Dead Cells is a cultured, clever, and collected fusion of roguelike canon and metroidvania doctrine. Discovering its wealth of secrets drives the player's curiosity while a proficient performance, derived from countless combinations of weapons and options, rewards their personal dexterity. Dead Cells, from any imaginable approach, thrives in a powerful cycle of surprise and satisfaction.
Dead Cells radiates confidence. It’s felt inside of its levels, a metroidvanian network of procedural generation that feels both distinctive and familiar. It’s visible in its roguelike impulses, delivering a smattering of weapons and power-ups and ensuring all of them are viable and fun to practice through every run. Finding Dead Cells proves to be as engaging as mastering Dead Cells, merging discovery and proficiency into the same productive response. There’s always another secret. This is the run. Failure is inevitable but Dead Cells almost makes it an incentive; the optimism it builds behind next time is a constant lure.
Each run of Dead Cells begins as an agile, reanimated body with a smoking ember in place of a head. A rusty sword is mandatory equipment for single-button combat, but you have the option to pick between two secondary weapons: a basic bow or an ordinary shield. The bow can fire limited shots in rapid succession, keeping safe space between you and your opponents. The shield can either absorb a significant percentage of damage or, if well timed, parry incoming attacks. You may only pick one. This decision builds into conflict that turns out to be one of Dead Cells’ principles. Every item has its advantages and it’s hard to feel disappointed with any choice.
Following this, you’re deposited into Dead Cells’ first level, The Prisoners’ Quarters. Lurching zombies notice your presence and leap out at you. Archers do the same with their arrows. Grenadiers have no melee attack, but lob time bombs in your direction (and sometimes through walls!). Shield Bearers charge forward with rush attacks. Quickly, their behaviors and tells are internalized and exploited. If you’re caught off guard any enemy in Dead Cells is capable of obliterating your health meter, but a practiced hand will soon tear through every jerk in The Prisoners’ Quarters like a wet paper towel.
Forks in the road beg for attention. Shop keepers are tucked away in obscure corners, providing a selection of three new weapons or skills. Stat upgrades, divided between Brutality, Survival, and Tactics categories, all offer significant boosts in hit points, but also increase the damage and effectiveness of their corresponding weapons. Hidden passages, rune-specific routes, blueprints for new weapons, giant treasure chests, and accursed oddities fill in more gaps. Why am I giving the finger to the creature locked behind a door? Dead Cells is focused on its mission, but it leaves enough room for weird bits of lore, too.
Skills, bound to cool-down timers, are also available inside of every level. Assigned to two shoulder buttons, they represent myriad of tactical options for offensive and defensive measures. Wolf Traps grab feet and stop movement for a few seconds. Swarm Grenades explode with blood sucking leaches. The Double Crossb-o-matic, my personal favorite, deploys a turret that fires arrows in both directions. In some levels where I felt particularly vulnerable, like The Ossuary or The Toxic Sewers, I would cowardly throw traps in the path of the horrible things, then retreat nearby and let them do their job. It worked. Progress is progress and there is no god in thunder dome.
There are two approaches for every level. The first is to find an exit as quickly as possible. Certain gates protecting significant rewards are time-locked in successive levels, incentivizing ruthless efficiency toward basic progression. I found it more prudent to stick around and scour every corner, killing everything in my way. I made more gold, I found more stat buffs, better skills, and I got better at Dead Cells. Enemies smash into body parts and gold with the kinetic blast of a Ys game, granting Dead Cells a Pavlovian response to even the most routine victory.
Gold is supplied from every opponent, but the more infrequent, titular “cells” are a greater treasure. Between each level is passage that provides reprieve from the hell on each side. Here you can turn in blueprints and turn in cells to The Collector. Cells can be spent for permanent buffs, like increasing your available health potions, randomizing your starting weapon, or the amount of gold that you can keep after you die. After you’ve turned in blueprints, you can spend cells unlocking new weapons, stat mutations, or additional skills. After boss levels you can even spend cells to increase the frequency of high-quality drops.
Each weapon and skill is also blessed with random affectations and basic skill levels. You could find an Infantry Bow that leaves a trail of oil. You may also have a Fire Grenade at the same time, which creates endless opportunities for strategic scorching. Maybe your Blood Sword, for some reason, launches a horizontal throwing knife every time you swipe it. Perhaps your dodge drops a Grenade whenever you roll. It’s wild out there. Every single weapon and skill also has a power level that reflects its DPS, and you’re encourage to toss it in favor of something new as you move forward in Dead Cell’s progression of levels. It does a marvelous job of convincing you that, either by the brute force of its stats or the lure of possibility, something else is better than whatever it is you’ve got.
Dead Cells’ maintains a diverse collection of weapons. The Assassin’s Dagger will strike critical hits if you attack from behind. The Blood Sword, as you might imagine, causes residual DPS bleeding. The Nutcracker, a huge mallet, stuns enemies with full health. The Electric Whip ignores shields and has great range while the Hayabusa Boots perform push enemies backward with 300-style kicks. Some of my favorites have been highly-specific, almost finesse tools like the Rapier (deals a crit when you’re rolling out of a dodge) paired with the Infantry Bow (critical hit at point blank). Dead Cells makes it easy to feel as if you have an edge.
Each of Dead Cells’ thirteen levels feel distinctive, usually bearing their own signature. They are arranged differently every time, of course, but center around individual traits. I know the Promenade of the Condemned delights in remote-shielded Grenadiers, teleporting Inquisitors, and underground lairs. Ancient Sewers have giant mushrooms, Spikers, that summon giant needles out of the floor and Thornys, rolling hedgehog-bladed-zombies. Forgotten Sepulcher employs a popular gimmick—stay near a light or suffer the consequences—and doubles down with packs of tiny assholes who would love to shove a knife in your back.
