Dead Cells is finishing a hell of a run. The excellent roguelike that first hit early access all the way back in 2017 got its "final major update" today, adding a raft of new features, weapons, customisation options and, most importantly, bidding a fond farewell to fans.
Update 35—The End is Near—was announced at the start of this year, and finally released earlier today. It marks the end of the journey with Dead Cells for both of the games' development studios: Its original creators at Motion Twin and the people at Evil Empire, who took over on the game five years ago.
"Thank you for everything," reads a statement from both sets of devs in the Steam patch notes, "Thank you for all of your dedication, passion, and feedback. Dead Cells wouldn't be what it is today without all of you." The team also gives thanks to devs past and present from both studios who have had their hands on the game before pointing towards their new games—The Rogue Prince of Persia and Windblown—and heading off into the night. Dead Cells is done, friends. It's over. You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.
As for what the final update actually does? Well, it does a bunch of stuff. In a handy-dandy "TLDR" section right up top, the devs call out "New additions based on one of our most iconic mechanics, Curse" as a particular highlight. Those additions consist of "3 new mobs, 3 new weapons, 3 new mutations and a new biome effect for you to choose whether you are gonna take the risk for more rewards or not."
Apart from that, also highlighted are "40+ new heads" to customise your protagonist with, "new routing" that will let you check out both Return to Castlevania biomes in a single run, and a slightly vague "more accessibility options."
The new Curse stuff sounds like the biggest addition, though, and the team is keen to point out that it's optional. If you don't quite remember, Curse is the name Dead Cells gives to the status effect whereby a hit from literally anything can kill you instantly, and it stacks. If you have, say, 10 stacks of Curse, you need to kill 10 enemies without getting hit to remove it, and so on.
The new enemies all deal Curse, which is why they're restricted to their own Cursed biome. You can choose to venture into it if you're brave enough or, if not, go into one of the plain-jane biomes you're already used to. Also, "Cursed biomes only spawn in runs with a Boss Cell level 2 or higher (boss fight biomes won’t be cursed)." Sounds pretty fair to me.
I haven't played Dead Cells in a while, but now that it's capital-D Done I'm tempted to dive back in and see just what nonsense the devs have gotten up to since I put the game down a few years ago. They, on the other hand, are no doubt quite keen to move onto new things.
I think so, anyway. Back when news broke that development on Dead Cells was wrapping up, at least one former developer wasn't so kind about it. Former Motion Twin designer Sébastien Bernard suggested that the picture was much less rosy than it was being portrayed as. "I'd just say [Motion Twin] did the worst imaginable asshole move against Dead Cells and [Evil Empire]," writes Benard. "Having seen first hand the actual situation behind the scenes, I can honestly say I'm glad to not be part of this anymore. The official statement is total marketing bullshit, the way this situation happened is on a whole different level."
Unfortunately, we haven't heard much more about what's going on behind the scenes since then. Still, with Evil Empire at work on The Rogue Prince of Persia and that game feeling pretty good, the studio at least seems to have landed on its feet regardless of what went down.
