Is Dead Cells a Roguelike?
Direct Answer
The short answer is: sort of. While Dead Cells doesn’t fully adhere to the traditional roguelike genre, it incorporates many roguelike elements, making it a pseudo-roguelike or a procedurally generated action game. In this article, we’ll dive into the details, discussing what makes Dead Cells resemble a roguelike, while also highlighting its deviations.
Common Roguelike Elements in Dead Cells
Before we examine Dead Cells’ deviations from traditional roguelikes, let’s take a closer look at the elements it does borrow:
- Procedurally Generated Content: Dead Cells’ world is randomly generated, featuring various levels, enemies, and environmental objects.
- Permanent Death: When you die, you lose all progress and respawn with a new run. No saves, no carry-over.
- Permadeath, but with a twist: Although progress is lost, you can farm rare cells to unlock new passive skills, providing a sense of character development and growth.
- Random Enemy Generation: Enemies are procedurally generated, providing a unique experience each playthrough.
Deviations from Traditional Roguelikes
While Dead Cells borrows many elements, it deviates from traditional roguelikes in several key aspects:
- Fixed Level Structure: Despite having procedurally generated levels, each zone (or "sails" in the game’s terminology) features the same fixed layout. This is different from traditional roguelikes where even the layout of the levels can be randomly generated.
- No Party/Team Management: Dead Cells focuses on a single playable character, removing party/team management, a significant feature of many roguelikes.
- Action-Adventure Twist: Combining elements from platformers, shooters, and action RPGs, Dead Cells’ gameplay involves movement, combat, and exploration.
- Narrative Focus: While procedurally generated, the game still maintains a central narrative, with a well-structured story and character dialogue, a departure from the traditionally opaque, cryptic storylines in roguelikes.
- Difficulty Curve: Dead Cells doesn’t feature a traditional increase in difficulty. Instead, the challenge relies on enemy placement, trap sets, and player skill.
Designing Dead Cells: A Creative Risk
In an exclusive interview with Game Developer magazine, Eric Yager, Game Designer at Motion Twin, shares:
"We wanted to do a different take on the roguelike, focusing on the action-RPG and platformer aspects instead. We thought, ‘Hey, what if we take some elements of roguelikes and throw them in an action-RPG?"
- Creative Freedom: Yager explains that the team drew inspiration from various genres, allowing for an experimental approach to game design, showcasing the flexibility of the procedural generation and permadeath mechanisms.
- Accessibility: Despite embracing action-RPG and platforming elements, Dead Cells prioritizes accessibility, featuring a gentle difficulty progression, optional tutorials, and straightforward exploration.
Conclusion
Dead Cells does not fit the traditional definition of a roguelike, but it incorporates many notable aspects from the genre. By adapting rogue-like elements to its unique formula, Dead Cells offers a fresh blend of genres, catering to fans of procedural generation, action-RPGs, and platformers. If we want to classify Dead Cells as a subgenre, we could coin it a Pseudo-Roguelike, emphasizing its borrowings and departures from traditional roguelike design.
Pros and Cons
| Pros |
|---|
| Procedurally generated levels |
| Permadeath (unique to each run) |
| Combines elements from various genres |
| Cons |
|---|
| Departure from traditional roguelike elements |
| No party/team management |
| Action-adventure twist removes classic roguelike feel |
The verdict is clear: Dead Cells stands out as a unique, visually striking, and engaging experience that bridges genres, offering a fresh perspective on gameplay. Whether you’re a veteran roguelike fan or an adventurer new to the world of procedurally generated games, Dead Cells’ accessible blend of action-RPG elements, platforming, and random generation is sure to satisfy and inspire.
Final Answer
Dead Cells is a pseudo-roguelike, a unique, innovative blend of genres that breaks with traditional roguelike conventions, introducing players to a new kind of challenging yet engaging experience.