[Impressions] Dead Cells

After getting hooked earlier this year on Binding of Isaac’s roguelike loop, Enter The Gungeon’s rather excellent Advanced Gungeons & Draguns update was another reminder of how much I enjoy the genre nowadays. Dead Cells, released earlier this month, is my latest addiction in the roguelike genre.

Going back to the gameplay, Dead Cells is a 2D side-scroller, with the world being structured with interconnected areas. Your runs start in an abandoned prisoner quarter’s and, judging from how far I’ve reached in the game, gradually make your way to a castle. In the way, you go through the castle’s damaged ramparts, a fisherman village and more. For the actual combat, Dead Cells has an almost hack’n’slash aspect to it, as you almost never stop and during combat you’re slashing away at enemies as fast as possible. The longer you play, the more you get into its rhythm and soon enough the enemies’ attack patterns will be engraved in your brain so much that you’ll be attacking and dodging out of the way on raw muscle memory. In combat, you’re always attacking and dodging, while exploring, the maps have plenty of fast travel points so that you can quickly move inside each area quickly and even simple things like dropping to a lower point makes you act as you as you should smash the ground upon landing instead of simply dropping down, leaving nearby enemies stunned. Upon finishing an area, you enter a safe area to invest your cells, equip one more skill and refill your health flask. And that’s the thing: you can go all-out in each stage without worrying about running out of resources for the areas ahead because your weapons and traps are infinite and, even if you run out of health recoveries, as long as you can make it to the safe area you’ll be back at full health with your health flask completely full. The game wants to make sure that you’re not stingy about your resources and end up dying because you were saving them “for the right time”. No, instead, it almost screams at you to make use of them, because once you start the next area you’ll have them all “restocked” and thus you’ll be able to go all-out once again. This is especially important for boss battles. Since you always have to fight bosses no matter how many times you’ve killed them in the past, having the chance to always fight bosses with everything you have at your disposal eventually makes bosses glorified enemies with very large health bars. They are still cool and the first couple of times you fight them they are a nightmare to fight, but soon enough you’ll start creating your own ideal equipment sets and perhaps come across some overpowered combinations (looking at you bear traps plus mini turret).

The gameplay loop, as expected in this genre, is what makes Dead Cells such an amazing game. As a roguelike, Dead Cells has the usual gameplay loop and structure of procedurally generated maps with progress resetting upon death. But that’s exactly where this game adds something new: you don’t lose ALL of your progress. Yes, you still start the next run in the very first stage with most of your currency gone (cells and gold in this game), but, between areas, there’s a resting area where you can invest your collected cells into permanent upgrades. For example, you can choose to invest cells into your health flask to increase the number of times you can heal yourself, start the next run with a portion of the gold you had upon death, randomize your starting weapons instead of starting runs with the basic ones, etc. Besides these permanent upgrades, you can also invest cells to unlock new weapons, skills or traps (we’ll get to these shortly). The game goes as far forcing you to invest your cells in those resting areas before progressing further, so that even if you die in the next area the current run won’t be a complete waste, no matter how small the progress. This contrasts with Binding of Isaac’s structure where you can unlock new characters or items during a run, with the difference that these rely on the player to complete certain requirements/feats. Thus, Dead Cells handles, this part of the progression in a more direct way that allows players to have more feedback and control over how to unlock new tools to reach a new area in the next run.

Going back to the weapons, skills and traps mentioned, these are your main combat options. While at first your weapon options seem to be limited to a short sword and a bow, as you progress you get the chance to unlock more variety such as hammers, long swords, twin sword, spears, whips, shields, etc. There’s a ton of choices and when I think I’ve seen them all I find a new weapon type. Skills are straightforward passives that grant bonuses to the player, such as extra ammo, cooldown reductions, extra damage and even the chance to be revived upon the first death of the run. Lastly, traps are “tools” that, instead of being consumables, you can just keep using them forever, with the disclaimer that there’s a short cooldown upon use. One good thing the developers implemented for the sake of balance is that traps won’t attack unless you’re close enough to them (this is implemented visually with a thin energy line that connects you to the traps, provided you’re close enough). This means you can’t just dump traps on top of the enemies and run away to safety while they do all the work, you still have to be close enough to the action. Oh, and just a final note about unlocking new gear with cells: you first need to collect the item’s corresponding blueprint from enemies (as fairly common enemy drops) and then bring it to a safe area to “unlock it for unlocking with cells”.

Still on the topic of the gameplay but also partly of the game structure, Dead Cells also introduces a MetroidVania aspect. At first, you’ll find plenty of structures which will make you think the procedural generation is not working properly. Well, as you’ll find out, by finding the necessary runes, you’ll eventually be able to cross those parts and access brand new areas. These runes are unlocked by killing elites, normal enemies cranked up to eleven. You’ll know when you’ve come across one of these special elites as the place you fight them is always the same no matter what area you’re in. You might also come across elites normally, but this won’t give you any runes, just a lot of cells and a weapon drop. Back to the runes, unlocking one always creates that satisfying feeling of “now I can cross that part next time I see it” and even if they don’t always create pathways to new areas, they always lead to weapon/traps drops.

So, what are my ultimate impressions of Dead Cells? It’s a fantastic game that is not afraid to reward the player with new items and encourages them to fight and explore to its heart content, reassuring them that they’ll have all their tools at maximum capacity on the next area. The MetroidVania aspect makes even the roguelike loop feel somewhat hand-crafted, instead of being completely procedurally generated. Even if the Nintendo Switch version (the one I played) has some slight hiccups, meaning the game is not always running at 60 fps, the game is extremely polished and it never interfered with my enjoyment of the game. Just one final question to be answered: does Dead Cells substitute Binding of Isaac or Enter The Gungeon? No, in fact, it’s another excellent roguelike game I now own on the Switch, with all of them presenting me very different experiences. I can’t look at any of them and say “now that I have Dead Cells I will stop playing Binding of Isaac/Enter The Gungeon”, it’s precisely the opposite, now I have three amazing roguelike games that I can enjoy anytime.

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