DEAD CELLS

Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

Developer/publisher Motion Twin

Origin France

Release 2018

Motion Twin made a difficult decision in early 2014. It was going to stop work on the project which would eventually become Dead Cells – potentially forever. This was just over a year into development, and the game had started to take shape. It was intended to be a spiritual sequel to one of the French studio’s biggest hits, known in English territories as Die2Nite and natively as Hordes. “The idea was to make a co-operative tower defence game,” lead designer Sébastien Bénard explains. “It would be eight players in a single building, and they had to build defences and set up traps, lock windows and doors, to survive a zombie attack.” Like its predecessor, this title – codenamed Hordes Zero – would be released as a free-to-play browser game. None of which, you may have noticed, describes Dead Cells as it exists today. Getting from this game to that one would involve some painful realisations about design, multiple changes of platform and the project getting brought back from the dead – twice.

But back then, as far as Motion Twin was concerned, the game itself wasn’t really the problem. This first hiatus was more the result of a company-wide shift, as it followed the rest of the industry away from the web (which was, in the words, “kind of dead”) and over to mobile. This project was deemed too big for its first mobile game, and instead the studio started work on a handful of smaller projects, until later that year.