Dead Cells' next DLC will let you praise the sun and explore floating islands

Dead Cells will receive its second paid DLC early next year, Fatal Falls. This introduces two new outdoor biomes, Fractured Shrines and The Undying Shores, which can be accessed mid-game when players would usually be running into tthe Stilt Village and Clock Tower, and a new boss to go with. As with the Bad Seed DLC it will also be "stuffed with new weapons and enemies" and cost $5. 

The teaser video gives brief glimpses of these areas, with the game's Steam page describing Fractured Shrines as "floating islands dotted with deadly traps", while the Undying Shores setting sees you descend a cliff face in the middle of a storm. It also shows some new gestures, inspired by the Karate Kid and the Dark Souls Praise the Sun emote (which has a fascinating history). Obviously a singleplayer game like Dead Cells has little need of emotes, so I suspect these are idle animations.

Dead Cells is a fantastic game and the Bad Seed was a great piece of DLC, so going on that history Fatal Falls should be a bit of alright. In its announcement post Motion Twin also went on to talk about Dead Cells' future.

"When The Bad Seed was announced last year we said there was at least 2 years worth of content left to build—and that's still the plan. Any maths geniuses out there will work out that there's at least a year of content to go, and we're pretty sure that we have more than that in our heads. To be honest, if we locked Joan alone in a room for a week he'd probably come out with about 20 years of content scribbled on the walls... Basically you can fully expect more of our regular updates to continue next year."

To which the only thing to say is: lock up Joan, baby.

The Fatal Falls announcement is more substantial post-launch support from this developer, most of which has been free. As recently as August the Barrels o' Fun update added a distillery with explosive tendencies, with another update adding a new weapon, enemy and more later this month. On release we gave Dead Cells 90, as well as roguelike of the year. Two years on, it just gets better and better.

Rich Stanton

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."