DLCDead Cells: The Queen and the SeaLoading store offers
Dead Cells
Dead Cells gets much of its pull from trying again: changing routes, unlockable skills, and demanding combat give each run a distinct drive. At the current tracked low, it costs $2.63 at 
Eneba. That makes this a fitting opportunity if you want fast single-player action and are comfortable starting over after defeat. The Steam PC version has full controller support and includes an English interface. At Eneba, Dead Cells costs $12.49, making this a chance to take on its shifting routes and unlockable skills.
All-time low ~ $9.13across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $4.602026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $2.63EnebaAt its historical low now
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
DLC
DLCDead Cells: Fatal FallsLoading store offers
DLCDead Cells: The Bad SeedLoading store offers
DLCDead Cells: SoundtrackLoading store offers
DLCDead Cells: Demake SoundtrackLoading store offers
DLCDead Cells: Return to CastlevaniaLoading store offers
DLCDead Cells: Return to Castlevania SoundtrackLoading store offers
01About Dead Cells
Dead Cells blends roguelite structure with Metroidvania exploration in a 2D action-platformer. Explore a changing castle, battle challenging foes, and learn from each failed run. Steam players rate it 97%% positive across 156,964 reviews. Interface languages include Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese-Brazil, Spanish-Latin America, and Polish. Released August 6, 2018.
Credits
Developer
Motion Twin
Publisher
Motion Twin
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$4.602026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 12 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| German | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Portuguese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Turkish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish-Latin America | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
How it plays
The Steam PC version is single-player and has full controller support.
Language
Its interface includes English, alongside multiple other languages.
03Frequently asked questions
What progress remains after death?
Death sends you back to the dungeon, but some unlocked routes, skills, mutations, and weapons carry over.
Are there checkpoints?
No. The description says there are no checkpoints: defeat the final boss in one run or try again.
Does it support controllers?
Yes. The Steam PC version has full controller support.
8.6
Overall Score
Graphics8.5
Audio8
Gameplay9.5
Story6
Content9
“A six-year mainstay that welds roguelite reruns to Metroidvania unlocks and tops out the 2D action feel”
Our Verdict
A 2018 genre-breaker that still sets the bar
Rewind to 2018 and the arrival of Dead Cells carried real significance. Roguelites and Metroidvanias both had plenty of representatives by then, but it was the first to truly stitch the two into a self-consistent rhythm, and it minted the word Roguevania in the process. Random reruns solved the Metroidvania problem of a map that goes stale once you have walked it. Earned exploration unlocks gave the roguelite's pure randomness a skeleton of long-term accumulation. That fusion was a breakthrough at the time, and it carried the game straight to Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2018, Best Indie at the Golden Joysticks, and a Mighty tier on OpenCritic with a 95% recommendation rate.
All these years later, Dead Cells still sets the bar on its lane. The followers are many, but the ones that match its level on both feel and rerun cadence at once are a short list. That is the part hardest to copy: feel can be imitated and structure can be borrowed, but the craft of maxing out both at once and welding them together is not something you learn from a single trace-over.
What is rarer still is that it never lost its shape across six years of live updates.
Plenty of long-running games bloat with every patch; Dead Cells folded each update back inside its original rhythmic frame and never wrecked the feel to pad the count. That restraint is the quiet reason it still plays as crisp today as it did on launch day.
Who should buy it, who should skip it, and which version
Spelling out the right audience is more useful than handing over a vague high score. Dead Cells fits a player who craves instant feedback, relishes action for its own sake, accepts a learn-by-dying path of growth, and feels curious about randomised in-run builds. If you have played Hades or Hollow Knight and loved them, Dead Cells is almost guaranteed to land for you too.
A few kinds of player should think twice. If you mostly play to sink into a complete story, there is next to no narrative here to feed that. If randomness grates on you by nature and you cannot stand looping back to the start, the core structure will wear you down. And if you only want a single clear and then a shelf, its enormous depth is wasted on you. As for versions, a newcomer can take the base game first, learn the fundamentals, and add DLC by taste — the four paid expansions sell individually or as a bundle, and Return to Castlevania especially rewards anyone with a soft spot for the source.
A quick word on its most direct rival. Hollow Knight is the other crown jewel of the 2D Metroidvania, winning on one meticulously built fixed map and exquisite hand-painted exploration, superb in both scale and atmosphere — but it has none of that every-run-randomised, one-more-go rerun drive. Each excels on its own ground, and neither can stand in for the other, which is exactly the proof that Dead Cells holds a spot all its own. Across all six dimensions we land it at 8.6: it gambled nearly all its narrative on feel and the rerun loop, and for the vast majority of action players, that is a bargain and then some.
