Review Date: October 13th
To continue the spree of roguelikes that I don't care for to varying degrees we now reach dead cells. I admittedly haven't played too much of this game but that's because it wasn't very good and 15 hours is adequate, also it was 3 years ago so I am looking back with red tinted glasses. There's a lot going on in dead cells, every run felt like the path I was going down was kinda random whether or not it presented itself, do I go sewers? idk maybe if it's there was the feeling. Now people what do we like in video games? choices chiblee we love choices don't we? not all choices chiblee, all my choices nowadays remind me of dead cells chiblee, every day I'm presented with different choices than the last and none of them seem to matter, the dirty dems were inundating me with so many nothing choices chiblee they were making me sag inside, I can't glow like that chiblee, I had to shut congress down, now we have time to hang out chiblee. whatever and sorry for this, choices have to be interesting to be fun, I choose sewers nothing really happens I choose normal path what's the difference what's the point.
The items are lowkey a bit like that too, this may be a bad faith comparison to make but they sit in between glop slop +3% fire resist item design and crypt of the necrodancer variations on the same weapons with a few different types like vampire or golden. There's a bit more than that going on for the passive items, but the weapons are pretty dire. Is the base gameplay fun? Yes, yes it is, dodge roll block attack with different weapons implemented well it controls pretty nice too, can't fault it there, but making an item be ass by it's ability be just generally unuseful but still unique is so much more interesting than oh that weapon of the same type is a higher colour rarity therefore it must be better because higher stats. The collabs are whatever.
Is this the genshin impact of roguelikes?
There's a reason a million devs have 1. tried their hand at a dead cells type of roguelike and 2. found success. Now I'm working with some limited knowledge because I wasn't cognisant when Isaac came out, or when it came out again, and I wasn't tapped in when afterbirth came out either, but from what I have seen it seems like if you make an isaac-like you need to be good and different enough to stand on your own, you need to innovate to interest people substantially, I'm talking like enter the gungeon and nuclear throne. Dead cells is lowkey ass, so even though it pioneered the sloplike subsection of roguelikes it doesn't really have people playing it again and again over other games inspired by it, people willing to play skul the hero slayer bro, everything has it's slop now, for games as a whole it's roblox, but for roguelikes it's dead-cells-likes and when people complain about the inundation of roguelikes in the market and showcases like 40% are dead-cells-likes.