Supergiant Games’ Hades 2 has been quite the triumph, as was all but inevitable. The original’s full release arrived in 2020, and has since cemented its place in history as one of the greatest roguelike/roguelite titles ever made.
That’s certainly a wide field to distinguish yourself in, but Zagreus succeeded in flamboyant style and then his sister Melinoe followed in his footsteps. Any conversation about the genre will inevitably turn to the Hades series, but there were genre superstars before that. One of the most notable would have to be Dead Cells.
Motion Twin’s effort arrived two years before Hades, and though it didn’t boast the charismatic cast of characters and involved story that series would, it would establish a rock-solid set of gameplay mechanics. The color-based upgrade system, whereby the player could choose which stats/combination of stats to focus their build around, tied together the responsive controls and satisfying, varied combat of Dead Cells. A sequel would surely have been a smash, but the team decided against taking that route.
In an interview with PCGamesN, Motion Twin designer and co-creative director Yannick Berthier declared that the fans have long been clamoring for a full follow-up:
Every post we do, we tend to have a few comments like, ‘OK, cool, when Dead Cells 2?’ But it’s fine. That’s our reality.
It could be argued, of course, that Dead Cells saw a full sequel’s worth of new content over its lifespan. Few indie titles have been as lovingly served with updates (big and small) as this one, with the Return to Castlevania crossover being a huge new injection of creepy content (including a Richter mode) so many years after launch. However, there has not been a true sequel to date.
Creative Freedom Is Everything
There may be at some point, but certainly not for the foreseeable future. Berthier explains that the reason for this is largely that indie titles enjoy a lot of freedom that bigger titles can’t. “[If] we would have been [part of] another company, maybe the pressure to do a sequel would have been way, way stronger – I mean, internally,” he said, but thankfully for the team this is not the case. Instead, Yannick explained, Motion Twin is “driven by what we want to make.”
What the team wants to make at present is Windblown, another genre entry that entered Early Access this time last year. The Prisoner and the dark, foreboding land they ventured through is replaced by an intriguing Tears of the Kingdom-esque realm of sky-islands and the fascinating beings that live there.
It’s entirely understandable that the team would want to concentrate their efforts on their new project. Just as those who act tend to dislike being typecast, so Motion Twin want to be known as more than just “the Dead Cells team.” Nonetheless, the game remains a phenomenon, and Windblown is absolutely one to watch too as a result. It’s just a shame that the Dead Cells updates ended the way they did, when an even longer period of new additions was planned.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
