Curse of the Dead Gods released on PlayStation 4 last month, and all of us here at Passtech Games have been glued to our screens to watch all of your amazing footage, comments, and reactions. As grateful as we are for the response, we are also happy to show you new things. Today we take a look at how we designed the Curse of the Dead Cells update, a collaboration between us and the developers of Dead Cells, Motion Twin, and Evil Empire.
Death in Curse is the gift that keeps on giving, and in this new update, we’re excited to bring you new ways to reach your unique destiny. To that end, we’ve added new weapons, originally from Dead Cells, the Cursed Chest, and the prisoner’s head skin for McCallister, the main character in Curse of the Dead Gods.
From a game design perspective, this was a very interesting challenge as it meant taking elements from two similar but also different games and crushing them together. This also goes for the art direction, where Dead Cells has a bit of a cartoonish and comedic vibe, which is not present in Curse. In Dead Cells for example, the cursed chest is addressed to the player, begging them to open it. It didn’t work out as well for Curse, so we changed it to something we think is true to both worlds – slightly less comedic, but still a little alien and quirky. We were also aware that some players don’t like crossovers because it can take them out of the world. That’s why we wanted the content to remain user-friendly and also match the overall feel of Curse. Every new item and mechanic introduced in this update fits into our universe.
Deciding which weapons to take from Dead Cells was a fun process. We started with a pretty long list of badass Dead Cells weapons, then filtered it down until we got only the most iconic ones that also made the most sense for Curse: The Broadsword, the Cursed. Sword and the Explosive Crossbow. The crossbow is an entirely new weapon in Curse, which makes it even more appealing to us. The Cursed Sword was a must, for obvious reasons. In Curse, we called these weapons the broadsword of the knight, the sword of conjunctivius and the crossbow of the condemned. Both swords have the same effect as in Dead Cells. The Conjunctivius Sword (see screenshot below) is a real devil – get hit once, and you toast. On the other hand, it is very powerful. If that doesn’t match Curse’s penchant for tempting players to their own fate, we don’t know what it does!
We took a few liberties with the cursed chest. In Curse, there were two ways to get a cursed item (weapon or relic): get one from a starting altar or buy one from a shrine. Now Dead Cells Cursed Chest gives you a third way. In Dead Cells, when you open a Cursed Chest, you are inflicted a curse that lasts until you kill a certain number of enemies. We have reinvented this mechanic to fit into Curse: to unlock the chest you have to kill a certain number of enemies in the room without getting hit. Fail, and the chest poops. Rather than just giving you a Cursed Item, the Cursed Chest gives you a choice of three items, one of which is always Cursed.
We hope you all enjoyed this preview of how we introduced a slice of dead cells into our own Curse of the Dead Gods. It has been a pleasure working with Motion Twin and Evil Empire, and we can’t wait to see how the update is received by you, the players!
Curse of the Dead Gods is now available on PlayStation 4. Its free Curse of the Dead Cells update will be available on April 14th.
