Summary
Dead Cellsis practically a household name among fans of the roguelike genre, having sold over 10 million copies and captivating players for countless hours since its early access days back in 2017. Although the game’s success can be attributed to its undeniable quality and exemplary take on the roguelike formula,Dead Cells' crossovers with various other indie games have also helped spread the word through mutually beneficial cameos and references.
Game Rant sat down with Evil Empire COO Benjamin Laulan who weighed in on the game’s many crossovers and references that have included content fromHollow Knight,Hyper Light Drifter, andRisk of Rainalong with dozens of other titles. Laulan spoke about the importance of indie games collaborating with one another in order to compete with larger AAA releases. At the same time, he also stressed thatDead Cellsdoesn’t wish to be a “crossover game” in the way that games likeFortniteorDead by Daylighthave become.
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By necessity, indie game developers are heavily community-focused both with their audiences and among the developers themselves. They often share advice on their projects, give feedback on works in progress, and most entertaining of all: they occasionally do interesting crossovers between their games. Laulan says that when looking for other games to feature inDead Cells, the process is often as simple as shooting an email to a friend working on another indie game and asking. By doingcrossovers withHollow Knightand other games, these studios can reach wider audiences while the content itself can bring in some unexpected gameplay twists.
And at some point, I was like, “Okay, we have a lot of indie friends. We love and respect a lot of those studios. Why shouldn’t we do that for our audience?” And the plan at the beginning was to do that as Christmas presents because it was around Christmas time. So I just started to shoot emails to my contacts like, “Hey, dude, I’m a big fan of your game. We’re doingDead Cellsand we have this idea for an indie friends update and we would love to have your character and weapons from your game as well.”
It went super nice. HavingHollow Knightin the game orHotline Miamiwas one of my dreams, and we were like, “Can we have that in the game?” “Just send an email and we’ll see what they say.” Sometimes it’s as easy as just asking, you know.
Laulan also citedCastlevania: Symphony of the Nightas one ofDead Cells' main inspirations, and so theDead CellsCastlevaniaDLCwas a way of bringing things full circle by introducing content from a game that has long served as the foundation for metroidvanias, roguelikes, and other sidescrolling action games.
On the other hand, Laulan pointed out thatDead Cellsdoesn’t intend for its identity to revolve around crossovers. WhileFortnite’s many crossoversare a major selling point of the game as players have countless skins to choose from among their favorite franchises, that’s not whatDead Cellsis all about.
We’ve been doing quite a few, and it was fun, and we loved it, but we don’t want to be that game that’s only doing crossovers.
We’re notFortnite.
We have our own universe, storyline, and characters and we love them and we want to do more with them. So the idea is not just to do crossovers. Obviously, there are amazing games that we’d love to bring intoDead Cells, but right now, I think we really want to focus on different ways of playing. We want to take our time, and that means maybe bigger development time than we had before to really create a new approach toDead Cells.
That doesn’t necessarily mean crossovers are completely off the table forDead Cells, but players can expect futureDead Cellsupdatesthat are more focused on the original universe and story, as well as more general gameplay improvements rather than additional cameos.Dead Cellsis going on 35 major updates since its release, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon.
Dead Cellsis available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
