![]() Would you believe I don’t fully understand it myself? By this point, I’m sure anyone reading this review has heard of Dead Cells, gets the gist of it, and is here to figure out exactly why I enjoyed it more than any indie game I’ve ever played. I’ll give it this: it was never uninteresting.Ī big part of the reason I had trouble beginning the actual writing process was because I honestly don’t know where to begin. I took my Twitter followers on a roller-coaster of eutrophic glee and bitter contempt, wondering out-loud if Dead Cells was the best indie I’d ever played or unworthy of my Seal of Approval at all. But then I decided I “needed more media”, reinstalled it, and ended up tripling my time-in. When I thought I had played enough to write this, I deleted the game from my Xbox One and Switch in a futile attempt to force myself to sit down and start typing. I’ve never had an indie utterly own my psyche to the degree it has. I’ve never cussed a game I intended to review more. I have never put more time into a game before I sat down to write the review. I’ve previously reviewed 568 indie games, and played thousands more that I never transferred my opinions over into review form. As of this writing, I’ve been Indie Gamer Chick seven years, three months, and twelve days. And it’s shitty of Dead Cells to imply in any form that it’s a Metroidvania.ĭead Cells is the best indie game ever made. I mean, they wear uniforms and they play a game with a ball and the team with the highest score wins, so it’s pretty much indistinguishable, right? Well, no. It’d be like saying the Chicago Cubs are essentially a basketball team. But that’s clearly not what the implication is behind the “rogueVANIA” thing, and I find that to be a bit dirty. Replace switching between different characters with switching between different weapons and make the game a roguelike and it would fit right in. Really, it’s the closest an indie game I’ve played has come to feeling like a modern twist on a 2D Castlevania, especially Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse on the NES. The protagonist even looks like a Belmont, sometimes uses a whip as a weapon, and fights the undead. I’m fine if they want the “Vania” part to mean “in the NES sense of things”, because Dead Cells feels an awful lot like the Castlevania games of yore, where you would play one linear level at a time and there was no gigantic map to explore. I can’t possibly imagine where they got the “Vania” part from. Doesn’t get more connected than that, right? Its levels are interconnected, after-all. But going by that logic, you’re saying Super Mario 1 is a Metroidvania. It’s factually true, in the sense that if you beat level one, you play level 2 next. Calling the levels “interconnected” seems intellectually dishonest. Some stages have more than one exit, but once you’ve used that exit, you continue on a linear path and can’t take a mulligan if you don’t want to play the stage you exited to. Dead Cells has levels, not one big, sprawling map. #Dead cells display menu to selec tmods not working upgradeYou can unlock runes that permanently upgrade your character, but once you have them you can’t go back to the stuff you missed in previous levels unless you die or finish the game. All runs in Dead Cells are fully linear, with no back-tracking. Nobody would deny that.īut saying or suggesting this marries that genre to Metroidvanias is utter hogwash. Still, Dead Cells is quintessentially roguelike. It never really gets as absurd as Spelunky’s “damsel behind ten feet of rock when you can’t possibly have enough bombs by this point to get to her” stupidity, but the algorithm leaves a lot to be desired. Hallways can wind around only to lead to a dead-end. Especially the level design, which can be so nonsensically assembled that you’d swear the game is set in the Winchester Mystery House. The difficulty is high, the randomness is, well, random. And I take it issue with that, because it’s just not true. Apologists for it will say that it’s NOT trying to invoke a Metroidvania, despite that term being thrown around everywhere. Dead Cells calls itself a hybrid of a roguelike and a Metroidvania, or a “RogueVania” to be specific. Before I get to the review, I want to take Dead Cells to task on how it promotes itself. ![]()
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