Some Thoughts About... Dead Cells/Return To Castlevania

Long time readers will know that I'm a big, big fan of Castlevania, so I'm coming at this almost exclusively from the Castlevania side and not the Dead Cells side. Dead Cells is... okay. It's just not my kind of game. I can appreciate it for what it is and means to be, but that's not what I'm looking for in a game. I'm mostly not a fan of rogue-likes and I prefer exploration over combat, so yeah, Dead Cells is not meant for me and that's okay. But I do like Castlevania!

To get the Dead Cells bits out of the way first, don't buy the bundle of the game and the DLC together. It was significantly cheaper to buy the standalone game and then buy the CV DLC, so check your store before making any purchases. The thing I appreciate about Dead Cells is the speed it moves at. The game is zippy! But it comes at the cost of an awful camera. There's almost no dead zone for how much you can move your character before the camera starts moving too, so once you're running and moving all about, the camera is really swimmy and unpleasant until you get used to it, and the air combat is particularly bad too. There's also a near constant issue with your character grabbing onto things you don't want them to grab. Try to drop through a block near a wall and they keep  pulling themselves back up to the block you just dropped through. So frustrating! The accessibility options are really nice and they give you some great gameplay tweaks. Especially since I'm only here for the Castlevania content, there's a lot you can change to get rid of the filler and some of the grinding. The game also shows you content you can't access because you didn't buy the expansions. You explore your way through an area, find the exit, and... you're not allowed to use it because you didn't buy a specific expansion. It's not like you can just buy it there and access it right away like in a mobile game, so why populate the map with exits in the middle of the game that you can't use? I could understand having the advertisement there at the start or end of a run to push you to make a sale, but getting it in the middle of a run didn't make me want to buy the new stuff, it just frustrated me. Which probably isn't the emotion most conducive to getting people to spend more on DLC. I'm also surprised at just how grindy the game is. Finding new outfits or weapons doesn't unlock them for use. You also have to spend currency once you have the blueprint and some of the costs are nuts. It costs an entire highest difficulty run's worth of cells to unlock a new outfit that's just a color swap of an outfit you already have. It feels like the game should be all about experimenting with different weapons but they cost so much to unlock that the game seems to be working against itself.

The storytelling is also really disappointing. The game throws so much at you with so little explanation of even basic who/whats/wheres that it just seems like stuff... happens. Why did that man attack me? Why did I blow that man up? I dunno! I was exploring and trying to find lore bits but there are so few of them in a particular run and you can get so far into your first runs that it feels really poorly put together. Compare that to the story telling in Rogue Legacy, one of the few rogue-likes I enjoy. Man, I loved the story in Rogue Legacy. It's sparse, but I was so excited to find the little bits and pieces that built everything up and slowly unfolded what was going on behind the scenes as you push deeper into the game. So good! And RL did a great job of tying game mechanics to the story. But in DC, you'll kill named characters before you're introduced to them or know anything about them and it takes multiple play-throughs before it comes together, and even then it's just "I dunno, unexplained time rifts that only affect some people and not others!". I'm also not sure if I'm done with the content of the game and how much I'm missing. It seems like it's just randomly finding lore drops and then I see online somebody mention that different events happen if you use different items or wear a specific outfit in a certain area and then you have to use specific modifiers and then a specific move to access the final area of the game. And then you have to do that again a second time to get the final ending. Also, you have to get DLC to get the actual ending. But now the DLC isn't available anymore. But maybe it's been rolled into the main game now but I don't know because the game doesn't tell you any of this and you get different results from searches because it might be different depending on where you're playing the game. You made the content, I paid for the content, so let's explore that content and not hide it from me. I shouldn't need to follow a guide on a wiki page to see this game I paid for. This doesn't feel like a cohesive package. It feels like a bunch of stuff taped onto a core but with the expectation that you've followed every release and know all the changes before you sit down and try to play.

