WINDBLOWN

Life after Dead Cells

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Developer Motion Twin

Publisher Motion Twin, Kepler Ghost

Format PC

Origin France

Release TBA

An age-old question for any creative with an unexpected hit on their hands: Where next? Dead Cells was developed as something of a last hope for Motion Twin, the French studio which had been making games for the best part of two decades by that point. As Gwenaël Massé once told us, for E352’s Studio Profile, the game was conceived as a “blaze of glory”, going out making the kinds of games the developers loved, rather than “something that we were just historically lumped with” by the company’s previous output. Of course, Dead Cells was such a success that it not only kept the studio alive but led to the creation of another, Evil Empire, to take over the game’s many updates and expansions from 2019 onwards. So, in the five years between that handoff and Windblown’s own arrival in early access this month, what has Motion Twin been doing?

First off, an awful lot of prototyping. The team spent April to December 2019 in essentially one long game jam, Massé tells us, during which they tried everything “from 2D platforming and puzzle games to a third-person shooter action game, even an arcade aeroplane prototype. One of those ideas was a multiplayer couch game with no fighting, à la Mario Party.” The latter was the first seed of