YMMV / Dead Cells

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The King. Was he really a tyrant, just incompetent at his job, a Well-Intentioned Extremist who completely lost control of events, or did the Malaise drive him crazy? This especially comes into question given The Reveal that the Beheaded is the King's mind and that he doesn't approve of what he's done. Furthermore, the Giant expresses sorrow over the King's brutal methods by mentioning that he was "a model for all of us", implying that he might not have been that bad in the past. There's also mention of the Malaise "doing a number on [the Beheaded's] body". If one reaches the Queen while wearing the King's outfit, her dialogue implies he was always something of a selfish prick, but how much of one is unclear.
• Annoying Videogame Helper: Biters, Mushroom Boy and the Leghugger can suffer from this depending on your build. Biters can alert enemies you didn't want to and can be targeted by enemy attacks, causing them to attack a different spot from where you normally expect them to, and the Leghugger and Mushroom Boy can't be targeted by enemies, but they can stagger them, which can mess with parry/dodge timings.
• Awesome Music: A lot of the music qualifies, but a few really stand out:
  • "Prison's Rooftop", the theme of the Ramparts. Its fast-paced string segments perfectly compliment the feeling of racing along the castle walls, slamming into enemies and rolling with your mistakes.
  • The Clock Tower theme. It's a hectic theme that sounds appropriately clocky and timey, right down to ticks and tocks in the background. Perfect for a frantic vertical tower level where you have to be in constant motion to survive.
  • "The Castle" is a climatic song that builds and flourishes in both the instruments and the backing choir, fitting for the final area which involves a dash through a multi-layered level that allows little room for error.
  • "Astrolab" is a what feels like the climactic confrontation, which is fitting for the Hell-exclusive level.
  • "Lighthouse" is an epic and frantic theme appropriate for the running battle up the burning lighthouse.
  • "Bank", the theme for the, well, bank, is a sinister-sounding theme, fitting the mysterious nature of the biome well.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Conjunctivius. It's an epic, long, grueling battle against an Eldritch Abomination and it kicks a ton of ass.
  • The Time Keeper. She fights like an unholy fusion of Artorias and Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower, dashing about with incredible ferocity, swinging her BFS with impunity, throwing out grappling hooks should you try to get away, throwing out shuriken, and even summoning GIGANTIC SWORDS FROM THE SKY TO FALL ON YOU. Whoever The Time Keeper is, she is certainly a worthy penultimate boss and will give you a run for your money regardless of your build. Just a tip: the giant falling swords can be parried.
  • If you're good enough to get to him, The Collector. Easily the longest boss fight in the game, yet it never feels like it drags on, as the fight goes through multiple phases. With a wide variety of attacks to throw at you, this boss is the ultimate test of your skill. It also gets very satisfying at the end when you steal the Panacea from him, drink it yourself, and proceed to utterly destroy him.
  • Dracula! Motion Twin and Evil Empire had a tall order to make the Lord of Darkness a memorable fight and they were up to the challenge. His first form is a familiar sight, with the usual Teleport Spam and fireballs, but he has quite a few attacks up his sleeve, including melee attacks and a powerful diving attack that drains your health if he catches you with it. His second form, however, is one of the coolest fights Dracula has ever had, fighting atop falling platforms as Dracula flies overhead to rain unholy destruction upon you. He throws everything he has at you, even scraping the walls of his castle to send debris flying your way, and culminating with a massive meteor strike. He's one of the hardest fights in the game, but also one of the most rewarding.
  • The other boss the DLC introduces, Death, is no slouch either. True to his home series he is a very challenging and aggressive boss with numerous scythe attacks, floating energy balls, and Teleport Spam. He even has a bit of a cinematic attack where he pulls a Your Soul Is Mine! on the Beheaded that is nearly a One-Hit KO. All while a remix of "Bloody Tears" plays.
• Crossover Ship: A small following exists for The Beheaded/Drifter.
• Demonic Spiders: Each area has its own kinds of enemies that will give you a run for your money. Some of them overlap with Elite Mooks.
