Even games that don't fall into the live service category can change dramatically before and after launch, cutting old features and tweaking mechanics, and then those old versions are gone for good. But not in the case of Dead Cells, thanks to the recent Legacy update. 

Dead Cells players can now return to earlier versions of the game, with every "major iteration" since the Early Access launch available. To access them, you'll need to go to the game's properties menu on Steam, select the betas tab and then pick which version you want to play through.

If you miss an earlier version, now you can return to the good old days. Or maybe you just want to have a nosey around and see how the game transformed over the course of its development. Motion Twin suggests it might also be handy for new developers to see the the game's journey.

Everything from the beta of the Christmas update has also been added for everyone with the Legacy update. It includes a Steam Cloud hack that creates save backups that it can't delete, a weapon rework, new weapons, new mutations and a Christmas skin. Check out the patch notes here. 

Dead Cells developer Motion Twin has just released a substantial new update for its roguelike platformer. The Corrupted Update adds a new challenge biome full of horrible blue birds to fight, and it makes key changes to Dead Cells' balance in order to keep things interesting.

The new area is called The Corrupted Confinement, and it's accessible from the Toxic Sewers. From there, you'll go either to the Ancient Sewers or the Ramparts (via the Boss Cell level one door).

Motion Twin informs us that this area is the home to some angry blue birds, who "ain't kidding around," according to the update. They're large and mean and their main hobby is murdering you, so keep an eye out for them if you head into the Corrupted Confinement.

There are some other big changes in the Corrupted Update as well. If you can defeat the Hand of the King on hard, you'll unlock the Recycling Tubes. These give you the option of selecting one of four five-piece gear loadouts when you begin a run, the idea being to make the early areas of the game less tedious and RNG-dependent.

You'll also be able to unlock a new rune called Explorer Instinct. This marks important points of interest on your map once you've uncovered a majority of a level. There are three new Tactic Mutations too: Crow's Foot lets you drop damaging caltrops behind you when you roll, Tactical Retreat slows enemies when you perform a perfect dodge, and Networking links up enemies you've struck with projectiles so they share damage.

Motion Twin has also done a lot of balancing to keep any particular path through the game from becoming dominant, so expect to find fewer cursed chests and colorless weapons.

It's a significant update, and you can read the full patch notes here.

Dead Cells is quietly one of the best 2D combat games on PC, a highly snackable roguelike with gorgeous pixel art and a growing array of weapons, traps, and bombs. Update 14: Who's the Boss? expands the armoury with some of the game's most over-the-top weapon drops yet, like a (very powerful) frying pan and a giant fist.

The update adds seven items and six new mobs inspired by the game's punishing bosses. You summon the god-sized punching arm of a giant with a magic whistle. Amusingly, the giant chooses who he decides to smash. He mostly seems to target the strongest enemy on screen, but while I was playing he would occasionally obliterate a zombie in a different room minding its own business. 

This is always funny, but it also shows how Dead Cells' world has developed since it dropped into Early Access in 2017.  Dead Cells started as a gruelling, minimalist combat game inspired by Dark Souls and Binding of Isaac. It's still tough, but a few years of updates have added an inventive layer of tools that allow for more experimentation—though not quite as much as the developers would like yet. This update is designed to make "glass cannon" builds viable in the late game where shields can feel like a must-take item. Who's the Boss adds three melee-focused mutations to boost damage output for more aggressive play styles.

Seasoned Dead Cells players will recognise that giant fist as belonging to The Giant, added as a new boss a few months ago. The new items all represent The Prisoner stealing powers from vanquished bosses. New enemies will also spawn in biomes leading up to boss arenas, to give new players experience with that boss' nastiest attacks. It doesn't make the bosses any easier, but it does make the game feel fairer. Being instantly killed by an unblockable attack you've never seen before doesn't feel good.

The new weapons are the star of the update for me, though. There's a dash power that leaves a trail of flame. If you tap the dash command the moment The Prisoner stops, he'll dash back again. Motion Twin tells me that an early version of Dead Cells had a dash dodge, later replaced by the roll because it felt much better. By making the dash equippable, long-range and adding fire, it feels great to use. I also enjoyed the big red axe that you can charge up to deliver a high-risk, high-damage blow. Then there's the pan, which sells itself in the latest vlog at the top of this post.

