It’s safe to say that Dead cells lives more than ever. First released in 2018 for PC and consoles, the excellent side-scrolling roguelike casts you like a reanimated soldier. You use randomly chosen weapons, which you use to kill randomly generated enemies as you roll through randomly generated biomes. It’s wonderfully chaotic.
Developer Motion Twin has continued to bring the game to life by releasing a steady array of additional content and diversifying the platforms you can play on. Today the latest expansion will be released, Fatal Falls, a $ 5 bit of downloadable content that adds new areas, new weapons, and a new boss to the game. Good reason to play, if you ask me.
Sounds nice. Where can I play?
Dead cells was initially available on Switch, PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Today there are mobile versions for both Android and iPhone players. It’s also part of the Game Pass library and can be streamed on PS Now (well, for the next week). Like it Fortnite and Minecraft, Dead cells is practically everywhere. I personally prefer it on Switch.
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What about those extensions?
Over the years, Motion Twin and her Dead cells-focused label, Evil Empire, have released three major expansions for the game. They are:
Rise of the Giant: This one is free and adds a level called the Cavern to the game, plus you can take on a new boss called the Giant.
Bad seed: Last year’s expansion, the Bad seed DLC, added two new biomes, the Dilapidated Arboretum and the Morass of the Banished. These serve as alternate routes for the second (Promenade of the Condemned, Toxic Sewers) and third (Ramparts, Ancient Sewers, Ossuary) stages, culminating in a boss fight against a giant 90-eyed monster named Mama Tick, an alternate mid-game boss for the janitor. All in all, it’s a great way to shake up the early segments of your runs. Five dollars.
Fatal Falls: Today Fatal Falls extension also adds two biomes. The first, Fractured Shrines, is intended as an alternative to the Stilt Village and Slumbering areas. The second, Undying Shore, takes players away from the Clocktower and absolutely dreaded Forgotten Sepulcher areas. It culminates in a boss fight on a stage called the Mausoleum. (Anyone who hates that frustrating fight against the Time Keeper rejoices!) This is also five dollars.
All told, there will be more than two dozen biomes after the expansions. With both expansions downloaded, your runs through the game’s procedurally generated biomes will be much more varied than the base version.
What’s with the story?
Dead cells‘story is not nonsense. It’s just extremely understated. You play as a disembodied entity known as the beheaded. Your goal is to escape prison, which you do by catching up with a headless body at the start of each run. The whole world is ravaged by a nebulous disease called the Malaise, which appears to have resuscitated a bunch of corpses into monsters of varying sizes and strengths. When you die, you take over another headless body in the starting area.
The Rise of the Giant added a funny wrinkle to the overarching plot by revealing that the Collector – he’s the man you give all your earned cells to in exchange for new gear and powers – turned out to be the game’s big bad. Apparently the Collector had tried to work on a cure for the Malaise, the Panacea, but drove himself crazy in the process. You can only reach him when five Boss Stem Cells are activated, a ridiculously daunting task that I haven’t even considered tackling.
Boss stem cells
These little droplets … are blood (?) Dead cells’ approximation of difficulty levels. You can activate them in the starting room – each room increases the challenge significantly more than the last – and must beat each difficulty level before you can unlock the next.
At the end of the day you play Dead cells for the smooth combat, the tight platforming action, the irresistible sense of incremental progression, the dazzling pixel art or that deliciously crunchy sound design. For better or worse, the story exists on the fringes.
So … should I play?
Yes! Go Go Go! Dead cells still freakin ‘rules. You heard it here first.