Dead Cells | |
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Developer(s) |
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Publisher(s) |
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Composer(s) | Yoann Laulan |
Engine | Heaps.io (programmed in Haxe) |
Platform(s) | |
Release | Linux, macOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Windows, Xbox One August 7, 2018 iOS August 28, 2019 Android June 3, 2020 |
Genre(s) | Roguelike, Metroidvania |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Dead Cells is a 2018 rogue-lite video game developed and published by Motion Twin. The game was released for Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on August 7, 2018. A mobile port for iOS was released on August 28, 2019 and an Android port was released on June 3, 2020.
In the game, the player takes the role of an amorphous creature called the Prisoner. As the Prisoner, the player must fight their way out of a diseased island in order to slay the island's King. The player gains weapons, treasure and other tools through exploration of the procedurally-generated levels, using them to fight various mutated creatures. At times, the player gains "Cells", an in-game currency that can be used to purchase permanent upgrades or unlock items. Dead Cells uses a permadeath system, causing the player to lose all Cells, items, and other currencies each time the player dies.
Production of Dead Cells began after Motion Twin planned development for a follow-up to their previous browser game Die2Nite, with Dead Cells acting as concept of their previous title focusing around constant combat. Inspirations for the game included Team Fortress 2, The Binding of Isaac, and the Souls series. The game was released in early access on Steam to gain feedback from potential players. After release, Motion Twin supported the game with several updates and expansions.
The game received positive reviews from critics, who praised its combat style and level design, with specific praise being directed towards the randomized levels and weapons. By March 2021, the game had sold 6 million copies.
Gameplay
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20220624172835im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ae/Dead_cells_jumping_May_2022.gif/220px-Dead_cells_jumping_May_2022.gif)
Dead Cells is a 2D side-scrolling "roguevania", a combination of procedurally-generated roguelike games and action-exploration-based Metroidvania games.[1] The player controls the Prisoner, an amorphous creature that can possess human corpses. The Prisoner explores a fictional island infested with mutated monsters, which must be transversed so the Prisoner can kill the island’s King. When the player dies, they lose all weapons and upgrades obtained in a playthrough, excluding a few permanent items.[2] Weapons primarily include swords, bows, shields, and placeable traps that harm enemies that come near them. The Prisoner can move across the ground to engage in melee combat, or can use ranged weapons and traps to harm enemies from a distance. The Prisoner can also dodge across the ground to avoid the attacks of enemies, or jump over the attacks. Dodging into an enemy's space allows the Prisoner to move through them and attack from behind.[3] When falling from a height, the Prisoner also slam into the ground, allowing them to hit enemies and stun them, or allow the Prisoner to fall from heights without getting stunned themselves.[4][5]
The game's combat is comparable to the Souls series, with difficult enemies possessing certain behaviors the player can learn, and where frequent player-character death is a fundamental part of the game.[6] As they explore a series of dungeon levels and fight the creatures within, the player can collect Cells from defeated enemies, which can be used to purchase permanent items such as potions that restore hit points or additional weapons that may be randomly obtained during a playthrough.[6][2] These Cells must be spent at the end of a dungeon section; if the player dies before then, they lose all collected Cells.[7] Blueprints can also be collected from inside dungeons, which must also be taken out of the dungeon to be collected. Collecting Blueprints allows for more weapons and items to be purchased from shops.[8]
Between dungeons, the player can obtain a limited number of mutations, upgrades which grant unique bonuses to the Prisoner's capabilities that last until the player dies.[4] The player can also reforge weapons during this time, giving the reforged weapons new effects during combat.[5] The player can also find hidden Power Scrolls inside a dungeon, which increase the Prisoner's hit points and increase the damage of weapons depending upon the tool's classification of Brutality, Tactics, or Survival.[3] Inside the dungeons the player can find multiple permanent upgrades called Runes, which allow for new methods of travel in the game's levels. Runes can be obtained by defeating powerful Elite enemies, which are located inside the game's levels.[5] Each upgrade requires the previous Rune in order to obtain the next one.[4]
Levels are procedurally generated by the merging of predesigned sections in a random configuration, creating levels with many different placements of enemies and items.[6] Up to three boss characters can be fought in a single playthrough, and defeating the game's final boss allows for the collection of "Boss Cells," permanent modifiers that can be activated to increase the difficulty of subsequent playthroughs. Defeating the final boss while having the maximum number of current Boss Cells grants the player another Boss Cell.[9]
The game includes Twitch integration, allowing viewers, via the stream's chat, to influence the game, such as voting for which Power Scroll weapon class option the player should take.[10]
Plot
Premise
The plot of Dead Cells is minimalistic, only giving minor amounts of information to the player. The Prisoner character is also mute, limiting interactions with non-player characters (NPCs) to a series of bodily motions that the Prisoner displays. The majority of the plot is learned through hidden messages and dialogue with important NPCs.
