Dead Cells dev's new roguelike Windblown was "too punishing," but it doesn't regret its "extreme" approach

How do you follow up the perfect game? Dead Cells has 97% positive feedback, and as the first major (read: Steam) release for developer Motion Twin, the ten million copies sold allowed the studio complete freedom of what to do next. While many wanted Dead Cells 2, or even just the rest of the planned Dead Cells content roadmap that sister studio Evil Empire had promised, Motion Twin had other plans. Windblown is an evolution of its roguelike formula, and even follows Dead Cells' early access development path. But the developer believes it may have come out of the gates a little strong when it released last year.

"The reception has been really good," says Yannick Berthier, Windblown's co-creative director and game designer. The team has sifted through "dozens of thousands" of pieces of feedback, which have shaped the development of the game from day one.

However, Motion Twin may have come on a little too hard when it first got Windblown into players' hands. "The only thing that got really emotional was the revenge system," Berthier explains to me over a video call. If one player was downed in co-op, any hits enemies landed on the remaining player would one-shot them. It was brutal, uncompromising, and intentionally extreme. But fans didn't love it.

"We lacked that extreme [before]," Berthier says. "So let's start with the most extreme and we'll see the reception. It was a bold move, a risk that that we took for creative reasons because we felt like it was cool to create systems that push you to play together as much as possible. Maybe it was a bit too punishing."

As all good early access games do, Motion Twin responded to fan feedback with the Revenge Update, which was prioritized over what the team intended to work on next. Berthier and artist and level designer Gwen Massé tell me that players were rarely negative, however, and often constructive, offering ideas and alternatives in their feedback.

But there's a fine line to tread. You can't implement every idea that players want, or else you risk creating a completely different game to the one you set out to make. "It's always a balance," says Massé, "between what you want to do for the game, what you think is best for the game, and what players put in their reviews." He acknowledges that a lot of reviews mention things that are already being worked on, so you can dismiss them. Others are feedback that the developer hasn't considered, and need noting.

This is a long, time-consuming process, he says, but is ultimately the core of the early access experience. Windblown feels like it has been shaped more than many other games, however, as Endless Mode was added due to fan requests, too. Originally planned to release "at the end of early access or a future update post-1.0," five or six percent of players had an "obsession" with adding it so they could work on their builds, Berthier says. So, Motion Twin relented and added it to the game in March 2025. In doing so, the developers learned more than they could have imagined.

"It revealed a lot of issues, underlying ones, that were not reflected because of the length of runs before," Berthier says. "So it helped us make the game way more stable, have ideas for new powers, new affixes, new effects, and so on."

That's the "dramatic impact" that players can have on an early access game. As it gears up towards its first anniversary of early access, player feedback has never been more important.

Windblown is available now in early access. You can download it here.

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