For those that favour fire, the oil grenade is an essential purchase, to be paired like a dinner wine with the flamethrower turret, charring your enemies the colour of merlot. Experience the thrill of the huntsman, laying wolf traps and whipping up crossbow sentries to shred your foes remotely. These are a collection of delirious playthings, giving you enough variety and firepower to fill an ordnance depot, and ramifying your play style. Along with a checkpoint and a fill of your health flask, you’ll purchase weapon buffs, magic perks, and, best of all, new toys. ![]() You invest these between stages, at a shadowy souk manned by an insectoid fellow in robes. From there, you stockpile greater weapons and abilities, hoovering dropped cells and treasure as you prune back the enemy horde. When you begin, you’re gifted the gear of a greenhorn: a spent sword, and a choice between a weak wooden shield and a bow. The title seems a wry smile: the cells of these genres may be near expiry, but that bears no mark on the studio’s confidence, nor the game’s freshness – squeezed from an agglomeration of styles and tropes like blood from a stone. There is something of that re-animating slime in developer Motion Twin’s approach, slotting itself into a number of dried husks – roguelikes, Metroidvanias, soulslikes, hack-and-slash platformers – and imbuing them with bursting colour and life. Not long after, we happen upon a pile of identical cadavers, and realise he is but one of many aborted attempts – something with which we will become intimately familiar. ![]() ![]() Only, it isn’t his body: at the very beginning, a blob of moss green mucus plops to the floor of a dungeon cell and possesses a corpse, birthing our hero from the dust. He wears the same signature flourish as Shinobi, a flapping hank of red trailing his body at every leap. He moves beautifully, like a liquid whip, his clothes carrying the same rotoscoped ripple that Jordan Mechner gave his prince. The star of Dead Cells is a curious figure.
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