Dead Cells gets a slick animated trailer in advance of leaving Early Access

Dead Cells made it into our list of the best metroidvania games alongside the likes of Cave Story + and Hollow Knight even though it was still in Early Access, and has only improved since then. To celebrate its impending release from the dungeon of lengthy public betas, it's got a cool new animated trailer that sums up its core loop of killing, dying, and trying again with some new gear.

When Shaun first played it last year, here's how he summed up the unusual hook of Dead Cells: "A very excellent and important touch is that you play as a man with no head—a ripe roleplaying opportunity. This headless fellow must collect cells, for some reason, and is doomed to repeatedly do so."

Dead Cells will be leaving Early Access on August 7.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.