Windblown Preview – What the Dead Cells team did next

thesixthaxis.com:

Motion Twin have experienced the highs and lows of game development. An early star of the social-media web-based gaming movement, when the market started to dissolve things were looking bleak until they settled on making a huge creative pivot to create something niche and something hardcore. The result was the runaway indie success, Dead Cells. Following that up is never going to be an easy task, but with Windblown they’ve retained many of the lessons learned along the way, and though they’ve created a new, undeniably cuter, roguelike IP, it’s still got plenty of that Dead Cells bite to take the unwary by surprise.

Before you can do anything in Windblown, you have to choose a body. This is a purely aesthetic choice, so you won’t have to question too hard whether to be an Axolotl or a Pangolin, and once you’ve completed your first run you can swap into any of the other bodies. If you played the demo you also get access to a Guinea Pig, which is, presumably, the most correct choice.

You immediately awaken in the fantastical isometric land that Motion Twin has created, impossible islands hovering in the sky, while rivers drop off into nothingness. The characters boast bold, comic-book lines, but the world itself is more grounded. Well, as much as a bunch of floating islands can be grounded.

Dashing here is both traversal and evasion. You hit the button to transition from island to island, as well as to jump between different areas above and below, while you must utilise it in combat to get out of the way of the increasingly aggressive and swift enemies you encounter along the way.

You immediately feel the vein of Dead Cells running through Windblown, emphasising movement and timing as much as any of the myriad Souls games that are out there. It’s certainly fast, and leaping from island to island and in and out of combat feels gloriously smooth.

Windblown is a roguelike, so you make repeated runs into the Vortex, collecting Cogs and upgrading your abilities as you go. You