I was six, and with my purple GameBoy Color in hand and “Elmoe in Grouch land” as my guide, I began my intrepid journey into the world of video games.
Years later, with the GameBoy put away, my love for quasi-2D side scrollers had stuck for good. So with the announcement of Dead Cells, I was sold. They proudly call themselves “Metroidvania” and “Roguelike” but to the unaccustomed those words don’t mean much. Dead Cells is a 2-D scroller in a procedurally generated world. The world itself is dark, but the monsters, their drops, and your attacks light the world with brilliant color.
- Special attributes can be purchased in the shop, altering your weapons and changing up the facets of combat, ultimately changing your build and play style.
- Cells, which help you to improve your moveset and unlock a wide variety of new weapons, are dropped from enemies but are lost for good when you die – so in this game, it’s better to spend than save.
- You get the nostalgia for Metroid when you realize that these moves you’ve unlocked can help you traverse the world in different ways, allowing you into areas you didn’t even know where there.
- But it’s the RPG-esc progression, the story, mixed with the game mechanics and dungeon crawl that make it a “roguelike.”
Whatever you refer to it as, Dead Cells is turning out to be an amazing looking game, and one I’m already looking forward to getting my hands on. If the developers continue on their current path, we’ll have a gorgeous reinvention of a classic that both Mac and PC gamers will enjoy for a long time.
I’ve already posted about Dauntless on the site. Transcribing an entire interview illuminated a lot about the game that I didn’t already know. Feel free to go over to that post to see exactly what I find so incredible about it.
As a brand new I.P. Phoenix Labs needed a comparison that would draw interested parties to their game, and in their search they made an incredibly apt comparison. Dauntless stands out as “a PC version of Monster Hunter” and everyone that’s set their eyes on both can see the similarities.
Given the ability to tear limbs off monsters and use those parts for weapons and armor, players that have experience with the sub-genre will instantly feel at home. Add in the crisp and but slightly daunting feeling of combat, and the fact that you can play this game cooperatively with friends, and even those inexperienced when it comes to fantasy based RPG’S will have the time of their lives. Oh, and it’s free to play – so in-game payments for faster progression and a higher chance of drops – but no game is perfect.
Here’s some combat footage:
Gaming Crisis 