“How can we do better than Dead Cells?”: Motion Twin follows a roguelike icon with a co-op game under huge but “good” pressure with “millions” waiting

The earliest seed for the follow-up to roguelike darling Dead Cells emerged the way a lot of games do: over a beer. The folks at studio Motion Twin wanted to make something new as co-developer Evil Empire continued to support Dead Cells, ultimately with years of excellent expansions and updates. The team’s brainstorming often played out at a bar. Developer Thomas Vasseur tells GamesRadar+ that there were a lot of competing ideas within the worker-owned studio, and newer hire Yannick Berthier says they weren’t even going to make another roguelike at first. “But habits came back quite quickly,” says Berthier, and sure enough, Motion Twin has another roguelike coming soon: Windblown, a three-player co-op action game launching in Steam early access on October 24. In my mind, Windblown belongs on the same shelf as the likes of Hades 2 and Slay the Spire 2. It’s a new game from a beloved studio that’s directly building on a pillar of modern roguelikes. Our first hands-on impression of Windblown was mighty promising, and with Dead Cells being one of the best roguelike games of all time, selling over 10 million copies as of 2023, there are waves of anticipation and expectation behind Motion Twin’s second game. That reputation can be both intimidating and motivating for the studio’s small team of eight, but Vasseur and Berthier say the chance to make something new and revisit a genre they love has been propulsion enough. Responses edited for clarity and length.The second album   Dead Cells was, of course, “a huge inspiration,” but the two games weren’t always so similar under the hood. “Actually, I think we are a bit closer to the Dead Cells formula right now than we were even a year ago,” Berthier says. “We tested a lot of systems that were really, really different in terms of unlocks, how the weapon works. We got systems that were closer to Binding of Isaac or something that was closer to Hades, and at some point, we went a bit back to the roots. Let’s go back to the basics of Dead Cells and let’s see how we can enhance the formulaYannick Berthier”We are facing the same problem that the original Dead Cells team faced at one moment. How do you make sure that people renew their experience enough between runs? How do you make sure that when you get a reward, it pushes you to do another run? How, inside the run, you feel a feeling of progress, and suddenly you feel god-tier, maybe until the end, if you’re lucky enough, and then you will have that memory that will stay on your mind. That was the run. So that should exist. But also in the most common runs, how do you feel? Because what we are aiming for is diversity. I think that that’s something super strong in our intention and in the whole team, to really push to never have the same run two times.”In many ways, Windblown is a chance for Motion Twin to improve on some ideas from Dead Cells. For example, Vasseur says they were always “frustrated” that dual wielding never coalesced in a truly synergistic way, and now Windblown has “Alterattacks” which combo your two weapons together in combat-defining ways. He says he was also encouraged by the Monster Hunter games, which have weapons “so incredible” that they pushed him to wring more depth out of their own. “We tried, I don’t know, three, four different weapon systems over the years,” Berthier explains. “The last one before the Alterattacks and the dual welding was this idea of building a weapon. I don’t think it was bad, but it was not amazing, and it was kind of going against us with the replayability. When you are able to customize one weapon, creating a lot of variety is quite difficult, and you’re always making kind of the same weapon … at one point we’re like, it’s not great enough. Let’s go back to the basics of Dead Cells and let’s see how we can enhance the formula and kind of make it even more beautiful somehow.” Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

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