Taking place on an unnamed island, the player character is the Prisoner, a gelatinous creature capable of possessing dead bodies located in the depths of the island. While the "head" of the Prisoner is immortal, the bodies it possesses are not, and dying will force the head to return back to the Prisoners' Quarters to find another corpse.
Story
The Prisoner awakens in the depths of the island's prison, possessing no memory of how they got there. A soldier encounters the Prisoner, and mentions that they can no longer die. The Prisoner tries to escape the prison, but their head is forced back to the depths as soon as its body is destroyed. Between subsequent escape attempts, the Prisoner learns that that the island was once a mighty kingdom that fell when a plague known as "The Malaise" transformed most of the kingdom's citizens into mutated monsters.
After finally escaping the Prisoners' Quarters, the Prisoner decides to kill the island's increasingly reclusive King, who the townsfolk blame for the outbreak of the Malaise. While leaving the Quarters, the Prisoner also meets with the Collector, a hooded figure that trades Cells in exchange for items and weaponry. After fighting through island’s Malaise-infected locales, the Prisoner reaches the island's clock tower, where they encounter and battle with the tower’s Time Keeper. When the Time Keeper realizes that her defeat is inevitable, she flees, giving the Prisoner access to the castle entrance.
The Prisoner fights their way through the castle to get to the throne room, where they are attacked by the King's chief lieutenant, the "Hand of the King". Upon the Hand's defeat, the Prisoner takes his weapon and uses it to slay the comatose King. The King's body violently explodes, destroying the Prisoner's host body in the process. The Prisoners' head crawls out from the burning fragments of the throne, where it returns to the Quarters by exiting through a fountain's drain. Back at the Quarters, the Prisoner remarks that although the King has died, nothing has changed.
Rise of the Giant
The Rise of the Giant downloadable content includes an expansion to the plot. The Prisoner gains access to a new area of the island, the Cavern, which houses a titanic undead Giant. Upon his defeat, The Giant reveals that the Prisoner is actually the King himself.[11] He blames the Prisoner for the island’s ruination, and gives the Prisoner the finger before sinking into a pool of magma.
If the Prisoner collects all five Boss Cells and faces the Hand of the King once more, they are able to gain access to the Astrolab, an area behind the throne room. At the top of the Astrolab, the Prisoner finds the Collector, who tells the Prisoner that he has been gathering Cells in order to create the Panacea. Upon producing the Panacea and drinking it, the Collector goes mad and attacks the Prisoner. The Prisoner manages to ingest some of the Panacea before the Collector’s defeat, which causes their host body to disappear. Disappointed with the Panacea, the head returns to the Quarters to possess another corpse.
Before attempting to escape again, the Prisoner encounters the Time Keeper, who is implied in a cutscene to have created a time loop that has resurrected the island’s monsters even after they are killed.[12][13]
When the Prisoner defeats the Hand of the King again, they discover that they can now possess the inanimate body of the newly-resurrected King. However, the King's body is infected with the Malaise, and he continues to the Astrolab to face the Collector. This time, upon the Collector's defeat, the Panacea cures the King and “binds his body and soul”, causing the head to cease to exist. The King returns to his throne, where he is confronted by a copy of the Prisoner created by the time loop. The two Prisoners then battle each other in a duel.
The Queen and the Sea
The Queen and the Sea downloadable content adds three additional levels to the game, as well as alternative ending. The Prisoner finds a letter inviting them to a meeting in the sewers beneath the prison. When the Prisoner arrives, they meet an aquatic creature called the Fisherman, who offers them a way to escape the island through the kingdom’s lighthouse. After the Prisoner finds the Lighthouse Key and meets the Fisherman again at the King's castle, the latter uses his boat to take the Prisoner to the lighthouse. Inside, the Prisoner accidentally knocks over a flaming chandelier, alerting three hostile warriors named Calliope, Euterpe, and Kleio. The three chase the Prisoner to the top of the now-burning structure, where the Prisoner defeats them in combat. The Prisoner enters the upper chambers of the lighthouse to light its beacon, but the island's Queen reveals herself and challenges them to a duel. The Prisoner defeats the Queen before throwing her off the lighthouse's balcony, causing a catastrophic explosion that activates the structure's beacon. The Prisoner uses the beacon to attract a ship passing by the island.