Latest news about Dead Cells
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
This is the game that pulled me away from Hearthstone and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Absolutely gorgeous and genius, even in its early state. Yes, you'll die a lot, but it never feels like a big deal. The point of the game is in the moment to moment combat anyway -- and the fact that you're rewarded for each run in a slow permanent progression means you never feel cheated. Highly recommended.Show moreShow less
17 hours at review12,589 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
A rare negative review for such an esteemed game. I am among the 5% that does not like this game. What many others find fun I view as a tedious mess that really should have been much better than it turned out. Metroidvania Rogue-like? Not even close. The developers themselves classify this game as both a Metroidvania and a Rogue-like, but neither is accurate. Dead Cells is essentially an action platformer that incorporates only a few basic elements from these genres, and it doesn't do it well. There's a plot but it's pretty much non-existent, and that's fine because it's not the focus of the game. The main goal is to navigate through each level and defeat all three bosses. Let's start with the good. Combat in Dead Cells is buttery smooth and super satisfying. Controls are very tight and responsive, and combat is fast and fluid. But this already leads to my first huge problem with the design philosophy behind this game: there is literally no incentive to fight enemies. The main thing they drop are "cells", which can be used to upgrade your character (more on that later). Sounds pretty useful, right? But the developers added "timed gates" in each level which, if you reach it before the timer expires, will give you a MASSIVE number of cells and other rewards. This means that it's often better to blast through a level as fast as possible, skipping every enemy (and thus the fun of the game) and getting to each gate to collect your reward. This problem is exacerbated by the game's randomly generated levels. The wonderful thing about Metroidvania games is the carefully constructed world filled with things to explore and secrets to discover. Dead Cells eliminates any meaningful exploration by having blandly thrown-together hallways to slog through. It quickly becomes a chore to run around each uninspired maze looking for its timed gate and exit. And this tedium is further compounded by Perma-death. If you die, you start all the way back at the beginning, just like in a terrible NES game. Any bosses and levels you completed must be re-done. This means you'll be replaying the same boring as hell, zero-challenge starting areas and boss fights just to get back to where you were, further incentivizing running past every enemy. And the difficulty spike is insane between later levels. The first four or five areas are braindead easy, but the last one just slaughters you unless you adopt painfully boring cheese strats. Normally this issue is addressed by having long-term progression that persists between each run. Your character should get stronger as you play to give you a better chance at success next time. But once again, Dead Cells drops the ball by emphasizing unlocking new weapons as its primary means of character growth. Most of the time these weapons are sidegrades or even straight downgrades to your current ones, and unlocking them dilutes the pool of weapons used during random item drops. In other words, you now have less of a chance of receiving a specific weapon during a run, because there are more possibilities. So once you find a weapon you like, you best not unlock anything else, or you may never see that weapon ever again. And any non-weapon related upgrades takes FOREVER to purchase (waaay to many cells needed) and have very little impact. My Personal Opinion (Recommendation Reflects This) It's a confusing mess of questionable design choices that all clash with each other. The result is a product that felt like a waste of time. You don't need to play the way I have decribed above, and its probably beneficial for player enjoyment to embrace the game's combat and have fun with the wide variety of available weapons. But that's simply not enough to engage me given this age of so many masterpiece-level games out there. I'd rather be playing a true Metroidvania with exploration, discovery, meaningful upgrades and creative boss fights.Show moreShow less
14.2 hours at review210 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Dead Cells is a game that I would describe as a mix of Castlevania, Dark Souls and most of the rogue-lites out there. You take control over a ninja-like character and your goal is to get through a bunch of randomly generated levels and defeat evil (I suppose, I'm yet to finish the game myself :P and keep in mind that it's the EARLY ACCESS game and that there's like a year of development to come which will fill story gaps and bring a ton of new items and mechanics) Now this game is a masterpiece in my opinion, and here's why: 1) levels - randomly generated levels make the adventure fresh every time you play. Not only that, but there are alternate paths to be taken (pretty cleverly locked behind certain 'skillchecks') and you're not destined to commit to one of them! It's this 'interweave' sort of a deal, where you can go hard path for one level and then hop back to normal path in the next. To put it more simply - in each level you have pretty much 3 entrances to the next level, it's entirely up to you which one you'll choose. And it's not only one enviroment. You fight in the castle, sewers, harbor-esk town, graveyard... And every level is different. In one you go up, in other you drop down, others are just flat, long distances to traverse. Everything designed to be easy to traverse but difficult to leave unscathed 2) weapons/skills - you start the run with 2 weapons - sword and bow/shield. You can find random gear during the run of course and what's cool is that there's never a 'right' answer to what to use. You have to be flexible and think about your loadout, because