While I was visiting Motion Twin last week and got to see some work-in-progress glimpses of Dead Cells updates planned months out, and there's substantial stuff to look forward to that I won't ruin. There is a studio dedicated to working on new Dead Cells features, and a smaller team of veteran developers speed-prototyping new ideas, one of which might become the team's next project. More on that process soon.

The developer of Dead Cells is "looking into" releasing its games on Google's Stadia streaming service, which was announced earlier this month.

In an interview with DualShockers, Motion Twin's head of studio Steve Filby said he was "excited" by the platform, which doesn't yet have a release date, adding that the studio was open to working with Google and that it's "definitely something we’re looking into".

He also revealed that the Dead Cells dev team were "not planning on stopping anytime soon" with extra content, following the huge, free Rise of the Giant update this week. The studio will release another update in the summer, and plans to add new levels to Dead Cells later in the year, he said.

Motion Twin has not decided whether these updates will be free or paid, he added.

Filby is not the only developer who's spoken about Stadia recently: industry figures are equal parts confused, excited and worried about the streaming service.

During this year's Game Developers Conference Sébastien Bénard, a designer on popular roguelike metroidvania Dead Cells, gave a postmortem of indie studio Motion Twin's hit game. He explained that Dead Cells had sold over a million copies, with about 60% of that number on PC. Of the console versions, the Nintendo Switch port was the biggest seller. He also described Dead Cells as a "last chance project" for the studio, and said that its success saved them from going under.

Dead Cells won our Best Roguelike award last year, and was a perfect example of Early Access being done right.

Thanks, USGamer.

Dead Cells is getting some free DLC this month, beckoning masochists back to its death-filled rooms. Rise of the Giant will let you continue your fight in a new location, the Cavern, which you'll only gain access to once you beat the game. Inside, you'll find new enemies, another boss and probably more deaths than you could possibly keep track of in your head. 

The Cavern will be filled with welcoming features, including toasty lava pools, while ten new enemy types will be waiting to give you a lovely hug. Not all of them will be in the Cavern, though, so expect to find them wandering around earlier levels on the hard difficulty and beyond. 

Once you've beaten the denizens of the Cavern into submission, you might want to try and find the new hidden level. Developer Motion Twin warns that it's for very advanced and skilled players, but if you're able to take down the hidden boss, expect a brand new ending.

Ten new skills, including a flying pet, will hopefully give you the edge you need. They'll be accompanied by ten new weapons, like the appropriately named Giant Killer. 

I don't know about you lot, but I need all the help I can get. I've yet to beat the game, but it's beaten me plenty of times. I keep going back, however, because gosh it's good. There's a reason we called it the best roguelike of 2018.

All of this is coming for free on March 28. Take a gander at the patch notes.

Dead Cells is really good: "A stellar action platformer with gorgeous presentation and excellent combat" that earned 90/100 in our review and a place on the list of our favorite games of 2018. Later this year it will also get some DLC, and today you can get an early look at what's coming. 

The footage is included in a Red Bull Gaming mini-documentary on French developer Motion Twin, which has been around for nearly two decades but was focused on free-to-play "casual" games prior to the creation of Dead Cells. The video looks at the risks Motion Twin took with the project, and how the game evolved from its initial design as a "strategy game with a preparation phase" that the developers quite frankly acknowledge was "fucking boring." 

The DLC-specific bit starts at around 9:00. "We're going to release a huge DLC we've been working on for nine months," artist Noémie Szmrzsik-Cohard says in the video. "It's going to be free, and the players are going to freak out."

"The game as it is right now, it's complete, but we really want to have an extra layer of quality on it," lead designer Sébastien Bénard says. "The DLC is really all about putting a proper conclusion to the story, and to explain things a little bit more and give the player new ways to understand the game world." 

The Dead Cells DLC is expected to be out in the spring, and will be playable at PAX East, which runs March 28-31.

The third of our GOTY awards goes to Motion Twin's excellent combat-heavy sidescrolling game, Dead Cells. Check out the rest of our awards and personal picks in our GOTY hub.

Phil: I'm not usually a fan of roguelikes that demand I spend time unlocking persistent skills to progress. I prefer the Spelunky method, where I don't technically need anything to complete the game, but will still throw myself against it hundreds of times, learning and improving as I go. If I'm going to die in roguelike, I prefer it be because I screwed up, not because I haven't yet unlocked the weapons and upgrades I need.