Development
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Dead Cells's developer Motion Twin had been developing games for the browser and mobile gaming market since 2001. The studio found that competition in the mobile market required more investment to make profitable games, and decided to switch focus to develop what they considered their "passion project", a game that was "something hardcore, ultra-niche, with pixel art and ridiculous difficulty" that they thought would be a potential risk for gaining player interest.[14]
Initially, Motion Twin had set out to make a follow-up to their browser game Die2Nite, which was a cooperative tower defense game for up to forty players released in 2008; for most of the game, players would work together to form defenses around a town, and then during the game’s night phase, wait to see if the town survived waves of attacks by zombies. Motion Twin wanted to have improve the sequel by allowing players to take actions and fight during the night phase, while also implementing free to play mechanics. While this version worked well with large number of players, Motion Twin found it was not very exciting for single players.[15] In 2014, they stripped down the game to a single-player experience between preparation and combat, and took it to an event called the Big Indie Pitch, where the idea came in second place in a contest. Motion Twin then decided to remove the preparation phase and focus the game around constant action. The process of figuring out how to keep and work with combat elements took a year up through the end of 2015.[15]
To tighten the gameplay, Motion Twin took inspiration of the Engineer character class from Team Fortress 2, where the use of turrets and other buildable items helps to strengthen the character's abilities, and remade Dead Cells into an action platform game where the player used weapons along with a variety of skills (including some elements they had developed for the tower defense approach).[16] They did not want players to get used to having a single weapon/skill combination that they used indefinitely, and arranged the roguelike elements to require the player to try out new combinations of weapons and skills as they progressed.[16] Motion Twin's producer, Steve Filby, said that The Binding of Isaac was a significant influence, as there, the way the game proceeds "as entirely based on the choice of items that you get. That's the fun of the game."[16] To give the player enough options, the developers crafted about 50 different weapons, avoiding having too much duplication in how each weapon worked so that there would be unique gameplay possibilities with each. The team used an iterative process in gameplay, graphics, and art so that each of these weapons also exhibited unique animations or behavior.[16]
Motion Twin opted to use Steam's early access approach to both gauge player interest and to obtain feedback on game features and the balance from procedural generation.[14] The team feared the stigma around indie games at the time, fueled by industry speculation of an "indiepocalypse" where too many indie games would have caused a collapse of the video game market around 2015, an event which never occurred.[17] Motion Twin did not want to release too early within early access, and made sure the first version available, while only about 30 to 40% complete, had tight combat and gameplay controls that players would appreciate.[15] This allowed the team to address balance issues, as the developers did not want to punish players for a specific style of play, and used feedback to address this. This allowed them to design short combat encounters, and assure that maneuvering within the game's levels itself was not a challenge to the player.[17] Motion Twin planned for the game to spend about a year in early access before its full release, during which time the content was created and incorporated after player feedback on both bug reports and feature suggestions.[15] Lead designer Sébastien Bénard estimated that 40 to 50% of the features in the final game were drawn from feedback during early access.[18]
Release
The early access period was launched on May 10, 2017, with support for Microsoft Windows, and released macOS and Linux versions in early access on June 26, 2018.[19] In November 2017 the game was released on GOG.com as part of their drive to provide an alternate way to purchase games that are in development.[20] In January 2018, Motion Twin stated they are planning on console development for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with a planned release in August 2018 to correspond with the Windows' version leaving early access.[21][22] Motion Twin does not anticipate creating a sequel, and instead focused on adding a robust modding system for the personal computer versions to allow players to expand the game following release.[18] The studio considered developing downloadable content for Dead Cells and other ways to expand the existing game.[23]
Dead Cells was fully released on August 7, 2018, for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. Retail editions were released in August 2018.[24][25]
Motion Twin released a free downloadable content update to the game called "Rise of the Giant" in mid-2019.[26] The developers announced plans to port the title to mobile devices running iOS and Android, modifying the game's interface to support touch controls as well as remote controllers. The iOS version was released on August 28, 2019, and the Android version was released on June 3, 2020.[27][28][29]
Around January 2019, Motion Twin started work on their next title while still developing Dead Cells. When they expanded by hiring more developers, Motion Twin wanted to keep Dead Cells' development team to between eight to ten people in order to stay a manageable worker cooperative. The team then spun-off a new studio called Evil Empire to help co-develop the game.[30]
