Dead Cells
BANGER · Roguelike · 2018
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $24.99.
- Length
- 14.1h
- Value
- $1.77/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Nvidia 450 GTS / Radeon HD 5750 or better, 502 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Dead Cells is a roguelite, metroidvania inspired, action-platformer. You'll explore a sprawling, ever-changing castle... assuming you’re able to fight your way past its keepers in 2D souls-lite combat. No checkpoints. Kill, die, learn, repeat.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
July 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $9.99. Its cuts run 40 percent off as a rule. There have been 92 in the 9 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 95 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. The nearest things to it, Skul: The Hero Slayer ($19.99, scores 84) and Vagante ($14.99, scores 73), are both worse buys on this math.
89 from critics against 97 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
19 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2025 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 355 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 282 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 88 percent of the 4,769 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 14.1 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 92, 6.5 times as much.
It came out 8 years ago and 2.6K were still playing it at the last check.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 14.1 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
92% start to 34% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
2,559 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The kind of game that feels good to play after 50 mins and becomes addictive after 5 hours. Dogshjt at 50 hours, then feels good to play again at 500 hours.
One of the most replayable games i have laid my hands on. I have played this for 38hrs and still have soo much left to unlock. This is PEAK
9/10 Man, this game just feels GOOD. Every hit has weight behind it. You smack something and actually feel that sh*t connect. The combat is fast, crunchy and ridiculously satisfying, and there's enough variety that I'm constantly going "alright, one more run" and then somehow another hour dissapears. What I really like is that it doesn't feel like I've seen everything after a few hours. I'm still finding new stuff...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Dead Cells scores 95/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/588650/dead-cellsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.