After 30-odd years of pillaging fantasy realms I'm pretty sick of video game loot, but I do love poring over the vicious trinkets I've harvested from the tissues of Dead Cells, Motion Twin's superb, handsome blend of Spelunky and Metroidvania. There they dangle in the jail where you begin each run: a galaxy of smoky coloured icons, sealed in jars that are chained to the ceiling. Bounce into them - one of my personal rituals, before I venture into the dungeon beyond - and the jars chime together ever so gently in a way that makes my skin crawl. I'm not sure the resemblance to a mad scientist's anatomy collection is deliberate, but it's compelling all the same. How better to capture the morbidity of escaping to a world of make-believe only to shake it down for swords and tat? You can almost smell the formalin.
As the name suggests, Dead Cells is rather on the macabre side. An action-platformer with permadeath, randomised rewards and procedurally generated stages, it takes place on an island overrun by undead creatures and casts you as the worst critter of the lot - a parasitic snotball that survives by reanimating the bodies of beheaded criminals. Die in your efforts to escape, and the parasite squidges back through the island's plumbing to the prison, where another corpse is always, somehow, waiting. Fortunately, once plugged into a torso the character is a formidable martial artist and a delight to control - able to perform brisk three-hit combos, double-jump, block or parry, slither around ledges, kick down doors to stun nearby foes and slam earthwards mid-jump to pulverise anything beneath.
The game's swish animations and skin-bursting effects are its immediate draw - Klei's Mark of the Ninja with a big dollop of Diablo 3 and Mortal Kombat. Besides looking tremendous, it succeeds in being thoroughly readable for all the quantity of bodies, gibs and damage numerals on show, helped no end by sound design that excels at conveying nuances like the difference between a normal and a critical hit. Also captivating: the level art, which combines the sunset palette of a Mike Mignola comic with the filigreed touches of vintage Castlevania. One stage is a hellish clocktower, cogs spinning inside walls and fragments of masonry drifting against a burning cloudscape. Another is a mildewed Siren-esque village on stilts above a river of gore, lanterns gleaming from windows in the backdrop.
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