The game's first paid downloadable content, "The Bad Seed", was released on February 11, 2020, adding two new biomes, Arboretum and Swamp, as well a boss for early game content. The new content included weapons, enemies and game mechanics.[31] On the same day, a new physical package for the game, the "Prisoner's Edition" was announced for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, which in addition to the game and DLC, includes the soundtrack, an art book, and a figurine of the player-character.[32]
A second paid DLC expansion "Fatal Falls" was released on January 26, 2021. It adds two new levels, eight new enemies, seven new weapons and a boss.[33] On the same date, a bundle called "The Fatal Seed Bundle" was released that contains the base game and all three DLCs.[34]
Motion Twin released a free update on September 16, 2021, titled "Practice Makes Perfect" which added a training room, world map and many other quality of life changes.[35]
A free "Everyone is Here"[b] update on November 22, 2021, introduced character skins and mechanics based on characters from other indie games as "guest characters". These games included Hyper Light Drifter, Guacamelee!, Curse of the Dead Gods, Blasphemous, Skul: The Hero Slayer, and Hollow Knight. For example, a character outfit based on the Drifter can be gained as well as the Drifter's blaster as a weapon.[36][37] Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Motion Twin, they revealed the final DLC called "The Queen and the Sea", which released on January 7, 2022.[38] Another free content update, "Break the Bank", released in March 2022 adds in a new level that can be randomly encountered which grants the player an opportunity to earn significant sums of gold.[39]
Reception
Aggregator | Score |
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Metacritic | NS: 89/100[40] PC: 89/100[41] PS4: 87/100[42] XONE: 91/100[43] iOS: 84/100[44] |
Publication | Score |
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Game Informer | 9/10[45] |
GameSpot | 9/10[46] |
IGN | 9.5/10[47] |
Nintendo Life | 9/10 [49] |
TouchArcade | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Critical reception
Dead Cells received positive reviews from critics. The Xbox One version received "universal acclaim", and the PlayStation 4, PC, Nintendo Switch, and iOS versions received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Brandin Tyrrel of IGN praised the game for its engaging gameplay premise, declaring "The placement and order of its levels are Dead Cells’ skeletal frame, but the ever-changing layouts and enemy and item placements are the blood that pumps through its heart."[50] Similar acclaim was foused around the game's constant action and combat.[51] Mitch Vogel of Nintendo Life stated "Dead Cells is a masterclass in excellent roguelike design, mixing together nonstop intense action sequences, gorgeous vistas, and an addictive loop of unlocks and rewards."[52] Chris Thursten of PC Gamer compared the game to Dark Souls and Diablo due to the game's difficulty and constantly changing levels, while giving specific praise to the visuals and sound design.[53]
Criticism was primarily focused around the game's plot, which critics found to be lacking or unclear[54][55][56] Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku found the story disappointing, stating "Aside from some sparse worldbuilding, the only story here is the story of moving forward, killing things, and gradually getting better at it". Some other reviewers felt that the permadeath system caused earlier levels to become more and more repetitive.[57] Chris Carter of Destructiod criticized the repetition, stating "Then there’s those moments where you have a perfect run with all of the items you prefer and think “these last 30 meticulous minutes are going to pay off.” Then you get to a boss you’ve never seen before and bam — he smashes you to a pulp."[58] Neal Ronaghan of Nintendo World Report enjoyed the permadeath feature, saying "Every run is engrossing and fun and when I die, the only thought rushing through my brain is to start over and try again, pushing as far past my previous run as I can."[59]
Sales
About a year from its early access release, Dead Cells sold over 730,000 units,[60] and exceeded 850,000 units just prior to its full release.[18] By May 2019, within ten months of its full release, Dead Cells had accumulated sales of two million units.[61] Following the release on the Switch in August 2019, total sales exceed 2.4 million units, with Motion Twin stating that Switch sales were "insane".[62] By November 2020, Dead Cells had sold over 3.5 million copies[63] and as of March 2021, it has sold 5 Million copies fueled by the game's mobile release in China.[64] In November 2021, Dead Cells has sold 6 million copies during the announcement of their last DLC.[65]
Awards and accolades
The game was nominated for "Original Property" at the 15th British Academy Games Awards,[66] and for "Best Indie Game" at the Italian Video Game Awards,[67] and won the awards for "Best Mobile Game" and "Best Game-as-a-Service" at the Pégases Awards 2020.[68][69]
Year | Award | Category | Result | Ref |
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2017 | 2017 Ping Awards | Best Indie Game | Nominated | [70] |
IGN Best of 2017 | Best Action Game | Nominated | [71] | |
2018 | 2018 Golden Joystick Awards | Best Indie Game | Won | [72] |
Best Visual Design | Nominated | [73] | ||
Ultimate Game of the Year | Nominated | [74] | ||
The Game Awards 2018 | Best Action Game | Won | [75] | |
Best Independent Game | Nominated | [76] | ||
Gamers' Choice Awards | Fan Favorite Indie Game | Nominated | [77] | |
Australian Games Awards | Independent Game of the Year | Nominated | [78] | |
New York Game Awards | Best Indie Game | Won | [79][80] | |
National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards | Control Design, 2D or Limited 3D. | Won | [81] | |
2019 | SXSW Gaming Awards | Excellence In Gameplay | Nominated | [82] |
Most Promising New Intellectual Property | Nominated |
Notes
- ^ iOS and Android
- ^ The name is based on a slogan from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
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