  • Hammers. Giant four-legged tin cans that spawn bats as soon as you get anywhere near them, as well as having high health and spamming grenades as soon as you're in melee range? Holy fuck.
  • Thornies damage you if you hit their backs and love exposing them for you to accidentally nail yourself on them. Trying to drop on them will have the same effect if you hit their behind. Even when blocking their Spin Attack, it's possible to take damage. It's really telling that they only appear in Ossuary and Prison Depths.
  • Inquisitors/Casters and Grenadiers/Bombardiers can ignore walls and see you through them, and will snipe you from there. Their Elite variant are even worse, in that if you get anywhere NEAR a stationed Elite of those they will start raining hell on you.
  • Slashers are practically a Noob Bridge in mook form. They only have one attack, where they Flash Step in front of you, slash twice, then charge up for a third slash that sends a shockwave. They are the first enemies that will teach you that you can't just roll behind the enemy as soon as you see the (!). If you dodge too early, they will turn around and hit you with the second slash. You also can't expect to stun them with a combo before they finish the combo as they are fairly tanky. To fight them effectively, you must either roll behind them on time or away from them, or use your cooldown abilities to burst them down.
  • The Rise of the Giant update adds the Arbiters, found only in the Cavern. These are Inquisitors on crack, able to fire bullets in a spread. Like the Inquisitors, they ignore walls and snipe at you through them. If you defeat one, it leaves behind a bomb that explodes into a six-way shot.
  • Slammers, giant birds that, as their name suggests, slam their beaks into the ground to create shockwaves that can't be parried. They attack very quickly and relentlessly, making it difficult to deal with them without getting hit, and they can also do a lot of damage, even if you're running a Survival build. Also, they're immune to crowd control effects, just to make things worse. While they're considered a late-game enemy, you may run into them unexpectedly early if you go into the Corrupted Prison.
  • The Bad Seed DLC added a few. The Arboretum has Yeeters (yes, that's actually their name!). They move slowly, but if you come anywhere near them, they'll toss Jerkshrooms at you, and like the Inquisitors and Grenadiers, they can see through walls and can toss their little buddies from quite a long distance. Even if there aren't any Jerkshrooms around, they'll throw rocks at you from a distance. Worse, if you get too close, they'll throw you. Did we mention that the Arboretum is loaded with spikes that the Yeeters will happily toss you into?
  • There's also Blowgunners, found only in the Morass of the Banished. Imagine an Inquisitor, but many times more aggressive and much faster on the draw, and you've got a Blowgunner. It doesn't help that they actively try to avoid getting into melee combat with you. Fortunately, they can't see you through walls like Inquisitors can or fire above them, but they can be deadly if they surround you.
  • Golems, found exclusively in the Slumbering Sanctuary. They have an absolutely devastating Mega Ton Punch that can knock you across a room, a ground stomp attack that causes unblockable damage in a large area, and worst of all, once you get their attention, they are impossible to escape - if you try to run, they will teleport you back into close range.
  • The Bank adds Gold Gorgers. In their base form, they're pretty easy to deal with. However, they absorb any gold on the screen, overriding your own money magnet feature. They can transform twice, and on the second transformation they become huge, get a massive defensive buff, and gain the same ground stomp used by the Golems, detailed above. And once they transform, they're impossible to escape, teleporting to you if you try to outrun them. On their own, they're not too difficult, but when in groups with other monsters they need to be prioritized so that they don't suck up money left behind from the other dead enemies. Beware if they're near Golden Kamikazes, as if they're allowed to explode, they will guarantee that the Gold Gorgers will power up.
  • Rampagers. Insane speed, can jump to the player through walls and floors, and their four-hit combo will take out most of your health bar if you don't roll through it. They don't show up until 3BC for a good reason.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The alternate zones which you enter after collecting new runes are marginally more difficult than the "standard" zones. The Sewers have lots of toxic pools, Ossuary is full of Spikers that damage you if you melee them from behind, Slumbering Sanctuary adds a ton of enemies after you awaken the Sanctuary, Caverns is full of pits, and so on.
