There’s no single path through the game: Once you’ve gained the ability to cause vines to bloom, you can bypass the Promenade of the Condemned, a forest filled with gibbeted corpses, and instead travel through the poisonous, green-hued murk of the Toxic Sewers. More so than in other roguelikes, each run through Dead Cells feels like a new adventure, not a retread. Each new build released into the game’s year-long Early Access helped to refine and rebalance the design, just as trace elements of the progression of predecessors like Rogue Legacy can be seen in the smarter ways in which Dead Cells opens up its map to the player. The developers at the Bordeaux-based Motion Twin have achieved this success, appropriately enough, through apoptosis: the pre-programmed cell death that helps to shape life itself. For one, the high drop rates for the game’s variety of weapons and tools ensure that the player won’t be stuck with unlucky gear for long, new tidbits of lore provide a reward for exploring familiar areas, and branching paths serve to cut down on the ennui that comes from constantly replaying the same old areas just to progress a bit further. This mechanic, based on randomization, will undoubtably be frustrating to some, but that’s a feeling that’s tempered by just about every other aspect of the game. Each time you die, you’re sent back to the first level, at which point a new layout of the game’s Castlevania-inspired map is generated. Dead Cells, by contrast, is a game designed for those who don’t particularly like roguelikes. Roguelikes are aimed primarily at gameplay junkies who thrive on a challenge.
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