Roguey romp Dead Cells – one of the best games of 2017 – is getting mod support, possibly as soon as this month. It s been requested frequently, so the announcement still comes as a pleasant surprise, mentioned at the end of a brief update post yesterday. The early access game is also now available on Linux and Mac – just pick those versions in the beta branch. (more…)
If only you could have heard the RPS treehouse chat a few months ago, during the great Metroidvania debate of 2017. Battle lines were drawn. On the one side: John, insisting that of course Dead Cells isn’t a Metroidvania. On the other side: everyone else, calling John an old fogey for insisting on overly strict and out-dated genre boundaries. On the other other side: the sensible people, who probably didn’t get involved because this is a silly discussion that’s of no consequence whatsoever.
Still, I was in the second group, and can’t help but picture the smug look on John’s face as he dropped news of the “Not a Metroidvania” Steam bundle into our Trello this morning. It includes the best game of 2017, the splendid Sundered, the Dark Souls-esque Salt and Sanctuary, and the comparatively essless Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition. John likes all of them, but what does he know. (more…)
There are only three colours in Unworthy – black, white and blood. It s an upcoming minimalist monochrome Metroidvania that isn t so much inspired by Dark Souls as it is a pixel demake of it. In one sense, it’s very derivative. The health and stamina bars, the slow and deliberate attacks, the sin you collect from kills (and drop on death), the depressed ramblings of NPCs. Even the places you roam have names both intentionally Gothic and unintentionally funny. The Throat of Despair, the Catacombs of Ur, the Cradle of Death. The human soul is a sponge that soaks up our sins, it growls in the intro, until it simply rots away. But this grimness barely matters, because Unworthy is a competent pastiche of what many people love about Souls games. I still haven t beaten the first boss. (more…)
The splendid roguelikelike metroidvania Dead Cells–our favourite game of 2017, don’t you know–has taken a big step towards leaving early access with the launch of the update codenamed ‘Baguette’. It’s a biggun, overhauling how persistent weapon upgrades work, letting us reroll the modifiers on particular weapons to shoot for something nicer, replacing the UI, adding new Legendary weapons… lots of good stuff. (more…)
Progression is so often an illusion. Many games use the idea of permanent progression as a way of tickling our lizard brains with a growing pile of loot or numbers which constantly tick up, so that we feel like we re achieving something while we sit in front of a computer and repeat the same set of tasks over and over again.
The beauty of permadeath is that it does away with all this. Characters grow and collect things, but then they become permadead, and it s time for a new explorer to begin their adventure. The only thing that progresses is you, the player, slowly learning a set of systems with each failure. At least, that s the theory. We spoke to the designers of Spelunky, Into the Breach, Dead Cells and Rogue Legacy to learn more about persistence within a permadeath mould.
Last week, we reported that metroidvania-ish platform roguelike Dead Cells had pushed its sixth major update – The Hand Of The King – to public beta testing. Having identified and smoothed out a few initial issues, developers Motion Twin have officially released the new content for all, along with their plans for the future of the game.
I said that the new Castle zone and the accompanying Hand of the King boss had a distinct endgame feel to them, and it would seem that assertion was on the money. While there may be some minor patches between here and there, Update 7, whenever it comes, will mark the end of core development, and Dead Cells’ exit from Early Access.
We’ve covered Dead Cells a lot over the past year, and with good reason. It might still be in Early Access, but even from its early days, it was clearly shaping up to be one of the slickest, most satisfying platform-roguelikes yet, blending stylish melee combat with Metroid-esque progression.
While developers Motion Twin aren’t quite ready to call it done, the sixth major update for the game just rolled out on Steam, adding one more, very dramatic looking environment to the game and a final boss fight to match that have a distinct ‘endgame’ feel to them.
Hey, remember Dead Cells? You should, because it’s not even out of early access and we named it our game of 2017. It s a combat-focused platformer roguelike that John refuses to call a metroidvania (although it is).
The game’s received another large update since anyone on the site wrote about it, though I ll save most of what s in the Foundry Update for another time. This is an article about one little item that solves one very big problem. It s about how the Hunter s Grenade gives me something to work towards with every fresh start, and why I was still playing at a point when I d seen almost everything the game had to offer.
The internet is currently aflame with hundreds of takes of varying heat levels based on Nintendo’s cardboard gaming venture, but that doesn’t concern us – unless, of course, some hardware company is working on something that involves stuffing your keyboard into a papercraft robot. This doesn’t mean there aren’t gadgets and games aplenty to salivate over in our little corner of the internet, though.
As always, we’ve gathered a batch of the best PC gaming deals of the week (UK, US and other places too) so far. This week: free Carmageddon, cheap Civ 6, gaming laptops, speedy SSDs and our 2017 GOTY.
The calendar’s doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer – we’ve reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017. (more…)