Dead Cells’ metroidvanian heritage is reflected in its five runes. The Vine rune transforms curious piles of green goo into veritable bean stalks, allowing you to reach higher areas. The Ram rune allows the player to smash through specially marked portions of the floor. Earning these runes grants access to not only better loot in hidden areas, but brand new levels on the way to the penultimate High Castle. There are thirteen normal levels in Dead Cells, but its flow accounts for as many as seven or as few as six in each run. With a proper rationing of keys in the rain-soaked Stilt Village, for example, I never have to go to the god forsaken Forgotten Sepulcher ever again.
Dead Cells is hard until it isn’t. While it delights in powering up the avatar with stat buffs, novelty weapons, and wild skills, it’s of little use without the experience and applied skill of the player. Much like Dark Souls—I’ve typed Dead Souls more than once when writing this—anything is capable of killing you, but lethality is removed with patient and informed play. I have no doubt that Dead Cells Let’s Plays will spawn rusted sword or no sword runs until its conclusion. It’s even built with speedrunning and competition in mind, from the permanent timer in the right hand corner to custom challenge level that flips every day.
If there’s a downside to Dead Cells’ operation, it can sometimes feel like normal levels only exist as a staircase to boss encounters. This is visible in the Concierge, the first huge menacing auger of destruction. If you’re spec’d well you can deploy skills and focus on dodging. If you’re really good you can judge his attacks properly and melee him into annihilation. If you’re neither of those you die quickly. In any case the Concierge, like the rest of Dead Cells’ bosses, has a massive health bar. His evolving technique is easy to solve, but taps a different skill-set than navigation-based challenges from the other side of Dead Cells. I like that its bosses are hard, but they’re the only time Dead Cells creates an impediment to its pacing.
Dead Cells showcases a level of control on par with precision 2D games like Nidhogg or Super Meat Boy. You can feel the pixel-specific range of contact when opening up a flurry of attacks. Practice with the dodge-roll enough and it’s easy to internalize the invincibility frames. Dropping down on enemies with the smash attack proves to be a tactile and satisfying opener to most any conflict. Your character moves more than they glide, setting Dead Cells apart from the loose maelstrom that can envelope (and I love these games) peers like Rogue Legacy or Abyss Odyssey.
Sophisticated control is passed on to Dead Cells’ visual pallet. Opting for pure pixel art over the nondescript chunky sprites, Dead Cells looks like someone amplified the level of detail in a Castlevania game and took an advanced class on shading. Backgrounds exist to set the mood (the stacks of corpses in the moribund Ossuary and the abandoned fishing community of Stilt Village, for example) while the foreground is left crisp and clearly delineated from the nameless protagonist. Enemies are identifiable on sight alone, and the level of animation granted to every moving piece is second only to Owlboy in terms of feedback and quality. Time looks like it was invested into making sure Dead Cells maintained a unique and coherent aesthetic.
The fifteen months Dead Cells spent in early access feels like it lead to a smattering of smart, quality-of-life options. Warp portals are everywhere in each level, making it easy to return to a shopkeeper once you’re financially solvent. Enemies won’t respawn. Items you leave behind, like that cut of meat that restores 50% health, also stay in place and visible on your map should you want to return and eat it. Fresh gear always has a better power level and poison pools can be negated with the roll-dodge. The user interface also features a permanent but unobtrusive clock and visual and audio cues when skill timers refresh. Dead Cells’ confidence in its 1.0, launching product is proof of early access done correctly.
My runs in Dead Cells initially lasted about fifteen minutes. Then thirty. Then over an hour before I found a satisfying end. With roguelike randomization elements and a plethora of weapons, skills, and mutations to unlock, Dead Cells is designed to easily facilitate a long-term investment. Without the hook of progression, however, it’s possible to treat Dead Cells the same as you would Spelunky; a focused romp through systemic levels without the need for modern definitions of progression. I like unlocking every last thing, but it’s not essential to enjoying the game.
It’s also difficult to look at Dead Cells and not feel the influence of other games: Rogue Legacy’s sense of progression, Spelunky’s devotion to intelligent procedural generation, Bloodborne’s aggressive health reclamation, The Binding of Isaac’s weirdass weapon combinations, and Dark Souls’ commitment to playing for keeps. Ignoring the fact that everything borrows from everything and none of this actually matters, Dead Cells blooms as a fusion of successful ideas. My closest point of comparison is Shovel Knight, a game with an original premise and a Murderers’ Row of classic ideas. Dead Cells is better than the sum of its parts.
The only form Dead Cells lacks is a sense of complacency. It prevails without being proud of itself or, even in the shape of a roguelike, wasting the player’s time. If you put off exiting a level in order to scour a dangerous, spike-filled hallway, you can be certain there’s a reward waiting on the other end. It builds a sense of trust between both parties, or at least a tacit agreement that each has something to prove. Maybe this relationship is another product of Dead Cells’ time in early access or maybe it’s passed on from a development studio that properly compensates its staff. In either case, victory is assured.
You know that feeling, when you were younger, when you would discover a secret in a game? Some overpowered but obviously designed surge of power that felt special and unique to your experience? On a micro level Dead Cells does this with its Powers, extremely-rare drops that can, in the case of Wings of the Crow, float your character in the air while shaking out leeches and electricity beneath their feet. On a macro level, it’s a thesis for the entirety of Dead Cells. It feels like there’s always going to be more on the horizon and I desperately want to see it all.