  • Going from 0 to 1 Boss Stem Cells was a gigantic leap in difficulty. Enemies in the first stage are suddenly hitting you for almost half your health, and your start getting less chances to heal. This is compounded by the fact that you likely don't have essential upgrades, adequate Forge levels, or mutations for the right situations unlocked, with Forge level being important for finding higher quality gear that give direct stat bonuses which are extremely important for any part of the game. The 1.9 update alleviated this huge gap by better flattening out the difficulty between each Boss Stem Cell levels and removing stat bonuses from gear, reducing dependence on higher quality gear.
  • The DLC areas are also considered much more difficult than the base game's ones, whether it's the Arboreum (with its plants, spikes and Yeeters/Jerkshrooms), the Morass of the banished (with its Blowgunners), the Cavern (with Demons that attack from unusual angles, Arbiters, Slammers or the highly resilient Ground Shakers), the Fractured Shrines (for its traps and heavy platforming more than for its enemies) or the Undying Shores (for its highly damaging Clumsy Swordsmen, compulsive Gravediggers, Dastardly Archers or failed Homunculi, all of which can be revived indefinitely by nearby Apostles). The infested shipwreck has its own challenges with floors breakable by enemy attacks and enemies like the armored shrimp.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mushroom boi! became immediately popular upon the release of the Bad Seed DLC.
• Fan Nickname: The main character has no canon name. "The Beheaded" is most often used and has become his canon "name" as of the Boss Rush update, but he's also been unofficially named "Blobespierre" after the beheaded Maximilien Robespierre, suggested on a Steam forum. Even the developer liked it!
• Friendly Fandoms: With Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter. Even more so after both series' have been represented in the game in the "Everyone is Here" update.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Double Crossb-o-matic, a crossbow turret that repeatedly shoots two bolts at two different enemies at once, in either direction. Especially when carrying two of them with complementary effects. Just plop them on the ground and retreat, then watch as everything in the vicinity gets schplaughtered into Ludicrous Gibs in seconds. Most bosses can be cheesed this way as well.
  • Freezing is largely considered one of the strongest abilities for a weapon to have. Being able to stop any enemy in their tracks to either attack or heal, on top of enemies being slowed afterwards makes most encounters laughably easy. These strategies even work fairly well on bosses, whose Contractual Boss Immunity only kicks in if you really spam your freezing abilities.
  • Wolf Traps are one of the few items that don't go through Contractual Boss Immunity, and boost damage done to trapped enemies to boost; for particularly evasive Elites or bosses such as Conjunctivitis they can eliminate that element of challenge. Plus, each use drops two traps, and with clever use of certain mutations they will become active again before the previous traps are done.
  • "Invisibility", or "Makes you invisible after 5 seconds without attacking." is a potential amulet affix considered to snap the difficulty of the game in half, provided you're lucky enough to get an amulet with it. It makes it so you can avoid almost every single enemy in the game, can choose when to fight, will not be taken by surprise, and so on.
  • Speaking of invisibility, the Predator mutation can be very useful in a melee build. While the invisibility doesn't last long, it does cause all nearby enemies to lose aggro whenever you kill an enemy. This is much more useful than it seems as it can effectively make every enemy much less aggressive and allow you to pick your targets more efficiently. It's especially useful when combined with a very powerful weapon, as killing an enemy in one or two hits, turning invisible, moving onto the next one, and repeating the process is a very powerful strategy when dealing with troublesome areas.
  • The Collector's Syringe, obtainable only after beating the game with five boss cells active. It requires a few cells to power up to its fullest, but it absolutely tears through everything in no time flat, and you can pump in cells to keep the attack going even longer. The only downsides of this weapon are that it's a lot more expensive to buy than just about anything else in the game, and you need to beat The Collector to unlock it.
