It’s difficult, if not outright foolish, to argue that the Half-Life series hasn’t played a tremendous role in PC gaming, first-person shooters, and level design that has echoed, and will continue to, throughout the video game industry. Valve apparently has a knack (outside of Architect) to brandish raw developer creativity and consistently craft a title greater than the sum of its parts. From Portal to Dota, Half-Life to Counter-Strike, they typically do pretty well for themselves whenever the team isn’t working on bringing additional Steam Lab experiments to bear, or otherwise improving the most popular online platform for PC gamers.
Another studio that has done remarkably well for themselves is Motion Twin; their first title on Steam Dead Cells has garnered quite an impressive following and rating: with 40,498 reviews total, 96% of them are resolutely positive. The 2D rogue-lite Metroidvania challenges players to control a headless protagonist attempting to escape an ever-shifting castle, dying repeatedly as they slowly gain more powerful weapons and items to use against the myriad of foes.
It’s a title that adheres strongly to its tagline: Kill. Die. Learn. Die some more. It’s standard fare in roguelites, but few relish the opportunity to murder the players so often.
Off the back of the wildly successful first paid DLC for Dead Cells, The Bad Seed, Motion Twin has been hard at work during the recent quarantine to ensure that everyone still has something to look forward to at the end of the day, and their first minor patch has just gone live that sees the team working remotely.
Within the minor patch, we find a few new things, content and fixes alike. Six new enemies, with half of them being biome specific, have been added to the mob tables to bring a bit more variety to the runs. This is a point that Motion Twin has felt needed to be addressed, and we’ll likely see a few more enemies being added over the next month or two as the developers attempt to spice up the mob tables.
Eleven new affixes have been added to active skills to grow the available pool of affixes in drops; while many items are simply going to be picked up repeatedly through various playthroughs, affixes have an opportunity to slightly alter how they operate, bringing some fresh air in runs that would otherwise be standardized.
Finally, the patch gives homage to the wildly popular Half-Life series that has just released Half-Life: Alyx. A crowbar (which is instantly recognizable) is a fast and brutal weapon that critically hits after breaking open a door or other prop in the level. A new skin has been added for food drops, featuring Half-Life styled med packs. Finally, a Half-Life skin is available in the game with this most recent patch.
It’s an amicable nod towards one of the juggernauts of PC gaming, without breaking immersion too radically. The patch is ready for download immediately, allowing those without a VR system to pretend that they can swallow the $1,060 price tag of the newest Half-Life experience.
