Dead Cells Review: Motion Twin’s Roguevania Still Sets the Pace for the Genre

Dead Cells fuses metroidvania exploration with roguelike permadeath, and years after launch its fluid, punchy combat still holds up against nearly everything that’s tried to copy it.

A Prisoner, a Plague, and No Memory of Either

Dead Cells casts you as a formless mass of cells inhabiting the corpses of executed prisoners on an island overrun by a mysterious plague called the Malaise. Each death ends that particular host and sends you back to search for a new corpse to inhabit, a clever, almost throwaway justification for permadeath that the game never dwells on too heavily. The plot is intentionally sparse and delivered mostly through item flavor text and environmental design, leaving the moment-to-moment gameplay to carry almost the entire experience.

Combat That Feels Better Than Almost Anything in the Genre

Where Dead Cells separates itself from other roguelikes is the sheer physicality of its combat. Every weapon, from basic swords and bows to more exotic options like whips, ice bows, or explosive traps, has distinct weight, animation speed, and knockback, and the game encourages constant repositioning, dodge-rolling through enemies, using vertical space, and mixing melee weapons with ranged and trap-based off-hand items rather than settling into a single repeated combo.

The roguevania structure means each run generates a new arrangement of hand-crafted room segments rather than a fully random layout, which keeps individual rooms feeling intentional while the overall path through the island changes every attempt. Progression is handled through two parallel systems: permanent unlocks, purchased with Cells collected from defeated enemies, expand the pool of weapons and mutations that can appear in future runs, while Boss Stem Cells, earned by defeating specific bosses, unlock harder difficulty tiers that meaningfully change enemy behavior and level layouts rather than simply padding health bars.

Motion Twin, and later the game’s continued custodian Evil Empire, supported Dead Cells with years of major free and paid content updates after its initial release, adding entirely new biomes, weapon types, boss fights, and even a full crossover update, a level of sustained post-launch support that is unusual even among successful indie titles and has kept the game’s community and metagame evolving well past what most action games manage.

Hand-Drawn Animation in a Genre Full of Pixel Art

Visually, Dead Cells stands out from many of its roguelike peers by using hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation rather than sprite-based pixel art, giving combat an unusually fluid, almost rubbery quality that makes every dodge roll and weapon swing feel distinctly tactile. Biomes range from the damp stone corridors of the Prisoners’ Quarters to the toxic sewers, ruined castle ramparts, and eventually far stranger, more otherworldly late-game areas added through updates, each with a strong, readable color identity that helps orient players despite the procedurally arranged layouts.

The soundtrack, composed by Yoann Laulan, leans into moody, percussive electronic tracks that ramp up nicely during boss encounters without overwhelming the sound design of combat itself, where hit feedback, from the clang of a parried attack to the thud of a landed heavy weapon, is arguably as important to the experience as the music.

Mutations, Scrolls, and Building a Character Mid-Run

Beyond raw weapon choice, Dead Cells layers in a Mutation system, three equippable slots that grant passive bonuses ranging from bonus critical hit chance after a dodge roll to health recovery on landing a killing blow, and a scroll-collection system that lets you invest found Power, Vigor, or Tactics scrolls into stat lines that also unlock stronger versions of matching weapon types. This creates a genuine mid-run build identity: a Tactics-heavy run leaning into traps and turrets plays completely differently from a Brutality-focused melee build swinging heavy two-handed weapons, and the game actively encourages experimenting with unfamiliar weapon types by making some of the most powerful late-game builds come from combinations that aren’t obvious on a first playthrough.

The inclusion of Daily Runs and Custom Mode challenges further extends the game’s replayability well past what the core campaign alone offers. Daily Runs give every player an identical seed and item pool for twenty-four hours, turning Dead Cells briefly into a leaderboard-driven speedrunning exercise, while Custom Mode lets players tweak dozens of individual variables, enemy density, specific weapon pools, starting difficulty, to build bespoke challenge runs entirely outside the normal unlock progression.

A Case Study in Post-Launch Support Done Right

Few indie games have been supported as consistently as Dead Cells. Major free updates added entirely new biomes such as the Derelict Distillery and the Astrolab, alongside paid expansion packs that introduced fresh boss fights, weapon categories, and even a full collaboration update featuring content inspired by an entirely separate acclaimed indie game. This sustained cadence of updates kept the community engaged for years past the initial release window, a stark contrast to how quickly attention typically fades from single-player action titles.

That ongoing investment also means new players today are getting a substantially larger and more varied game than those who played at initial early access launch, which is worth factoring into any comparison with newer roguevania releases that may look flashier on release day but lack years of iterative refinement behind their core systems.

Where the Run Can Stumble

Dead Cells’ permadeath structure means a single bad run, particularly a poor early-game weapon draw, can sour an entire attempt before you’ve had a real chance to demonstrate skill, and newer players may find the jump from early biomes to mid-game difficulty spikes sharply once optional difficulty tiers are unlocked. The amount of content added over the years, while generally a strength, has also made the game somewhat overwhelming for brand new players trying to parse dozens of weapon types, mutations, and biome branches all at once without a strong sense of where to start.

The Malaise-infected story, while atmospheric, is also easy to miss entirely if you’re not actively reading item descriptions and environmental clues, and players expecting a clearer narrative payoff after finishing the main boss sequence may come away feeling that the game’s lore, while present and reasonably deep for those who dig into it, was never really the point compared to the moment-to-moment combat and progression loop.

Tips for Escaping the Prisoners’ Quarters

New runs go far more smoothly once you stop trying to force a specific weapon type and instead adapt to whatever the first couple of biomes hand you. Dead Cells is deliberately designed so that almost any weapon can carry an early run if paired with a reasonable scroll investment, and players who insist on rerolling shops looking for one specific favorite weapon tend to waste time and health that could go toward simply learning the current run’s tools. Prioritizing Cells collection early to unlock a wider pool of possible items is also generally more valuable long-term than rushing straight through levels, since a larger unlock pool smooths out the odds of a good draw in future runs.

Parrying, while initially unforgiving in its timing window, is worth practicing deliberately against weaker early enemies, since a consistent parry dramatically increases survivability against the game’s tougher mid-game elites and bosses, where taking hits directly becomes much less forgiving on higher difficulty tiers.

Final Verdict

Years after its initial early access debut, Dead Cells remains one of the most mechanically satisfying action games in the indie space, a rare roguelike where the base act of moving and fighting feels good enough to sustain hundreds of runs on its own, story or no story. Its commitment to years of substantial content support has only widened that appeal, and it’s still the roguevania every newcomer to the subgenre should play first.

The Switch version handles the game’s fast-paced combat well, though the busiest late-game arenas can show occasional frame drops compared to PC, which remains the most consistently smooth way to experience the game’s tightest parry and dodge timing windows. Regardless of platform, the sheer amount of accumulated content since launch means new players are getting one of the most complete versions of any roguevania currently available, and that continued investment in the years following its original release is a big part of why it still gets recommended as a genre starting point ahead of newer competitors.

Ultimately, what keeps players returning to Dead Cells run after run isn’t the story or the setting, both of which remain intentionally understated, but the sheer tactile pleasure of the combat itself, a quality that’s much harder to manufacture than a compelling plot and one this game has in genuine abundance, run after run, biome after biome, for as long as you’re willing to keep dying and coming back for more.

Reviewed on Switch by the Foremy Team.