Highlights
- Dead Cells' success is partly attributed to its crossovers with other indie games, allowing it to reach wider audiences and introduce unexpected gameplay twists.
- The developer, Evil Empire, actively seeks out collaborations by simply e-mailing fellow indie game developers and asking to feature their characters and weapons in Dead Cells.
- While crossovers have been fun, Dead Cells doesn't want to be solely defined by them. The focus is on the game's original universe, story, and characters, with future updates centered around gameplay improvements and the development of a new approach to the game.
Dead Cells is 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 ZXC sat down with Evil Empire COO Benjamin Laulan who weighed in on the game's many crossovers and references that have included content from Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, and Risk of Rain along 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 that Dead Cells doesn't wish to be a "crossover game" in the way that games like Fortnite or Dead by Daylight have become.
Indie Games Like Dead Cells Have to Stick Together
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 in Dead Cells, the process is often as simple as shooting an email to a friend working on another indie game and asking. By doing crossovers with Hollow Knight and 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 doing Dead Cells and 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. Having Hollow Knigh t in the game or Hotline Miami was 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 cited Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as one of Dead Cells' main inspirations, and so the Dead CellsCastlevania DLC was 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.
Dead Cells Doesn't Want to Be Fortnite
On the other hand, Laulan pointed out that Dead Cells doesn't intend for its identity to revolve around crossovers. While Fortnite's many crossovers are a major selling point of the game as players have countless skins to choose from among their favorite franchises, that's not what Dead Cells is 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 not Fortnite .
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 into Dead 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 to Dead Cells .
That doesn't necessarily mean crossovers are completely off the table for Dead Cells, but players can expect future Dead Cells updates that are more focused on the original universe and story, as well as more general gameplay improvements rather than additional cameos. Dead Cells is going on 35 major updates since its release, and it doesn't appear to be stopping any time soon.
Dead Cells is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
