Also, catching up on Patrick’s stream, and that is uh … a lot of legendary drops …
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It’s hilarious reading discussions about doing harder difficulty runs because I am SOOO far off even beating vanilla.
The game reminds me most of Risk of Rain. Similar run length with item drops and challenge. I’m having an absolute blast, but will happily admit that I cuss out my clumsy fingers at the end of most runs.
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It’s weird. I don’t fully click with Dead Cells; I think the game feel is really solid and all that, but something about the whole game doesn’t grab me in the same way other games do. But all that being said, I genuinely think Dead Cells is one of the most brilliantly designed Rogue-lites of all time? It’s polished to a mirror sheen and the way it constructs its gameplay loops and reinvents the structure of Metroidvanias in that form is absolutely amazing? It’s just a shame I don’t click with it fully!
I tend to go for time door runs if can find two scrolls and an exit in first area with 1:50 left. All the following time doors are easy to get if only killing elites or star topped enemies.
Im getting to final boss with 21-25 scrolls in main stat. Which I think is similar to when would kill everything runs
Fair enough, that sounds like you’re doing a pretty good job of parsing the maps. I’m still in the process of farming cells for upgrades, and I’m also still getting the dodges nailed.
Pretty pleased to have beaten the final boss at only the second attempt this afternoon
I saw in chat people asking about tactics for beating Conjunctivitis and the tactic I found super easy and ended up using for my successful run was bleed all the things. Knife dance does such a huge amount of DoT, without needing to aim, and can roll +175% damage to frozen enemies, that you can hit it, and then focus on staying alive till the cooldown resets, then hit it again for pretty consistent damage
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Yeah, honestly the best tactic i feel like is to use an ability that locks an enemy in place, and then use a high dps weapon/ability to shred the enemies before they can hit back. (Freeze is by far the best at this imo, the initial lock and the slowdown are pretty great, especially if you can roll 4xslowdown) This works on the bosses to, you just have to actually dodge their attacks because they don’t die before they can hit back.
The funny thing about beating Conjunctivitus is realizing that those three tentacle sections are way more dangerous than anything the main fight will throw at you. The attacks that the main head will do really aren’t that deadly or hard to dodge. Honestly the most annoying thing about the fight for me now is that sometimes he is a bit irritating to chase around the arena sometimes so i can actually get some decent hits in haha.
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I just beat The Hand of the King for the first time tonight and wow. What a game. I played it quite a lot towards the end of last year when it was in the middle of its Early Access stage and never got past The Watcher (now Conjunctivus), which at that point was the final boss, and I definitely feel like it’s been made fairer. Not easier necessarily, but fairer at least on its base difficulty, mainly by sanding down the super-grindy elements it used to have with cells going towards weapon damage and the like.
I also appreciate how the new runes and branching paths actually do make the game feel more metroidvania-inspired than the very early version I played a lot of. And also how the lore sections and even the loading screen text manages to make them all feel like discrete places on this island.
For Conjunctivus specifically, I found that a shield makes the tentacle section pretty trivial. Dodge aside as one is about to poke up, hit it once or twice and don’t get greedy, dodge the next one, etc., and then when one comes across the ground, parry it. In the late stages they’re moving so fast that the parry timing is pretty easy, even for someone like me who’s not that great at it. The difficulty for me was, if I was carrying a shield, having a weapon that can easily hit him outside that phase—I somehow managed to beat him with Valmont’s Whip on a previous run, but that was a real exercise in patience. Seems like a quick-swinging sword is the way to go.
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Woof. Doing it with the whip sounds like God-tier Gamer status right there!
Wolf traps are great too for bosses. Just had my first no hit boss fight using Hokuto’s Bow, Quick Bow and two Double Crossb-o-matic’s.
I really like the how new game + has been implemented Having different enemies types for areas as well as taking away some healing and raising damage
It was easily the most awkward a fight has ever felt in the game. Though the thing’s hitbox is so big that whenever I did get a hit in, it counted as a crit, so that was nice.
I rolled the dice on this game when it was in early access back in December, and I ended up waiting to play it until just last week. It’s really letting me test my limits in terms of reflexes, which is fun - I’m in my late 20s and I felt like I’ve had a minor decline overall in my abilities, but I’ve been pretty successful at this game, most notably defeating The Clock Tower boss on my first try /humblebrag.
I will say that your point about having to defeat bosses each run is a strange choice, but I feel like it hasn’t been an issue for me yet. It’s difficult to accidentally beat a boss, so when you’ve done it once, you know you can do it again, even if it feels like you were flailing through the encounter. Boss encounters require a certain degree of rhythm that actually reminds me of Furi, to a degree, and once you know the tricks, it’s all down to execution.
