It’s safe to say Dead cells is more alive than ever. The excellent roguelike released by the first page in 2018 for computers and consoles is a renewed soldier. You use randomly selected weapons, which you use to kill random enemies while scrolling through randomly generated biomes. It’s wonderfully chaotic.
Developer Motion Twin has continued to breathe life into the game by releasing a steady range of extra content and diversifying the platforms on which you can play. Today the latest expansion is launched, Fatal Falls, a $ 5 downloadable content that adds new areas, new weapons, and a new boss to the game. Good reason to play, if you ask me.
Sounds delicious. Where can I play?
Dead cells was initially available on Switch, PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. These days there are mobile versions for both Android and iPhone players. It’s also part of the Game Pass library and is streaming on PS Now (well, for next week). As Fortnite and Minecraft, Dead cells is virtually everywhere. Personally, I prefer it on Switch.
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What about the extensions?
Over the years, Motion Twin and his Dead cells-focused label, Evil Empire, has released three major expansions for the game. They are:
Rise of the giant: This one is free and adds a stage called the Cavern to the game, allowing you to tackle a new boss named 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. It serves as alternate routes for the second (Promenade of the Condemned, Toxic Sewers) and third (Ramparts, Ancient Sewers, Ossuary) stages, culminating in a boss battle against a giant, 90-eyed monster Mamma Tick, an alternative middleman for the Concierge. This is a great way to shake up the early segments of your runs. Five dollars.
Fatal Falls: Today’s Fatal Falls expansion also adds two biomes. The first, broken sanctuaries, are intended to serve as an alternative to the Stilt Village and Slumbering areas. The second, Undying Shore, leads players away from the Clocktower and absolutely dreaded Forgotten Sepulcher areas. It culminates in a boss fight on a stage called the Mausoleum. (Everyone who hates the frustrating fight against the Time Keeper is happy!) This one is also five dollars.
After the expansions, there are more than two dozen biomes. With both expansions downloaded, your runs through the game’s procedure-generated biomes will be much more varied than with the base version.
What’s going on with the story?
Dead cells‘story is not nonsense. It’s just turned off extremely. You play as a disembodied entity known as the beheaded. Your goal is to escape the prison, which you do by catching up with a headless body at the beginning of each run. The whole world is plagued by a vague disease called the Malaise, which apparently revised a bunch of corpses into monsters of different sizes and strengths. When you die, you take over another headless body in the starting area.
The Rise of the giant added a fun ripple to the overarching plot by revealing that the Collector – he’s the guy you give all your deserved cells to in exchange for new equipment and powers – turns out to be the game’s biggest bad. The Collector apparently tried to cultivate a medicine for the Malaise, the Panacea, but drove himself crazy in the process. You can only reach him with five Boss Stem Cells activated, a ridiculous task I have not even considered yet.
Bosselselle
These little spheres of … blood (?) Are Dead cells’ approach to difficulty. You can activate it in the starting room – each one increases the challenge more than the previous time – and must beat each difficulty level before you can unlock the next one.
At the end of the day you play Dead cells for the smooth fight, the stiff platform, the irresistible sense of incremental progression, the striking pixel art, or that deliciously crunchy sound design. For better or worse, the story exists in the margins.
So … I have to play?
Yes! Go go go! Dead cells still freakin ‘rules. You first heard it here.