Dead Cells: Rise Of The Giant launches this week
A giant update of crushing difficulty
If you thought twitchy roguelike platformer Dead Cells was hard before, you're in for a hell of a time when the free Rise Of The Giant expansion launches this Thursday, March 28th. While daring players can opt in to a testing build now, the major, story-focused update to the game will officially roll out soon. It adds more enemies, weapons, zones, boss fights and multiple new endings to the story, although you'll need to play on the highest possible difficulty to access the toughest battles. Below, a cute animated short in the style of the game's launch trailer.
The Rise Of The Giant expand-o-patch feels like it has two main goals; wrap up the story (for now) and give the bestest best players something to really chew on long-term. While ten new enemies have been added to the game, some of them only appear on the higher difficulties. Fortunately there's a few things working in your favour, including ten new weapons. A special shout-out needs to go to the the Boï Axe, which is a cutely named, shameless clone of Kratos's frosty throwing axe from the new God Of War game. The update also unlocks Custom Mode after beating the Prison Roofs mini-boss, so players just wanting to goof off can do it without having to master the game.
If that video accurately reflects your first meeting with the Giant, then you might never get to see the latter half of the free DLC. Once you've completed the game once, you'll unlock the Cavern area, and a boss fight against a very large cranky skeleton. Finish that and the original final boss on the highest difficulty (5 Boss Cells) and you'll gain access to one final, brutally tough area with an absolute slobberknocker of a fight at the end. If you can somehow beat that, you'll still need to fulfil one secret criteria in order to see the game's true ending, but you'll at least find out the identity of the headless protagonist either way.
There's also a new cosmetic skin system. On higher difficulties, they'll drop as blueprints from enemies and bosses, although one particular outfit is hidden away. You can see the full patch notes for the coming pain-train here, which includes at least some nerfs to difficulty. It seems that Motion Twin want to give you a halfway plausible chance of truly completing the game, even if you'll have to sacrifice a bit of your soul to attain that power. More readily available food, slightly more HP across the board and big buffs to slow, heavy weapons. There's a lot to look forward to.
The Rise Of The Giant update launches on Thursday, March 28th. Dead Cells is currently 20% off on both Humble and GOG, reducing it to £17.59/€19.99/$24.99.