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[Ygdrad]

Dead Cells, a nifty little game just released in Alpha and I've been playing for a few hours and having a blast. It is what the developpers refer to as a "souls-lite RogueVania" and I'd say that's fairly accurate. Combat feels deliberate and non-spammy, like Dark Soul's, you can recognize and learn enemy attacks and patterns to block/parry/dodge and avoid damage. Obviously there's permadeath to crush your soulcell.

You have 2 weapon slots, 2 ability(basically spells) slots which you fill with things you find or buy along the way, and 3 stats(health, strength, skill) you will find upgrades for.

The zones have a semi-randomized layout(seems to mix random generation with premade set pieces) and branch to different areas based on your choice of exit and there's a bunch of hidden secrets and corners to explore and die in.

Items are randomized with various bonuses that can result in great synergy, like a fire grenade ability and a sword with a large damage bonus against burning targets.

There are two currencies, gold, which you spend on buying things during a run, and soulscells you spend to permanently unlock various weapons and abilities or to get various permanent upgrades that stick around between runs.

Aside from the normal enemies there are other interesting challenges like elite enemies which can be quite a handful but usually have great rewards, curses the gods can cast on you if you displease them, special secret challenge rooms, doors which only stay open for a certain amount of time which is calculated from the moment you start a new run to give you rewards if you can speedrun, and obviously bosses which will pound what you've got instead of a face into the dirt.

Link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/588650/Dead_Cells/

[nenjin]

Cute. Reminds me of Salt & Sanctuary. Would have been nice if S&S could have been randomized.

Too bad for me its robbits though. I think if this were more dank fantasy I'd be all over it. Love the visuals though.

(Lacks coop too, without a deeper reading. Pity.)

[Ygdrad]

I had a ton of fun streaming this today and I'll probably stream again tomorrow. I totally recommend you check the game out.

(Lacks coop too, without a deeper reading. Pity.)

Not everything needs co-op, this game does what it does great and I'd rather see the resources go to making the singleplayer as polished and feature/content-rich as possible rather than to adding in co-op as an afterthought. It probably wouldn't lend itself to it very well with how fast-paced it can get once you're good at it. Most of the time a game needs to be designed with co-op in mind from the start to give you a really good multiplayer experience rather than just having a second player in the game you like breaking the balance or flow of things.

[Neonivek]

With Co-op they would probably need to make enemies buckets of HP like another roguelike I can think of with Co-op.

[Drakale]

Good game but controls feels a bit awkward. I tried to remap to something more similar to Dark Souls and it helped somewhat, but stuff like platform grabbing and jump attacks are still messy.

[Ygdrad]

Good game but controls feels a bit awkward. I tried to remap to something more similar to Dark Souls and it helped somewhat, but stuff like platform grabbing and jump attacks are still messy.

It felt like that to me at first. Half my deaths were due to unfamiliar controls, but after getting used to it I can say it works just fine. Jump attacks aren't really messy unless you're trying to do them around climbable things as far as I've noticed, it's just a matter of holding down and pressing jump again.

With Co-op they would probably need to make enemies buckets of HP like another roguelike I can think of with Co-op.

I wouldn't want enemies with huge healthpools. One of great things about this game is that once you get really good at it you can go through enemies and zone blazingly fast and giving enemies tons of health for co-op would force the two players to always focus the same target or have things slow down.


I'm about to stream the game some more on twitch if anyone is interested in having a look or has questions or challenge ideas   https://www.twitch.tv/ygdrad


Edit: Thanks to everyone who joined the stream and made dying  more fun I'll probably be streaming again tomorrow around noon EST

[Ygdrad]

Been having fun doing all kinds of crazy builds and breaking the game all sorts of ways. I recorded a shield-only dual-shield run which got past the first boss before sleepiness and lack of caffeine made me make a few mistakes too many https://www.twitch.tv/videos/142987236

[sambojin]

Looks like a great game to watch (and play, too). Followed your channel. Hopefully I'll be able to check it out next time you're streaming.

[sambojin]

DeweyUnchained is currently streaming this on twitch. He'll probably chuck a couple of winning run VoDs up too, if you want to see if it's your kind of thing.


(he's a great Clash Royale streamer too. Sometimes for the community interaction, sometimes for the gambling. Mostly for the gambling.
Think of Saltybet, but with an actual person playing CR. And without the bullshit. It's in stream chat through revlobot too, so you can do it on mobile. Yay!)

