You've got to give the folks at Palworld developer Pocketpair one thing: they know good games when they see them. Palworld is a quirky mix of Ark: Survival Evolved and Pokemon training, and now the studio's cooking up Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, a Metroidvania roguelike so shamelessly based on Dead Cells that it can only come across as the sincerest form of flattery.
I tried the Steam Next Fest demo for Never Grave, and I'll be damned if it isn't fun as hell. It's a little quirky in its own right given the addition of light city building and farming. It also supports up to four-player co-op, which I haven't been able to sample in the primitive demo, but the very idea sounds like a blast after what I've played solo. It really is Popular Indie Game soup, but from the art to the mechanics, even the demo feels more cohesive than Palworld's fun-but-sloppy mashup. That said, it couldn't be more like Dead Cells without risking a cease and desist.
