henke on 7/8/2018 at 05:21
DEAD CELLS
IS
OOOOOUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTTTTT
and I own it on the Switch. I haven't played it yet tho. I wonder if it's ANY GOOD !?!?!?!?!?!? :confused::confused::confused:
Renzatic on 7/8/2018 at 05:38
IT IS SO GOOD IT IS GREAT GOOD! YOU WILL LOVE IT LIKE FAT KID LOVE CAKE!
Thirith on 7/8/2018 at 06:54
I enjoyed this a lot for a while, not least because you could easily pick it up and play for 15 minutes and have fun. Then I just stopped - not for any specific reason but because the game's appeal pretty much waned from one week to the next. I'm planning to get back to it and start from scratch to see how it's developed in the meantime, but at least for me it didn't quite have legs (or a head *badum-tishh!*). Not a complaint, though: I got more than enough fun out of it for what I paid.
Sulphur on 7/8/2018 at 06:59
Like all roguelikes/lites, the appeal is vastly limited for me. It's fun enough in the moment-to-moment, but the lack of long-form progress isn't as mitigated by the sops (blueprints and area shortcuts) provided as I'd like, and I simply do not relish having to carve out a solid, uninterrupted hour or two to work it through to the end (and keep trying if the loot/level design/your own skill or lack thereof fucks you over).
As such, it falls into the 'play it for a bit then chuck it' category, which may seem unkind, but then I generally am to roguelikes. Which is ironic, considering I spent much of my teenage years playing ZAngband and ADoM. Some things you just move on from, I guess.
Renzatic on 7/8/2018 at 07:48
I guess that's why I've come to love Roguelikes so much recently. I never played them during my teenage years, so I haven't had time to be burnt out on the concept.
Sulphur on 7/8/2018 at 07:56
Part of it's also that I'm never going to be fond of procedural generation in anything outside of Diablo or XCOM, and procedurally generated platformers present to me what is essentially designer LEGO: here's some themes and some scaling difficulty we're designing to be thrown together in almost any configuration, now go navigate. The joy of knowing you're being led through carefully crafted challenges towards some definite narrative endpoint is absent, and games that are solely about skill that minimise flavour/filler (like narrative hooks) tend to throw me off unless they're flaunting benchmark-level gameplay.
Renzatic on 7/8/2018 at 08:25
Well, I wouldn't say I like all roguelikes, since most of the Roguelikes I most enjoy are the more combat centric ones, such as Spelunky, Enter The Gungeon, and Dead Cells. Those games don't really need handcrafted level design. Their randomness, that being pushed to make the best of always unpredictable situations, is a part of their overall appeal.
Though the games that align more closely to the original roguelikes, like ADoM and their ilk, never appeal to me for long. Take Caves of Qud for a good example. I love the idea of it of it on paper, love what it offers, but I just can't manage to get into it. To me, it can't compete with an RPG like Pillars of Eternity, which, despite not being nearly as flexible gameplaywise, feels so much more rich and alive due to the obsessive attention paid to every minute detail of the world.
Sulphur on 7/8/2018 at 08:41
Yup, unpredictable level design for a platformer is a no-no for me at any rate. Combat I can take or leave, usually, but if it's bone-crunchingly satisfying (as with Dead Cells), that's a plus.
ADoM and ZAngband cater (catered? It's been more than a decade since I touched 'em, who knows what they look like now) to people who're prepared to get in deep and engage with the absolute fuckton of random variables and encounters that they dole out in steady streams, always with the knowledge that there's a >90% chance of your journey being terminated early. It could be over in as quickly as 5 minutes if you have particularly bad luck, or it could be 4 hours and multiple dungeon levels cleared and you're picking mithril off the walls before running into a monster nest when you've forgotten to restock supplies; but that, and the level of depth to the systems, was part of the appeal.
Acceptance that you're going to die eventually always took the edge off, but at some point I decided that the level of short-term satisfaction conferred by surviving random encounters just didn't rate when compared with something authored, something that had a definite, gradual build and release. And yes, that's probably the makings of a sex joke but I haven't had enough coffee to work on working it up appropriately.
Oh well. Unfulfillment is a relevant analogy here anyway.
Renault on 7/8/2018 at 17:32
Not sure if anyone saw this, but IGN completely plagarized some youtubers review of the game:
[video=youtube;eKF6xnvaCsE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKF6xnvaCsE&t=185s[/video]
henke on 7/8/2018 at 17:48
Jim Sterling saw it. And I guess IGN saw it too since they've taken the review down.