[Oneir]

I can't tell if Dead Cells is really picky about double jumping, the Surface Pro 3 is just the wrong computer for this (true), or if I'm just really bad at platforming (definitely true). AKA, I just died in the stupidest way possible: endlessly jumping onto spikes because I couldn't jump up and jump back to the platform above where I started. I've had weird issues with games and this detachable keyboard, so maybe it'll get better when my xbox controller comes in the mail...?

[Oneir]

There's a beta update! I've been enjoying it a lot. Details are here and full patch notes (including more description of mechanical changes + tweaks) are here. Some quotes from the announcement:

The Elemental Update:

• New mechanics related to elemental damage, particularly fire mean that you will now be burning enemies to death in a sort of grisly pyre of pixel art.
• Oil based items now actually do what they're supposed to and there are new weapons that go hand in hand with them... Got the urge to burn something? Yes, we mean in the game!
• New Items and affixes: New weapons, skills and passives attributes! Including many triggering elemental effects, oil grenades, electricity conducting water and more... We can’t wait to nerf it all for you!

Combat & Extras:
The rest of the changes are mostly tweaks except for the work that we did on making shields more interesting to use and traps and turrets a little less cheesable.

• Shield rework: Shields now allow for a more defensive playstyle. Your character is no longer locked after a successful parry and all shields provide a short force field when you take damage. Cherry on the cake, you can finally send back those annoying red bombs to their owners!
• Skills rework: Turrets, meat grinders and most of the others deployable traps now require you to be around them in order to function correctly. This is to bring the cheese level down a little bit...

A word of warning: there are a couple of crashes. Completing a level will sometimes throw an Out of Memory exception and lose your progress for that level. That's fine (if annoying) if you crash stepping out of the Collector's room, but extremely frustrating the rest of the time. I think they also forgot to include the music for the level after the second boss, so you have to jump through some hoops to avoid a crash after leaving that level.

Right now you have to opt in to the Steam beta (probably best to back up your saves), and then you can either start a new game on the beta branch and swap back to your old game on the release branch or just make your main save beta-only. If they're right about their schedule, they should be merging the beta branch in sometime in the middle of next week.

[Retropunch]

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!!
This is a fantastic game for anyone who hasn't tried it - it's an extremely solid platformer, but with enough tactical/RL elements that it's way more fun than it looks like it'll be. It's the whole item synergy thing - a lot of stuff stacks, and it can make for interesting decisions. For example, you might have a broadsword that does 150% more damage on frozen targets,  plus an freeze grenade. Then you see a fire grenade that'll also poison enemies, so do you swap or stick with what you've got? I've been having a blast with it - I'd say I've sunk more hours into it than any other game this year.

You MUST have a controller though - absolutely 100% - don't even bother without.

They're still constantly upgrading it, and my main wish is that they'd add a few more routes from the beginning - you die ALOT, and it can get tedious (only slightly) to do the same routes over and over again.

[AlStar]

This game has now left Early Access with version 1.0, so it seemed like a good time to resurrect the topic.

I bought the game at version 1.0 and have put in 13 hours according to Steam. I've just recently managed to pick up the horn rune (or whatever the one that lets you smash weak floors is called) - mostly thanks to the crusher trap I unlocked that same run. I'd previously met a horrible, gory fate at the hands of the elite that guards the rune, but throwing down dual crushers right as he spawned squished him good.

Other thoughts:
While not a good weapon, the Spartan Sandals are certainly a fun weapon - kicking enemies into walls and off cliffs just doesn't get old. I even managed to take down a randomly spawning elite with them, since he happened to spawn right at the edge of a cliff.

I really need to be more observant - I somehow managed to totally miss the 'light' mechanic going on in the Forgotten Sepulcher, and have ended two otherwise promising runs because I died to the darkness. I thought that I was dying to some kind of poison from the little ninja-guys that spawn there.

As much as you might love it, that level I infantry bow you got right out of the gate will eventually run into problems killing things effectively, even after you upgrade it to a + version - probably best to just suck it up and grab those level VI daggers.

[Sergius]

I've been managing pretty well playing this with a keyboard tho.

[Levi]

Its pretty great.  I like all the story bits they've added.

I'm a little disappointed in myself though as I had played it a ton previously and gotten two boss cells, but this time on a new playthrough it took me EIGHT tries to get the first cell. 

I figured I had gotten pretty good at the game, but I guess not!