the game is designed in a way that strongly encourages being minimalistic instead of engaging with its systems.
I keep going back to the game's central goal, because it has to be said: having the single-minded pursuit of killing the final boss, no matter how, at the core of the game, was a mistake. As has been a trend with roguelikes in the last several years, the goal here is to finish the game over and over again to reach the true ending of the game. Once you've beaten the final boss once, Dead Cells introduces something called a Boss Cell, which, when equipped, transforms the kingdom, making enemies more powerful and maps, harder. These harder modes are generally referred to by the playerbase as 1BC, 2BC and so on. The ultimate goal is to get to 5BC and beat the game twice more to unlock the true ending.
I speak from experience when I say this: don't do it. From 3BC onwards, the game is a complete meme, with enemies that spam the screen with projectiles or teleport behind you becoming commonplace. In both cases, they're almost always able to two-hit the Beheaded from full. This adds frustration to the chore that is beating the game, making Dead Cells into one of those games where people who didn't play it to the end -- say, played a couple of runs and thought it was too hard, or finished 0BC and decided they'd had enough -- are more likely to have a more positive opinion than those who tried to push through it. In that latter group, I suspect only a select group of masochists will even have it in them to see the game to the end. I... I actually have the platinum trophy. I wonder what that says about me. I should probably get my head checked.
On a more serious note, I think what ultimately kept me going was that, as with most games that are less than the sum of their parts, that have great ideas but do not make great wholes, you'll see small glimpses of the game that could have been and keep chasing after them. Listening to the wonderful soundtrack by composer Yoann "Valmont" Laulan also helped. The fact remains, however, that Dead Cells left me wanting a wholly different game: maybe an actual metroidvania, or maybe a roguelike that emphasized the variety of systems instead of a grind mentality, like by using different archetypes of weapons and/or taking different paths. There's plenty I feel could have been done to make Dead Cells a must-play, but as it is, it is something I could have done without.