This DLC is as much an ode to Castlevania’s heyday as it is a reminder of Dead Cells’ staying power. It also brings vampire-killing veterans Simon and Richter Belmont, Maria Renard, and Alucard, along with new gothic biomes and a swath of minor enemies and major villains. It refreshes the game’s expansive array of weapons with tools straight out of Konami’s iconic series, including whips, crucifixes, and holy-water grenades. Now, six years after its release, developer Motion Twin has released its fourth DLC, Return to Castlevania. It is a deeply satisfying game to learn, and is beyond deserving of the praise that it’s so often afforded. That is not a loose statement in the way most comparisons to Souls are - Dead Cells teaches you to intuit enemy behaviors until you reach a point where you can anticipate and ultimately foil them. While it functions as a roguelike, it is styled as a Metroidvania and borrows patterns from notoriously difficult games, namely FromSoftware’s Souls series. It operates on sheer freneticism, with every jump and jab feeling vigorous yet deeply tactile.Ī large part of Dead Cells’ appeal is its ability to blend its various influences into its own unique formula. No list of the best roguelikes would be complete without Dead Cells, one of the purest and most popular games to ever liken itself to Rogue. Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania Image: Evil Empire/Motion Twin That’s where we come in.įrom intense romps through vampire-infested castles, to ruthless rampages through the depths of Tartarus, to carefully planned but quickly ditched assassination missions across the world, here are the best roguelikes you can play right now. This has led to somewhat of a saturation in the market, where it can often be difficult to know which game among hundreds is the one for you. Hell, one of 2021’s best games was a roguelike from a PlayStation first-party studio. They have become so trendy, in fact, that aspects of their makeup are now often visible in behemoth AAA efforts, from mechanics like permadeath, to procedurally generated dungeons, to build variety in their design ethos. Still, it’s only in the last decade or so that roguelikes entered the mainstream. Roguelikes are difficult to stop playing because, more often than not, you’re improving in some way.Īlthough roguelikes’ surge in popularity is still a recent phenomenon, their history dates back more than 40 years - since 1980, to be exact, which is when Rogue put the “rogue” in roguelike. The allure of the roguelike sells itself: rewarding repetition and the tantalizing hope that your next run, whether because of the new tools you’ve gathered, the new skills you’ve developed, or the new stats you’ve buffed, will be more successful than the last.

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