Sophomore crisis, or second album syndrome, is a well-documented musical phenomenon in which emerging artists sometimes struggle to replicate the heights of their debut on their second album, but does that ever happen to mainstream studios? games? The developers behind Dead Cells certainly felt that pressure when making their next roguelike release this month.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, Thomas Vasseur and Yannick Berthier of Dead Cells creator Motion Twin spoke about the sometimes overwhelming pressure of following one of the best and most successful roguelikes in history with their next game, Windblown, another equally beautiful action.
“It's horrible and very, very cool at the same time,” Vasseur says. “Because when you want to do better, it's like you're running after something else. So I think we needed this pressure to be effective in development, but when it's too hard for us to think about it, we just remember what we're doing. We just wanted make a game to play together.” Vasseur even compares that thrill to the feeling of traversing a World of Warcraft dungeon like a seasoned veteran. “We really want to have this kind of rushing feeling. It's hard to be in the shadow of Dead Cells.”
The pressure indirectly placed on the Motion Twin newcomers, who joined after Dead Cells shook the world, was slightly different. As one of those new recruits, Berthier felt he had to “reach that level” and so he spent “every night for a year and a half, I don't know, filling myself with knowledge that I missed in my previous experiences.” because I wasn't working on those games.”
“The added pressure is like you have millions of players waiting to see what you're going to do, and that's going to be compared to Dead Cells, so you have to be up to the task to be able to give them something else to care about.” and that they will find it interesting,” he continues.
Despite the mental pressure of trying to live up to something as successful as Dead Cells, Motion Twin also acknowledges that he's “fortunate” to have that financial success to fall back on. “Not all independent teams have the ability to work based on the success of something else that can buy food, as you say, so that's a big benefit,” Berthier says. The popularity of Dead Cell meant that the team could spend years working on Windblown without having to take contract work or release games that didn't match “the level of quality we wanted.”
We'll see what those years of work culminated in when Windblown hits Early Access on October 24.
Look at the very best roguelike games to play while we wait.