one random weapon/skill drop can flip your playstyle inside out. And I like that weapons have weight attached to them. for example, when you swing the big, massive sword or hammer, it has a significant delay in attack (but much better damage of course). There's tons of other weapons with different quirks. Some inflict bleed/poison, some crit while backstabbing, some crit when enemy is near the wall, some get bonus damage against frozen targets, etc - the variety is stunning skills - 2 slots, things to crowd control / augment your weapons. Magnetic grenades to keep enemies in place, meat grinders to bleed them, turrets, bear traps, etc, all with additional benefits / synergies. Again, stunning variety already 3) movement - this has to be one of the most precise and enjoyable to traverse games available. Super tight controls (at least with x360 pad), dash move, double jump - full control! You even have dropjump which can hurt the enemies, but it's one of those moves that you love videogames for, because it's just fun to use randomly :) You know what I'm saying? :P Sometimes you just jump around to use it, it's so fun :) 4) builds - there's no 'right' build in this game. You can upgrade strenght and go full sword damage, you can upgrade health and create regen build, you can make skills only build, you can do something stupid like whip that brings enemies closer to you and then your secondary kick that pushes them away :) Again, everything depends on the stuff that you find on the way. Adapt or die, that's the name of the game :P 5) presentation - graphics, music, sound effects - everything's gorgeous, period :P 6) difficulty - this is a difficult game. It's because of the combination of randomly generated enemies and dungeons, loadout and skill upgrades, precision in platforming, patterns recognition and ability to fight a bunch of the enemies at the same time. Which brings me to pretty much my only pet peeve with this game: No post hit invincibility - it's a deliberate design decision, but certain enemies in this game can hit you multiple times in a very short period of time. It makes the game much more deadly to the player and sometimes it gives you literally no chance to recuperate. But that's ninja's life I suppose. Be precise or die :P Overall, this game is a gem in the genre and it's already great despite being in early stages of development. 9/10Show moreShow less
69.4 hours at review2,481 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
Well, I had to give it some thought but I believe I don't want to play this game anymore. As for writing a review on this, I think it would be worthwhile because of where I am coming from. I do not hate this game. I do not even think its a bad game. But I do regret buying it. This is a caution to people like me who are not fans of the roguelite genre but are willing to consider them based on their gameplay content. So far Slay the Spire and Synthetik worked well for me, and I really thought this one would, but it doesn't. The combat and level design are for the most part, pretty good, but have their issues. The levels are ultimately sparse linear runs or forking mazes. I did think, well, okay, but this is a combat game, does it really matter? Well it kinda does. Ask yourself, would Doom be as good as it is with randomly generated levels? I tried OBLIGE, I can confirm a crystal clear answer to that, and it's the big N-O. I do think what they did with certain encounters giving you access to areas you would not be able to reach before is neat, and quite well implemented. There is a decent variety to the combat weapons and a legitimate attempt to do different things with them, but the result is almost certainly, you will take to some and hate the rest. But the game gives you stuff randomly. So you might be stuck with a set up you hate for significant parts of the game. Also when fighting bosses, 90% of the damage is gonna come from your traps, because its mostly a case of dodging the boss and surviving and letting DPS kill them. They are not fun fights. Deaths Gambit, a game I bought around the same time, has many issues of its own, but its bosses are a highlight of it. In Dead Cells they're pretty trash. I think the final straw was realising how much of the game is defined by level scaling, and how much this then restricts what builds are effective over time. I've seen many people say this game is like Dark Souls. They are entirely wrong. This game couldn't be a more different beast. And when its most fundamental problem is actually close to Skyrim's most fundamental problem, this should really illustrate that. This game really shouldn't have level scaling, it shouldn't be giving enemies HPboosts based on you upgrading yourself. I just find it antithetical to the RPG experience. Many people like this game, and fair enough, I just have issues with it that make it quite disappointing. This review is to point these things out to people. The above points are at least objective statements about things in the game, with my interpretations on why I don't care for them. The final point is just subjective. It got pretty boring, and made me realise I ought to be playing real Metroidvanias.Show moreShow less
10.6 hours at review188 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Nobody will read my review, so i'll just say i'm gayShow moreShow less
5.8 hours at review1,285 people found this helpful
Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
There's no feat harder than finding the perfect balance between difficulty and reward in a rouge-like games, and I think the devs botched this gem with their last update. There is now a soft-cap that limits how hard you can hit a boss, which is currently set at 5%. This renders hard hitting weapons obselete, and there's no point in rolling high risk-high reward weapon bonus (eg, +100% damage done to enemies, +100% damage taken). I understand that balancing the game is not a simple matter, but giving out punishment in order to force people to play your game the way you want them to be is never a good idea - let alone making your game more difficult by relying on something cheap like artificial difficulty.Show moreShow less