  • Necromancy was considered THE mutation to take, no matter what your build was. It healed you for a percentage of your health with every monster you killed AND removed a third of your Malaise bar when you beat a boss. Not only is the latter extremely useful in 4/5BC, but the former means that you also never really had to worry about health. Sure, if you didn't go Survival, the healing was really low (less than a quarter of a percent of your health for every kill), but there are so many enemies in later levels that it can still heal most of your health, and unlike Frenzy (heals you for every melee strike dealt while under the speed boost) and Adrenalin (heals you for every melee strike after a last minute dodge) it has no difficult condition to activate its healing. To the point that it received many nerfs to its healing capability over patches, and the 1.9 patch eventually brought a hard cap to the healing it provides (it cannot heal you if you are above half health) and the Malaise reduction on boss kill was made baseline to the beheaded when the Malaise was reworked.
  • Rampart, a Survival shield whose effect is to grant invincibility for a short duration after a successful melee parry (and the duration of the invincibility remains the same even if you don't go for a Survival build), allowed players to simply facetank everything in the game. While its effect remained, the invincibility was nerfed to two-thirds of how long it initially lasted (from 3 seconds to 2,5 to 2).
  • Shortly after the "Everyone's here" update, people found the Face Flask on top of being perfect for Spite Sword/Vengence builds, the recoverable hit points effect (a percent of missing hit points) made it a superior alternative to vampirism. The devs noticed this and when fixing some Switch bugs removed the "recoverable HP" effect. This adjustment would arrive to PC and other consoles with a later update.
  • Aspects in general provide powerful bonuses to the player at the cost of being unable to acquire boss cells or getting flawless achievements for bosses. By far the most broken of the lot is Damned. To start with, curses no longer kill you instantly if you get hit. Instead you deal and receive double damage while cursed. Additionally, twice as many cursed chests are guaranteed to spawn, which means twice as many scrolls to buff your stats. By far the most broken thing about Damned, however, is that you no longer die in one hit with the Cursed Sword! The Cursed Sword has that drawback for a reason: it's the most powerful weapon in the game by a wide margin. Finding a Cursed Sword with Damned means you've practically beaten the game.
  • Blood Drinker (restore about 3% max hp per melee attack on a bleeding enemy) is another powerful aspect in that with the right effect, weapon, or mutation (anything that inflicts bleed), you can keep yourself healthy rather easily with melee attacks.
  • The Armadillopack mutation, which makes it so that rolling with a shield in your backpack triggers a parry. Being able to parry while moving is already super powerful, but what really breaks the ability is that it allows you to effectively use all three weapon types at once, meaning that the entire aspect of managing which two types to use is completely negated. Not to mention that rolling in the face of imminent danger is already muscle memory by the time you unlock it!
  • The rapier's crit damage is on-par with weapons like the war spear, spite sword, and flawless, all of which have fairly difficult-to-trigger crit conditions. The rapier's condition? Roll or parry. Having the two most fundamental methods of avoiding damage is, understandably, pretty busted, especially since the rapier can finish a combo in about the same time as 1 swing of the Maw of the Deep.
  • The Baseball Bat. It is a Brutality/Survival melee weapon with a fast swinging rate that increases incredibly quickly with it's easy to accomplish crit conditions, that the target needs to be rooted, frozen or stunned. Due to these reasons, players are still questioning that how this weapon still hasn't seen any nerfs despite it's obvious game-breaking power.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Most areas have some kinds of, appropriately, bat enemies that will cause problems for you and are very hard to hit due to their tendency to hover above the range of your sword.
  • The Shield Bearers. The main reason to hate them is their dash attack. The audio cue for it is quiet and, unlike every other enemy in the game, they don't have a noticeable animation for when it's being prepared. Getting hit by it stuns you and opens you up to punishment from the two or three other mooks surrounding the Shield Bearer, and you also get stunned if you attempt attacking from the front.
  • Rise of the Giant adds Knife Throwers, found only after you start putting some boss cells in. They don't have much health, but they're camouflaged until they attack, at which point they jump back and quickly throw a volley of poisonous knives at you. These enemies aren't too bad if you're decent at parrying and can identify them while camouflaged, but they can be a pain in the ass if you're new to them.