Despite this, I love Dead Cells, in large part because its combat is so good. It's satisfyingly technical, forcing you to learn attack patterns and special abilities. And executing the perfectly timed strikes and dodges required to efficiently and safely progress remains fun, even after tens of hours. Its weapons keep things interesting, too, with lots of interesting quirks designed to tempt you away from your preferred loadout. Temptation, and the risks and rewards that come with it, are the key to any good roguelike.

Steven: How does another 2D Metroidvania roguelike even make it onto one of these lists in 2018? That's the kind of cynicism I brought to Dead Cells when I first started playing it—and it only took a few minutes to see why everyone won't shut up about this game. Dead Cells is just too damn good. The combat is great, sure, but what I really dig is the sense of exploration and how Dead Cells forces players to juggle survival, exploration, and speed all at the same time. Some of the most powerful items are behind doors that will close after a certain amount of time has passed, so once I discovered one I'd dedicate a whole run just to getting there as fast as possible to grab the item before the door slammed shut. Those runs are my favorite, because I couldn't afford to be careful and slow. In those frantic sprints, there was no room for error, and that was completely thrilling.

Bo: When I started playing Dead Cells, I would die in seconds. Then my skills improved, and runs would last minutes. Then I learned enemy strategies, and unlocked some useful gear. Now I barrel through early levels, taking on ever more challenging hordes. An hour deep into a run, death is agony, but it still never stops me wanting to immediately start again.

Tom: I remember playing Dead Cells for the first time at the PC Gamer Weekender a year or so back, and the moment I started playing I knew I’d end up putting dozens of hours into it. The pixel art is beautiful and the controls are quick and crisp. The colour-coded upgrade system is so easy to grasp it takes the edge off the unusual progression system, which asks you to pour cells into unlocks that may or may not appear on future runs. The first four or five hours can be rough, but when Dead Cells opens up you’re consistently powering into later levels and casually besting enemies that once seemed unstoppable.

Want more words on Dead Cells? Check out our original review from earlier this year. 

The developer of Dead Cells, one of our highest reviewed games of 2018 so far, has added custom dungeon runs and a massive balancing update to its alpha branch. 

The changes—which include both weapon tweaks and overhauls of entire features, such as the way level scaling works—will remain in alpha "for quite some time" so that the team can make adjustments with community input, Motion Twin said.

Custom games, announced in September, are probably the biggest single addition. They let you change the loot table to ban certain weapons, choose your starting gear and apply gameplay modifiers or timer settings. 

In another major change, mobs will no longer auto-scale to your level: their difficulty is fixed, which means "you'll have to be really careful to be properly equipped before getting to late levels". It'll completely change the pace of play, and encourage proper planning and caution. 

Bosses no longer drop legendary items, and you'll instead get one weapon and one active skill. You can only get legendary items as random loot in the world, or if you poke your head in a challenge door that appears after you defeat a boss. Walking through these doors will trigger another boss fight, and if you kill them without taking damage they'll drop legendary gear.

Cooldown reduction has also been rethought—mutations that granted automatic reduction have been axed, and replaced with mutations that will reduce cooldown when you perform a specific action, such as killing enemies or parrying. 

If you're interested, you should really browse through the full patch notes, which contain around 90 tweaks to specific skills, weapons and items. It'll fix plenty of bugs that have been flagged since the full release in August, too, and you can expect lots of graphics and UI tweaks.

Dead Cells, one of the best action platformers on PC, has now been out for more than a month, giving the team time to go to the pub, hang out on a beach, and play games that aren't Dead Cells for a change—so they said in a new dev update. They also shared their plans for post-launch content, starting with a new game mode called Custom Mode, which will arrive in the game's beta test branch in late October or early November.

Custom Mode will give you more control over the game, "really giving you the ability to make 'your' Dead Cells". You'll be able to ban unlocked weapons from the loot table, for instance, or choose your starting gear. The team promise that "many other modifications" will also be possible.

In the same update, the devs will balance items, fix bugs, add some polish and improve mod support, they said. 

After that, they will begin working on the game's first free DLC, which will be "focused on new playable content". They don't yet have an ETA, but they teased the below screenshots that give an idea of what's in store:

Looking even further ahead, the team want to gather feedback about how players want Dead Cells to change. "What do you guys think about paid DLC? Would you prefer regular light updates or more packaged, themed ones? More playable content in the vein of what’s already existing or exploring new ways to play the game through different modes? Everything is on the table...let us know what you want to see," they said. 

You can read the full post here.