Author: Julie Muncy / Source: WIRED
A clump of alien matter rolls through a hole in the prison wall, finds a body, and settles in. Suddenly, that body is me, and I scurry to the right, picking up my dropped money and weapons and slamming through doors until my pace is a full-on sprint.
I run, roll, and slash from one side of the screen to the other and back again, hoovering up everything that isn’t nailed down. If I do this right, I’ll be done fast. If I do this right, it’ll be worth it.Dead Cells, the newly completed title from Motion Twin (it was on Steam Early Access for a while before that), is a game about striving toward a goal and losing everything, again and again and again. Set in a slick, fast 2-D world, it’s celebratory of player death and the possibilities that brings for progression, development, and play. You’re already dead, the premise goes, so why not die again?
Dead Cells follows a structure that, for the hardcore game player, is likely familiar: Every life is spent gathering resources and getting as far as possible in a series of stages with randomized level design and enemy placement. When you die, you lose all this progress, but you keep certain resources, which you can use to upgrade your gear and change the loot that will appear in upcoming runs. In this way, you slowly, carefully build a situation where you can actually succeed. Then you do it again, but faster, and better.
This game…
The post Dead Cells Succeeds Where Its Competitors Fail appeared first on FeedBox.