  • Protectors and Maskers. The former makes all nearby enemies (with a few exceptions like bats) invincible, while the latter makes them invisible. They're especially annoying in the higher difficulty levels, where they can protect some of the aforementioned Demonic Spiders. Beware in the Graveyard, where both Protectors and Maskers can appear.
  • Weirded Warriors, while are not hard to kill with melee weapons, with ranged weapons they become extremely annoying to kill since they will block all projectiles from the front. Even if you attack them from the back, they can turn around and block if they didn't die quick enough. The only window of opportunity you have is while they're attacking, which is also tricky to dodge at first. An update had to nerf how fast they recovered from their attack.
  • Jerkshrooms, introduced in the Bad Seed DLC, due to their ability to become completely invincible when they hide underneath their caps, and they'll stay that way until you turn away from them. Their charge attack doesn't look like much, but it's surprisingly powerful and has high knockback.
  • Apostates, found in the Undying Shores. While they're fairly tanky and hit hard, they're not that difficult. What makes them annoying is the fact that they revive enemies around them.
  • Throw Masters, found in Dracula's castle. Not so dangerous normally, they become very annoying if they're below you, as they toss bones rather quickly and can catch you off guard if you're descending.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Typical Survival Based builds are seen as less optimal due to fast kills being advantageous, enemy damage being such that a higher HP doesn't amount to much, and the boss damage cap means the damage per hit is rather moot. It becomes more pronounced at higher boss cells with the spikes in enemy damage and Malaise control being based on fast kills.
• Most Wonderful Sound: So many sound effects qualify because they all sound so powerful, from the fanfare after a boss is killed all the way down to the chanting and drums that play every time the Prisoner respawns. However, some stand out in particular:
  • The metallic "-PING" when you land a Critical Hit. Especially if it was a parry causing it, and even more if you parried an attack that would've otherwise killed you.
  • The gooey "-SPLAT" when enemies are killed.
  • The metallic scraping of a Broadsword swinging, especially when it's accompanied by the heavy thud of the third hit.
  • The short vocal noise used when a Legendary item drops.
  • The vocal hit that sounds when you achieve a 30 or 60 no-hit kill streak.
  • The heavy "-CLANG" whenever an attack is successfully parried.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The game was at the center of a plagiarism scandal involving IGN writer Filip Miucin, who copied a review of this game from a lesser-known Youtube channel, BoomstickGaming. Being caught in the center of this plagiarism controversy drew more attention to the game, and may have helped its commercial success.
• Scrappy Mechanic: During its introduction phase, the daily run contained all weapons, but if the player hadn't unlocked some of them, they would be unable to pick any of them up and use them. Many players complained about this, saying it put people at unfair disadvantages since the only weapon they'd likely be able to use is the Rusty Sword. Thankfully, the devs quickly removed this feature so you could use all gear even if it's locked.
• That One Attack:
  • Conjunctivius's tentacle attack; to be more specific, that one where it bursts out from one side of the room and sweeps across the floor. At first, it's not so bad, but once the tentacles Turn Red they become frustrating to deal with. They move really fast once they turn red, Conjunctivius likes to do it just after you've rolled and can't roll again, and if you're in the corner of the room, you're pretty much guaranteed to take one hit since the sweep attack doesn't have a telegraph like the other attack does.
  • The Time Keeper's shuriken. At lower health, she'll throw several shuriken directly at you. Trying to dodge them all is almost impossible. If she's close enough you can roll behind her, but if she's too far away, you have to jump and dodge in an extremely specific way to avoid them all. Having a shield is mandatory if you're trying to beat her damageless and in 4+ BSC before the Malaise rework.
  • The Hand of the King has one specific move he does, a 2-part combo where he does a quick stab and then jumps up to do a Telluric Slam. The second part is simple enough to dodge, the first part on the other hand is one of the fastest attack in the game, so fast it's virtually impossible to react to. The only way to dodge this is to stand really far away or use precognition to dodge or parry it. This one attack will probably be the only attack that prevents even veterans from killing HotC damageless.