It also amplifies one of my favorite parts of Rogue Legacy, which as many people have mentioned is the weapon/tool interactions. Playing well feels great, and this is magnified when your weapons and mods have great synergy - having a grenade that spreads flame and a sword that does double damage to burning enemies, for example, makes an astounding difference. Paying attention to these interactions can lead to some really startling and fun pairings that makes each run feel fresh. This is a really well-considered game and I’m digging it. I’m at work right now and wish I could play.
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Having played through a few times now I think the bosses are actually helpful, in that they are a fairly decent (if not guaranteed) chance at a legendary drop, and with the runes that allow you to pick your path and which of the first bosses to fight you can tailor that to whichever items you have.
I think they are meant to be a marker on how well the run is going; I’ve only died to the clock keeper once and that was when I was trying to find out if curses carry over to the next level. Spoiler, they do /humblebrag 
Having beaten HotK once, I started another run and made it all the way to the end. Only after completing the run did I read up on how to activate NG+, which makes more sense as that run was E-Z. The first NG+ run also made it to HotK but RIP’d there. But was the first one I’d held onto YOLO for the entire run till that point.
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So far, my initial impression is that it’s impossible to play on a laptop.
Control-wise or performance-wise? I played the EA version on a decently-spec’d laptop and it ran fine, but I’ve never tried playing it without a controller and imagine it would be pretty difficult with a keyboard.
Laptop keyboard + trackpad combination is awful ergonomically (because, apart from anything else, you kind of get in your own way using the keyboard and the mouse at the same time). It’s possible that rebinding keys away from the mouse buttons would help a lot (in fact, it’s almost certain it would), but the initial keybindings are really laptop unfriendly.
(And I deeply hate controllers and can’t use them competently, so that’s not a solution for me in any game.)
I tried it a bit with keyboard and bound away from mouse buttons and it helped. But it is clearly a game balanced around a controller control scheme unfortunately
I played it a bit when it was in Early Access on PC and have purchased it again on Switch - and am playing it here and there. Dropping in and dropping out, whilst I cook dinner. It’s good, it’s addictive in the way Rogue Legacy or Spelunky is. But I do have a weird feeling of ‘so what’ about it, I can appreciate the combat is fast, varied and feels good but I guess I just want something more out of it. I’m fine throwing myself at it, but I think I’ve hit a wall in terms of progress and for in order for me to overcome that, I’m going to just have to become better at the game. Which I don’t think I’m feeling that committed towards.
Perhaps it’s story or character, because I’m loving Hollow Knight and that game has it in spades. And I’m fully committed to getting better at that game to complete it. Perhaps it’s the procedural generation, but Dead Cells itself just feels a little hollow for me.
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How much of it have you unlocked? I definitely felt that way about the Early Access version, and in my first couple of hours with the Switch version, but once I started paying attention to the lore areas and making it to more biomes (mainly by unlocking more runes), it all began to feel much more engaging.
Once the game’s world is fully open to you, I feel like it does a good job of giving the island a sense of place and continuity. But before that point, when you really only have one route to go down as opposed to the two or three different options most of the biomes will give you for where to go next, I was definitely in a similar place with it.
I forgot I made The Thread for this game over a year ago…damn.
I’m playing the 1.0 release on Switch and a lot of my opinions of the game haven’t changed much. I like the game mechanics but think the game as a whole is…fine. Dead Cells loves to take design language from Metroidvanias (literally both Metroid and Castlevania) but then does the bare minimum with them and that detracts from it for me. There’s not much enjoyment from exploration…or any exploration at all really. You’re just moving forward. Moving to the next area. Compared to something like Rogue Legacy where the boss for an area is the direct objective and you have to explore the area to find it. That gives Rogue Legacy a stronger Castlevania vibe because you have an objective, something you’re striving for.
Dead Cells doesn’t really have that? It trades in the Dark Souls mentality where you’re just going forward because that’s what you are expected to do, yet it doesn’t have an interesting world to explore whole you do it.
I dunno. I guess what I want out of this kind of game just isn’t what it’s wanting to give me. I like the combat but don’t feel like there much else to it beyond that. Most of the things people seem really jazzed about are all the cool combinations of weapons and skills you can do and I’m just like “yeah ok”.
The weird thing is that I love The Binding of Isaac, which is basically Dead Cells but as a Zelda-like. The only thing that I can assume is that because Dead Cells looks like a Metroidvania but isn’t a Metroidvania, my brain reacts negatively to it.
I definitely agree that the world could reward exploring a little more. There’s a lot of dead ends with little things you can “look” at but half of them are just little cheeky quips. Even just filling those out with actual lore or more interesting worldbuilding stuff would really increase my desire to explore the world. As-is I’m just poking around all the hallways to make sure I maximize my Cells but that’s all.
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