Curse of the Dead Gods released on Xbox One in February, and since this launch, all of us at Passtech Games have had a fantastic time watching all of you adventuring through our dark temple, getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. We’ve also been working hard on our latest update, the “Curse of the Dead Cells Update”, which we’re about to tell you all about!
The idea of a collaboration with Motion Twin was actually first sparked before the full launch, during the community-supported development of the game, back in October 2020 – what seems aeons ago now. Due to time limits, we chose to prioritize the base Curse content for the launch, which ended up being a blessing in disguise as it let us expand on the content of today’s update.
There are three new weapons in the update: the Broadsword of the Knight, the Sword of Conjunctivius, and the Crossbow of the Condemned, with the latter being a brand new weapon type with a unique cross-combo pattern. With the Broadsword, the second attack and the combo finisher will always score a critical hit. The Sword of Conjunctivius is powerful as hell but take damage once from enemies and you’re temple dust. The crossbow is a slow-firing ranged weapon that does damage in an area around the impact.
Moreover, we have added the iconic Cursed Chest from Dead Cells, with a few alterations. When you encounter it during your runs, you will have to defeat a certain number of enemies without taking damage to unlock its tempting contents: a choice of 3 items (weapons or relics), one of which will always be cursed.
Finally, we added a new curse (Curse of the Dead Gods’ emblematic gameplay changing events) which, alongside a gameplay alteration, gives Curse’s main character, McCallister, Dead Cells’ Prisoner’s iconic flaming head. As for how this new Curse works in-game, we’ll let you discover it!
Translating Dead Cells 2D pixel art into Curse of the Dead Gods 3D models was less of a challenge than it might seem, since we had a lot of references from Motion Twin and Evil Empire. The biggest challenge here was the Prisoner’s head, since it was created for a 2D side-scrolling platformer, and Curse has a top-down camera view. We are happy with the results though, and so are the studios behind Dead Cells!
It should be noted that most of us here in the office are huge fans of Dead Cells, so it was super exciting for us. It was also a good fit from a practical standpoint, because both games have a good variety of cool weapons, and both studios have a love for good combat systems. Besides paying homage to a game that marked the decade for us, our goal with the collaboration was to bring some fresh and surprising content into Curse, combining content from Dead Cells with the mood of Curse to create brand new features and weapons. We hope you all enjoy it!
Curse of the Dead Gods
Focus Home Interactive
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