Dead Cells

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.