  • The Collector has many attacks that can qualify, but far and away the worst of the lot is when he hovers above you and fires a downward laser at you. The only tell for this attack is an exclamation mark appearing over his head, and the timing to avoid the attack is very strict. He'll also do it three times in a row, just in case you thought you could get a breather after dodging the first one.
  • Dracula from the Return to Castlevania DLC deserves a few mentions, notably for borrowing attacks that already were these from Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia:
    • His "grab and choke" attack (named "Soul Steal" in Order of Ecclesia) was this at launch. While it could be dodged, it came quite quickly, had a fairly large hitbox and, if it touched, did absurdly high damage (enough that even dedicated Survival builds, supposed to be the tankiests in the game, died to it from near-full health) and healed Dracula. To add insult to crippling injury, the way the damage was dealt not only bypassed the HP to One mechanic of the game, but also the Disengagement Mutation, supposed to help prevent exactly these kind of things. The Queen has a near-identical move (that also bypasses the HP to One and Disengagement), but her version of it is more forgiving due to inflicting nowhere near as much damage and being more telegraphed. It was so bad that within days a patch was released that made it easier to dodge, greatly lowered its damage and made the Disengagment mutation work properly with it.
    • Dracula's bat swarm, which he uses in both phases. Like in Order of Ecclesia, you need precise positioning to dodge it, and if you stay within its area of effect, your health will be depleted extremely fast.
• That One Level:
  • The Forgotten Sepulcher is a vast Blackout Basement infested with all sorts of Demonic Spiders and Goddamned Bats. What makes this particularly hard is the fact that the darkness kills you if you linger too long in it, and you have to stand near lamps to be safe. Those lamps are spaced very far apart, meaning you have very little time to accomplish anything else than running between lamps. Most of them are also temporary and go out after a while, forever. There's an item at the entrance that lets you place your own temporary lamps, but it takes up one of your skill slots and has a recharge time of two minutes before you can place another lamp. It's also locked behind a door that costs 6900 gold to open (and that places a curse on you if you break it). Slow and steady does not win the race this time.
  • Derelict Distillery is a death maze full of explosive barrels everywhere. Navigating this place requires traversing through multiple obstacle courses of bouncing barrels being shot from the other side of the walls or straight down, being forced to take the Barrel Launcher with you to blow up walls unless you're very careful navigating it, and God forbid if you ever have to deal with barrels and enemies. The place is crawling with some of the game's worst Demonic Spiders, including one that's unique to the area: Living Barrels. These bastards are fast and will continuously chase you, shoot out surprisingly hard-hitting spikes that are poorly telegraphed, and once they're damaged, they'll keep chasing you so they can blow up in your face. Anything short of bursting them down equals losing a huge chunk of health. If you're masochistic enough to go through the Distillery, the Masochism mutation is a must.
  • The Lighthouse! It's a frantic boss level that requires you to climb your way to the top of a burning lighthouse. Simple enough, except the Servants are taking potshots at you the entire time. The closest thing to a breather you get is the rooms where you fight the Servants as boss fights. And more of them will join the fray the higher up you go. Calliope's Wrecking Ball has a huge range, does lots of damage, and seems designed to punish you if you try to make use of ladders, as her upward swing will tag you every time. Euterpe is far and away the most annoying, as she makes use of her Gilded Yumi to fire at you from a distance, or detonate explosive barrels near you. She's also the most irritating in the actual boss fights, as she likes to stay far away from you and fly overhead while firing arrows at you. Kleio is the most straightforward of the three and the least dangerous during the climb due to the short range of her attacks, but the boss fights are another story due to her aggressive combos and the fact that she spends much of the fight spin attacking into you. The only mercy you get is the presence of food items before the second and third fights (and if you're lucky they'll be big food items that restore half your health), but it's still one of the hardest challenges in the game. Good luck getting the achievement that requires you to finish the whole thing without taking damage! To add insult to injury, they didn't add a way to practice the boss fight when the DLC first came out.