Game review: Dead Cells (Nintendo Switch)

The famous Bill Murray film Groundhog Day followed a man who was forced to live the same day over and over again. Each day, he would wake up on Feb 2nd, regardless if he went to bed the night before or killed himself. But he remembered things from each iteration of the Groundhog Day he was forced to endlessly relive, letting him learn about the people around him and acquire new skills.

Now take that concept and turn it into a video game -- that's Dead Cells. You play as an unnamed protagonist who starts the game as a corpse, until a ball of green slime crawls into your body and brings you back to life. Your goal is to fight through the armies of creatures that have taken over the island where you reside and figure out why the population was wiped out.

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Dead Cells is a wonderful mashup of roguelike and Metroidvania. You begin the game with very basic items and no special abilities. As you explore deeper into the game, you'll unlock new item and abilities that will help you get just a bit further in subsequent runs.

As you play, enemies will sometimes drop money and 'cells' as they're defeated. As you explore, you'll also find item and ability blueprints. Between levels you'll get a breather where you can trade cells towards unlocking new abilities and items that you've found blueprints for.

Your character can hold up to four weapons or items at once, two primary weapons and two sub weapons or traps. Primary weapons are broken into three categories, melee (swords, whips, hammers, etc.), ranged (bows, energy blasts and throwing weapons) and shields. Subweapons are primarily turrets, bear traps and grenades.

Every item has a rank that determines its damage and how many additional effects they can have. For example, a sword might start someone on fire, poison them, freeze them, cause the corpses to explode, give you a temporary speed boost after a kill and any other number of a perks. Building an arsenal with complementary perks is a vital tactic, like pairing a ice bow that freezes enemies with a sword that does 175% damage to frozen enemies. The amount of customization in your loadouts is mind-blowing.

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However, in Dead Cells you don't get to pick what you have. The game randomly drops and hides items. Every level has a chest with a random item and a vendor with three items you can buy with money you've collected.

Each time you play, you'll get a basic melee weapon, ranged weapon and shield to pick front. As you explore, you'll find other items that you've unlocked by cashing in your cells. The longer you play, the bigger your potential arsenal becomes.

In addition to weapons, your character can gain passive perks called 'mutations'. These mutations might give you double the ammo for your bows, refill your HP with every kill or give you damage buffs. For the first three stages, you can select a mutation for your loadout. After that, you're stuck with those three mutations unless you pay to reset them.

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When you begin the game, you'll find curious objects that you're unable to interact with. As you advance deeper into the game you'll find permanent abilities that will let you interact with these objects. This is where the Metroidvania aspect of the game kicks in. The game is structured as branching paths, so you begin in the prison and can exit to either the town or the sewers. In those stages, you can exit to one or more later levels, so the path you take towards the end can be different on every playthrough.

Your character uses three primary stats to grow in power - red is brutality which increases melee damage, purple is tactics and increases ranged and secondary damage and green is survival which boosts your healing and shield effectiveness. You'll find scrolls throughout the stages that let you individually boost these categories. The boost you get from these scrolls only lasts during the current run and reset when you die.

And you will die. A lot.

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This game is brutally difficult and gives you few methods to restore your health. As you boost the power of your items, they'll come with negatives that will increase the amount of damage you take. Later in the game you can get wiped out in a manner of seconds if you get surrounded or are careless. This game is for the crowd who love having their ass kicked and will come back for seconds.

While the game is very hard, its a fair. Controls are extremely tight and responsive. You have the standard movement controls at your disposal, and can dodge any attacks by using a defensive roll. As you 'become one' with the game, you'll start using your roll as much as your attacks and dealing out devastation like a relentless killing machine. Its very much like the dodge roll from Enter the Gungeon. In fact, Dead Cells shares several aspects with Gungeon, like the the dodge roll, the 16-bit-inspired visuals and the randomly generated stages.

Like Gungeon and other roguelikes, the levels in Dead Cells are randomly generated to give you a fresh stage to explore every time you run through it. However, the start and end area of each stage will always be the same. Rather than feeling completely randomized, the stages feel like a set of stage 'tiles' that are randomly assigned and connected. You'll find yourself seeing familiar and unique areas as you explore, but they might be in a completely different part of the level each time you play.

After several dozen hours with this game over several weeks, I'm still trying to reach the end. Its a hardcore, unforgiving and demanding game, but its also rewarding and very addictive.

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Dead Cells uses a 16-bit pixel art visual style, which works very well for this type of game. It feels both modern and retro at the same time. The graphics are dark, yet full of vibrant color. Green sewers, blue landscapes and orange ramparts give each stage a strong visual style and stages are filled with odds and ends to discover, like notes left behind by prisoners and hidey holes that feel like easter eggs. I even found an homage to Dark Souls with a sword stuck in a campfire.

The characters are unique and well-drawn. Animation is top notch, especially for the hero. Movement and combat is buttery-smooth and he has a good number of animations that trigger when he finds something interesting or converses with another character.

Sound and music are moody and atmospheric. Each stage has a unique ambient tune that fits the theme and never gets in the way. When you enter the area where a merchant set up shop, the music fades into a different tune, and the stage music fades back in when you leave.

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Many people have compared Dead Cells to Dark Souls due to its brutality and die/try/die/try demands on the players. These types of games are not for everyone as they push your devotion and reflexes to the breaking point. I wanted to throw my Switch across the room after a single attack killed my character. But thankfully I avoided making a $300 rage-quitting mistake.

But for those with the nerve to tackle a game this demanding, there are few games like it and even fewer that do what Dead Cells does so well.

Dead Cells is available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, XBox One and Steam.

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

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