Dead Cells, an indie roguelite Metroidvania

[toro]

http://dead-cells.com/#

Blending the meticulous level design of a metroidvania with the procedural generation and permadeath of a roguelike, Dead Cells pits your skill against a brooding castle filled with cunning enemies and cutthroat bosses.

Made by french guys.

 

[Mozg]

It's really fuckin' good.

Since toro didn't say shit about it it's a roguelite metroidvania. The core action game stuff and the enemy design is shockingly high quality and diverse. There's "procedural level generation" but it's really more like Daggerfall, i.e. it's really just kind of remixing levels by mixing up a number of premade chunks and enemy placements, but the overall effect is great.

My only issue with it is that it's probably a bit too hard for me.

 

[Ivan]

sounds excellent. fuck off

 

[Excidium II]

I've watched some streams, seems good.

Hope they keep development on a nice pace.

 

[abnaxus]

 

[Drowed]

Played it for a bit, now that it's in early acess. It sure looks good, but I'm getting my ass kicked hard.

 

[Mozg]

I've played enough that the new game shine is thinning a tad and I can see some balance problems that don't seem like the kind of stuff they'll change for release (e.g. the "skills" like grenades should have been on some kind of mana or ammo system), and other balance stuff that will probably change (shield mechanics are very mismatched to the game, some weapons are way better than others). Still an amazingly competent package overall.

Edit - They really bricked up their roguelite design in a few ways. The "sword I, sword II, sword III" stuff really removes the element of having to use whatever you happen to get to its fullest, since you can easily be using the sword II you think is top tier over the badsword VI. The final boss (who I think is supposed to be the middle boss in the release version) is also very punishing against most gear setups, meaning you are better off collecting a kit specifically for fighting him, which means lots of oddball tools like the spear or whip that would be fine as "underpowered but interesting" are major liabilities. The +1 stat scrolls are also of immensely more RPG importance than you might intuit for a roguelite - the functions that derive material numbers like your hitpoints and damage from those stats are strongly superlinear, and a character that's accumulated some 8s or 9s in the three stats can rip through stuff a low stat character has to peck at for quite a while.

I'm updating my opinion of this to: excellent core combat and movement mechanics designer/programmer? they have there that got me over-enthusiastic but pretty bad Sawyer-type higher level design stuff. Plus pretty good art.

 

[T. Reich]

Tried the AC beta, it's pretty damn nice!

The core gameplay is indeed very good, and the semi-randomised gameplay also keeps the game fresh longer.
The game rewards skillful play.
The weapon/skill balance is indeed very skewed towards certain weapon/skill types, but I don't mind the fact that some gear choices are noob traps.
I like how magic affixes on gear can lead to interesting weapon+skill choices that would otherwise be "suboptimal" based on weapon type alone.

And, of course, the graphics and animations are very beautiful - the old OP screenshots don't do the game justice.

 

[Morgoth]

Well I'm gonna have to play the demo of that.

 

[sullynathan]

Played it a bunch and the level design so far is nothing to write home about. The combat is really good, far better than the likes of salt and sanctuary but I'm not really getting that metroidvania feeling. Also, the blood sword and twin swords are way too over powered. I can see starting the entire game over to grind can be tiresome

Is it possible to open those doors that say "it was locked 5 minutes ago"?

 

[Mozg]

They're timed doors. There's one in promenade that closes 3 minutes after the run starts, etc. It's not at all feasible to fully explore levels and still get to the timed doors before they lock. They more or less require speedruns. A few of the timed doors have a blueprint behind them (the 11 minute door after the first boss has a really good item) but otherwise at least in the current version it's just some gold. So you play a few speedrun games to get the blueprints then ignore them. Part of me thinking the game must be super hard was assuming you could get to those doors in time using normal play.

And yeah once you grasp the game structure it's obviously not a metroidvania. There's no backtracky exploration, they're like somewhat more complex semi-linear oldschool Castlevania levels with little dead end branches with teleport backtracking.

 

[T. Reich]

There's a very small metroidvania mechanic in the game actually - there are green blobs that you can "tickle" and purple totems that you can "rub", but at the start of the game they do nothing.
However, once you defeat some specific early elite "bosses", two special upgrades will drop, and those two objects will become properly interactive - green blobs spawn vines that you can climb and totems are one-way teleports.
Both will let you access the otherwise unreachable parts of the leves, often letting you access entrances to altogether different levels of the game.