42.3 hours at review174 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
stop calling games dark soulsShow moreShow less
20 hours at review1,154 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
it seems, and is, pretty fun for the first ~10 hours. then the cell farming starts, and you start moving up in the game's difficulties and seeing gameplay slow to a paranoid crawl as getting hit 1-3 times might as well be the end of your run. the extent to which "not getting hit" is important in this game removes half the items from usability for being too slow to use without risking getting hit on each run you pick up cells from defeated enemies and bonus objectives (clearing areas quickly or without getting hit). in roguelite fashion, you can spend the cells to unlock new weapons and features. well, the biggest cell sink is the legendary forge, where you just dump your cells to make all items dropped in your runs stronger. investing in the forge makes every run better, which you need on the higher difficulties, because being able to kill enemies before they can act is your best defense when the punishment for getting hit by regular enemies skyrockets one of the fast cell farming methods involves playing up to the first boss for ~100 cells (twice as many on a higher difficulty. you only get about ~50 cells if you mess up and get hit/go too slowly). it takes 13,500 cells to fully upgrade the forge. but you have other permanent "fun" roguelite upgrades to unlock, which brings the total closer to 20,000 dead cells heavily punishes getting hit, in ways that are not fun. on the higher difficulties, your ability to heal is severely limited, since you can't refill your healing flask anymore, which heals you for 60% per use, up to 4 uses. enemies hit hard and, more importantly, give you a stack of "malaise" every hit. if you reach 10 stacks, you're essentially guaranteed to die to the next hit. the healing flask removes some stacks of malaise, but you only get 4 uses the game also has "cursed chests". opening one gives you stuff that powers you up an obscene amount. on the higher difficulties, you should be opening all of them to keep up with the difficulty. the downside is that after opening one you become cursed, making it so that the next instance of damage you take will kill you, until you remove the curse by defeating 10 enemies. if you go into a boss with even 1 kill remaining on your curse, the curse will persist, letting the boss kill you in one hit lastly, there are bonus doors that only open if you've killed 60 enemies (30 for the first area) without taking any damage. these doors give good rewards, so you should try to get them dying in one hit in any game is bad design, it's frustrating and promotes slow, degenerate gameplay. the "kill 60 enemies without taking damage" doors aren't nearly as bad as losing a 30 minute run from opening a cursed chest and getting clipped by one attack, but it's the same idea: promotes stupid gameplay, frustrating to mess upShow moreShow less
26.2 hours at review134 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This is truly one of those "okay, one more try and I'll sleep" game. Then soon you will realize the sun already started rise. And Developers are very active, and only developers who are really listen players.Show moreShow less
40.3 hours at review677 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
A mostly fun base, but with badly thought out item unlocking, and with some badly designed bosses and elites (especially near the end) that prevent you from actually being able to choose a build you like, since they strongly counter whole types of builds. If you go for a high damage build, the end boss ("Hand of the King", at the time of writing) can almost one-shot you, even on the normal difficulty. And since this is a permadeath game, you have to slog your way back through all of the previous levels before you can try again. And he attacks very quickly, and gives you very little time to do anything (even use a potion, since those take time to use) before he launches into another insanely strong attack. But if you go for a high health build, the elite enemies in the level right before that can trivially kill you instead, since they stack an infection that doesn't exist anywhere else in the game that will kill you after a certain number of hits, regardless of your actual health and damage resistance, and since you don't have much damage it's incredibly hard to dodge them for the length of time needed to kill them. And you have to face at least two locked-in arenas with them. One of the earlier bosses (Conjunctivius, a.k.a. "The Watcher") requires having turrets, or at least a good bow, in order to reliably damage, since it hangs from chains and frequently moves around, meaning melee is almost worthless against it. On top of all that, the items you find in a run are completely random, and so you just have to hope that you get lucky and stumble across the items you want in the shops, and hope that they're a good level, and hope that the few "legendary" items you get are actually useful. This means that the more items you unlock, the worse the experience gets, since unlocking neat new items just means that what you find is even more random and even less likely to be the one you want if you're trying to do a specific build for a specific goal or boss. And even further, there is no way to permanently upgrade your character (apart from getting a few more uses from your health potion), meaning that you can't even just grind for a while to get better stats and make beating a boss or level easier. If you're stuck on a boss, there's no way around that apart from spending hours practicing against that one boss that could easily be spent in far more fun ways playing other games or even doing things besides video games. Edit: Toned down the vitrol about some of the boss/elite design a little. A number of them are definitely bad, but I made the mistake of writing after a rage-quit, and was overly hostile.Show moreShow less
34 hours at review126 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/14/2026.