So on to the important/Castlevania stuff! The game does a really poor job of telling you how to access the CV content. I'd heard from people online about the CV content being certain exits during a run so I was searching for it through my first run and found nothing. Then after your first run, there's an explosion and lava that the game leads you to! But no Castlevania. But then bats fly by! But nothing there... You still have to hunt down the stage exit that leads to the CV content, which I would have missed on my second run because I found a different exit first and if I hadn't seen somebody play it online, I wouldn't have known to skip that exit and find the CV one. This game's UX is bad. Did it just not dawn on anybody that doing a licensing deal with a major IP would bring in new players unfamiliar with the base game so a quick "here's how to access the thing you paid for and care about" would have been good?

You can access the CV music right away but the implementation is pretty disappointing. During the non-CV stages, you get music mostly from Symphony of the Night and that is surprisingly low quality. SotN's soundtrack is great, but I was hoping for more CV 1 and 2 and a little more breadth from the decades this franchise has been around. And it's not a variety of music either. The CV music it applies to that biome is just the song you get. I was expecting more like a jukebox where each biome would have a playlist of songs rather than looping the same one.

The new stages are... okay? They're pretty short and the first one is fairly plain. There are no interesting gimmicks to set it apart from the other normal DC stages. The second stage is also plain but there are several moments where Dracula teleports in and messes with you in some silly ways. It's fun because it doesn't feel like Drac is menacing. He feels like, at best, he's toying with you and at worse, he's just there to knowingly be a dick. There are only the two CV stages but for no apparent reason, you're only allowed to play one per run. They occupy different spots in the route (Death at the beginning of a run and Dracula at the end) so it doesn't make sense why you can't do both. The stages also don't run very well. It took so long to load into Dracula's Castle that I thought the game had locked up and once you're in, the game hangs up when some effects play, like it's loading them in as they happen.

There's nothing special about the enemies. Armor Knights, fishmen, skeletons that throw in an arc, buer, bats, and a harpy. It really took me a while to realize the werewolf was supposed to be a werewolf. No Medusa heads, fleamen, white dragons, or any of the other dozens of recognizable characters. There's a miniboss pulled from CV but it's just the one. You come across other bosses, but they're just objects in the background, the Beheaded makes a quip about them, and that's all. 

The CV heroes don't look great, but Richter fares the worst. They're so much bigger than the Beheaded, but they retain the faceless look of older CV sprites. That worked because their faces were so tiny on your CRT TV, but now all big and defined, Richter's head is a fleshy void. And for some reason, Shanoa is there to serve as the Collector's role in the CV stages. Weird choice as this thing is almost all SotN-based but then you get a random Shanoa appearance. At least Konami remembers she exists?

The sub-weapons are pretty no-frills takes on the axe, cross, bible, and so on. They included that weird rebound stone one that's rarely ever useful. The main weapons are more interesting, but DC already had whips so the scythe is the only one that stands out (but it's pretty bad against bosses, so I usually drop it by the end of a run).

There's a "Richter Mode" mini-game you can stumble upon, where you play as Richter and the gameplay mechanics are set more like Castlevania's. It's... fine. It's a regular stage that adds the Bone Pillar enemy and you use the high jump and dash relics for Richter's movement upgrades. It looks like an explorable space from the map, but it's really a linear path to the two movement upgrades and then two paths that wind up in the same place. You fight the same mini-boss in the Dead Cells CV stage and then it just ends. The jumping feels really bad so it's not particularly fun and there's nothing there to encourage replaying it. Weirdly enough, they use a different Richter model from the DC content and since it's smaller, it looks so much better.

If you're a Castlevania fan only, this DLC isn't for you. The CV window dressing is nice but it's not going to make you like Dead Cells. If you're a Dead Cells fan already, you may be into it, but you're not getting a lot. Maybe wait for a sale or just look up videos of the boss fights depending on what $10 is worth to you. It's not outstanding and it's light on content, so it's not going to hold you over for the next Castlevania game.