It can be tough to review a game from 1996 in the year 2020. Obviously since this game's release it's been iterated on and imrpoved upon in ways that leave it in the dust but the thing is... this was the real blueprint for those iterations. Mario Kart SNES is an interesting proof of concept but a pain to play. To this day this game holds it's own in terms of playability, game feel and overall fun. It holds up! There's a reason everybody from your friend Daryll to the Church Youthgroup room had a copy of this game. It was universally accessible, understandable and fun! A classic in the genre and probably one of the most important video games ever made.

The mark of a quality rogue-lite is the ability to sustain a sense of discovery despite repeated play throughs and to keep a general barometer of fun in the moment to moment gameplay.

Dead Cells excels at the latter but stumbles in the first. I generally enjoyed the 2D-souls-lite combat but every run I found myself accidentally stumbling down the exact same path. I eventually went online and found out there were separate paths I could've been taking the whole time but they were so obtuse that even while knowing about them I never found them.

I got the "bad ending" a few times and have never put in the time to get the good ending.