It's a very limited fearure, of course, because you unlock both of those early on, and after that you get nothing of the sort, and they are only really useful on repeat playthroughs, with no backtracking available.

 

[sullynathan]

I downloaded the new update and I reached further than I had before but something is rubbing me the wrong away. A lot of the areas don't have bosses at all. I had to go through 3 areas before I reached a boss and that health bar was massive. Is this the only other boss in the game right now and what locations are easy enough to go through so that I can always reach him after dying?

 

[T. Reich]

Currently the game is balanced in such a way that you don't want to go through the easier areas. That's because easier areas award you with fewer upgrade scrolls, fewer dead cells, less gold, fewer and weaker tier equipment. As a result, if you go through eaiser areas, you're almost guaranteed th reach the second boss underpowered and will die.

 

[Excidium II]

I downloaded the new update and I reached further than I had before but something is rubbing me the wrong away. A lot of the areas don't have bosses at all. I had to go through 3 areas before I reached a boss and that health bar was massive. Is this the only other boss in the game right now and what locations are easy enough to go through so that I can always reach him after dying?

I think it largely depends on your build/luck, I've seen a guy kill the first boss in like five hits.

 

[sullynathan]

so it would be better for me to go through all the areas I can each time I die until I beat the boss?

 

[Excidium II]

Yeah you're supposed to explore whole map. Otherwise you miss on upgrades and items.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

It feels like the only viable strategy is to spam various granades. Regular weapons do meager damage compared to them and letter stage enemies have massive health & damage. If you try to kite them with ranged weapons you are guaranteed to run out of ammo (you have limited ammo and the only way to replenish it is to kill enemies which take too many ammo to kill on later stages).

 

[T. Reich]

You're wrong on so many levels it's as if you barely played the game.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

You're wrong on so many levels it's as if you barely played the game.

Baseless accusation.

 

[T. Reich]

Ok, seeing as you're playing dumb:
1) try pumping strength instead of skills and THEN try using melee weapons, instead of spewing bullshit.
2) I bet you haven't tried using the damage buffer either.
3) ranged weapons are BY DESIGN meant to be auxilary means of strength-based combat (even though they are more than capable of quickly killing all the non-boss enemies with their limited ammo - because see point #1).
4) There ARE ranged weapons with "unlimited" ammunition though (whips, spells, bow and infinite ammo, which is also the highest base damage bow in the game).
5) as far as damage-dealing skills go: death orb >>> turrets (except ceiling turret) >>> grenades (with the exception of cluster and ivy grenades).

 

[Mozg]

Every stat scroll you get in Dead Cells multiplies the derived stat by the square root of 2 (so, every two stat scrolls you get doubles the derived stat). Meaning, your HP when you have health 5 is double what you have at health 3, health 7 has quadruple the HP of health 3, etc. So, stats are really, really important relative to what you might expect to be the case in this kind of game, which generally has roughly linear derived stats. Once you know that the game is pretty degenerate in the current form, unfortunately.

 

[T. Reich]

Yeah, and weapon tier damage increases are also relatively insignificant.
While that does mean that with correct/lucky stat-scroll distribution you will be able to dish out some good deeps with even tier I weapons/skills, on the other hand it places overwhelming importance on finding weapons enchanted with specific stat boosts (strength/skills/hp) relevant to your current strat, rather than weapons with other meaningful enchantments or high item tiers in general.

Like, if you're doing a weapon-based run, there's absolutely no reason to drop a +1 strength enchanted skill over anything else (assuming you find one).

If it were for me, under the current scaling system I'd probably opt to completely remove the +stat enchantments on items and somewhat increase damage increases per item tier. That at least would force more complex decision-making when finding new items during the run.

 

[sullynathan]

The new patch brought a lot of weapons. I really like the infantry bow, lightning bolt and impaler. The lightning bolt is hilariously overpowered and will probably be nerfed, while the impaler attacks really quickly.

I ended up beating the boss, he's a real pushover once I got certain items and enough healing.

I started using my items more and it makes combat a lot easier and manageable. The turret, grenades and bear traps are highly useful.

 

[sser]

Been eyeing this game -- how is it with a keyboard/mouse?