The earliest seed for the follow-up to roguelike darling Dead Cells emerged the way a lot of games do: over a beer. The folks at studio Motion Twin wanted to make something new as co-developer Evil Empire continued to support Dead Cells, ultimately with years of excellent expansions and updates. The team's brainstorming often played out at a bar. Developer Thomas Vasseur tells GamesRadar+ that there were a lot of competing ideas within the worker-owned studio, and newer hire Yannick Berthier says they weren't even going to make another roguelike at first. "But habits came back quite quickly," says Berthier, and sure enough, Motion Twin has another roguelike coming soon: Windblown, a three-player co-op action game launching in Steam early access on October 24.
In my mind, Windblown belongs on the same shelf as the likes of Hades 2 and Slay the Spire 2. It's a new game from a beloved studio that's directly building on a pillar of modern roguelikes. Our first hands-on impression of Windblown was mighty promising, and with Dead Cells being one of the best roguelike games of all time, selling over 10 million copies as of 2023, there are waves of anticipation and expectation behind Motion Twin's second game. That reputation can be both intimidating and motivating for the studio's small team of eight, but Vasseur and Berthier say the chance to make something new and revisit a genre they love has been propulsion enough.
