Dead Cells (2018) is a Rogue-lite Metroidvania game developed and published by Motion Twin. It already says quite a bit about the game's spirit when just describing its genre already references three other games—three seminal 80s video games at that. It's no coincidence that Dead Cells can often read like a love letter to gamers. But more often, Dead Cells reads like by-invitation-only celebration of hardcore gamer culture. With its quality-of-life features (i.e. features, distinct from game mechanics, that improve the smoothness of the player's experience without directly impacting gameplay) and overall in-game presentation of information to the player, Dead Cells consciously narrows its accessibility to a specific audience of hardcore or otherwise experienced gamers.
Genre jargon aside, Dead Cells is a run-based, action-adventure platformer where the player traverses through a set of discrete, procedurally-generated and interconnected labyrinths (called Biomes). Each run begins with a selection of two out of three: a short-range weapon, a long-range weapon, and a shield—also procedurally generated. The player must use their weapons and abilities to defeat enemies who may randomly drop Cells and item blueprints that they must complete the Biome to redeem cells and blueprints for permanent unlocks and upgrades at the intermission "Passage" levels between Biomes. They might also uncover additional weapons and abilities in chests, dropped by enemies, or in secret areas accessible by completing optional platforming challenges or exploration. The player may only hold two weapons (a shield is considered a weapon) and two abilities at a time, so their loadout is constantly changing as they make discoveries, upgrades, and other equipment decisions throughout their run.
If not a direct response to players' general interest in metagaming, Dead Cells is rather conscious of the how important metagaming is to experiencing a game. Metagaming refers to strategies, rulesets, or objectives that players apply to gameplay outside of the game's original design. In many video games, a common example is when players use information that the game doesn't explicitly present about the its mechanics to influence their decisions. This might look like choosing to breed specific Pokémon based on their Individual Values (IVs), a metric that is never explicitly named or described to the player by the games' interface. Or in fighting games, this might look like memorizing frame counts for certain attacks or maneuvers to gain a competitive edge over one's opponents.
More adjacent to Dead Cells, though, in action-adventure games, a popular metagaming challenge is speed-running, where players impose a timer onto completion checkpoints. In order to shave time off of their run, players explore the limits of the game mechanics to optimize the speed of their run. Like many metagaming challenges, speed run strategy often employs information, tools, techniques that are not explicitly presented by the game. For speed-running, the most obvious example is time-keeping. Keeping time on a speed run isn't as simple as a single start time and end time, though: speed runs require the player to pause or deduct time spent in loading screens, menus, victory animations, et cetera. Dead Cells incorporates a metagame-ready stopwatch as a salient feature of its interface. Beyond providing a stopwatch as a default part of the heads-up display (HUD), the game explicitly provides a [Paused] indicator beside the run time when the player enters areas with readable text, merchants or other NPCs, or when they are in the Passage levels. The loading screen between levels even includes a reminder of the current run time.
Not only does the game provide ample information on run time, the game's interface is also characteristically transparent about the effects of each of the items in the game. Dead Cells presents the damage rating for each weapon in damage per second (DPS), rather than a more opaque measure than a unit-less damage number that may not translate directly to its damage output when considering other relevant factors like speed and recharge time. A measure like DPS effectively provides more information in a concise metric than, for example, having a separate damage rating and speed rating.
Usually, quality-of-life features like these aim to enable players to play the game however they wish. Information is information—do with it as you please. But even if the Dead Cells provides all this information for the player's use, whatever their ends are, it's not exactly neutral in its presentation of this information. In its presentation,Dead Cells subtly narrows instead of widens the range of ways the game is played. The game relies on the player's experience with other games and encourages, rational, efficient, and skillful play over other styles of play. Its presentation of DPS perfectly illustrates this. DPS as a measure of damage is more characteristic of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) than of action-adventure games. MMORPGs and their players have a community of their own, a culture with its own vernacular and behaviors—like metagaming—more intelligible to hardcore gamers rather than to casual gamers. Dead Cells invokes these connotations with its use of DPS as a central metric for gameplay. Although context may clue in to the meaning for players who are unfamiliar, the interface doesn't even expand the acronym DPS, relying on the players' experience or expertise with other games. The use of DPS instead of metrics for damage more more akin to action-adventure games also cues players to play more rationally and efficiently. With the utility of DPS over other more ambiguous damage metrics, players don't even need to be consciously thinking rationally to be making quicker, more optimized decisions about their ever-changing loadout of weapons and abilities. It also presents DPS alongside elemental damage descriptions, additional perks, replete with percentages, multipliers, and recharge times down to a tenth-of-a-second in one display accessible by a single input of the pause button. Although one could argue for the convenience of presenting the totality of relevant information without sub-menu navigation, this dense display of information again encourages rational and efficient play in its in-your-face presentation.
Dead Cells' implementation of the metagame-ready stopwatch furthers its favor for rational, efficient, and skillful play. It would be difficult for the player to simply ignore the importance of time and speed, as the running time is a persistent part of the HUD and is a prominent element of the loading screen interface. To boot, there are time-locked doors that secure valuable loot and upgrades—that could further improve the player's performance—the near the beginning of each biome that tease the player ("This door was sealed ## minute(s) ## second(s) ago. Pity...") for playing inefficiently if they fail to meet the requisite timestamp. These additions work in tandem to discourage divergent play styles and ultimately cater to play styles more characteristic of hardcore gamers.
For as much as its transparency may allow players to play the game how they wish, be they speed-runners, difficulty fiends, or something else entirely, Dead Cells rewards certain kinds of players more than others—players with the requisite purview and expertise to consider themselves hardcore gamers.
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