Pocketpair has a new co-op Metroidvania roguelike that rips off Dead Cells way harder than Palworld ever copied Pokemon, and its Steam Next Fest demo is awesome

Feb. 5, 2024

Never Grave is Dead Cells wearing the skin of Hollow Knight but with co-op and farming

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You’ve got to give the folks at Palworld developer Pocketpair one thing: they know good games when they see them.Palworldis a quirky mix of Ark: Survival Evolved and Pokemon training, and now the studio’s cooking upNever 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 theSteam Next Festdemo 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.

Palworld has gotten some deserved comparisons to mechanics and creature designs from Pokemon, but Never Grave is a next-level lookalike. I’m not a super hardcore player, but I’ve beaten multiple difficulty tiers of Dead Cells, which is more than enough experience for me to recognize the vibe when I see it. Here are just some of the ideas and mechanics that Never Grave has lifted beat-for-beat from Dead Cells:

Art inspires art, sure, and some of these things are innocuous on their own, but together they paint a very familiar picture that’s more creatively lacking than anything I’ve encountered in Palworld. Pocketpair – previously listed as Never Grave’s developer and publisher on Steam, with the dev now replaced by the company’s apparent subsidiary Frontside 180 – is clearly owning its reputation of making whatever works.

So what, Never Grave is just a bunch of the same ingredients reshaped into something else, like a ‘new’ Taco Bell menu item? Not exactly. Rather than Dead Cells' stat system, you draft upgrades from a more Hades-like loot pool, for one. I also like that you can choose between a few procedurally generated paths based on the loot you’ll receive.

There’s the farming thing, too. You can build and decorate a whole village block by block, and on top of unlocking upgrades for offense and survivability, this is essential for growing food that provides indispensable buffs for each run of the dungeons, sort of like a Monster Hunter canteen. The farming and building seem to run surprisingly deep; balancing materials between character upgrades and village upgrades is a real dilemma.

There’s also the possession mechanic, which is much more important here than in Dead Cells. You regularly jump out of your body – by default, a cute little witch with a sword – in order to clear platforming challenges. What’s more, you can possess the bodies of certain powerful enemies by putting your hat on them. This seems to be especially critical in co-op where you and your friends can form a veritable monster mash. I don’t know how I ended up writing abouttwo Super Mario Odyssey-esque Metroidvanias just weeks apart, but I’m not complaining.

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