I've been thinking a lot about why my opinion of Dead Cells has degraded over time, and ultimately it boils down to an immense amount of design conflict.
- There are many interesting areas in this game, but the most interesting are simultaneously the most annoying and tedious to get through, mostly based on the enemy design.
- The game simultaneously seems to point the player toward speedrunning the game and taking it slowly to look through every crevice for loot. You'd think going faster would be better, but all signs point to looting everything being the better approach. If you go quickly, you get to open doors that contain loot. If you go slowly, you miss out on those doors, but you end up more powerful as a whole from picking up every stat boost and hitting every store.
- Another point about game speed, slow weapons seem to be much worse than fast weapons due to the amount of hitstun you can apply. The only way you can use slow weapons effectively is by pairing it with a shield and parrying every single attack, or taking a freezing weapon, which also seem insanely good in any build.
- Enemy design, time after time, slows the pace of the game down. Enemies that damage you when you hit their back, enemies that shoot projectiles through the floor at you, enemies that damage a substantial AoE around them, enemies that hook you to them, etc.
I dunno. I'm open to hearing people's thoughts about this but as of right now (at 2BC) it seems like the game is sluggish to play most of the time. I'm sure if I played the game at the base difficulty again I would have a blast, but at this point it's just kind of tedious to play.
- There are many interesting areas in this game, but the most interesting are simultaneously the most annoying and tedious to get through, mostly based on the enemy design.
- The game simultaneously seems to point the player toward speedrunning the game and taking it slowly to look through every crevice for loot. You'd think going faster would be better, but all signs point to looting everything being the better approach. If you go quickly, you get to open doors that contain loot. If you go slowly, you miss out on those doors, but you end up more powerful as a whole from picking up every stat boost and hitting every store.
- Another point about game speed, slow weapons seem to be much worse than fast weapons due to the amount of hitstun you can apply. The only way you can use slow weapons effectively is by pairing it with a shield and parrying every single attack, or taking a freezing weapon, which also seem insanely good in any build.
- Enemy design, time after time, slows the pace of the game down. Enemies that damage you when you hit their back, enemies that shoot projectiles through the floor at you, enemies that damage a substantial AoE around them, enemies that hook you to them, etc.
I dunno. I'm open to hearing people's thoughts about this but as of right now (at 2BC) it seems like the game is sluggish to play most of the time. I'm sure if I played the game at the base difficulty again I would have a blast, but at this point it's just kind of tedious to play.