The sophomore slump, or second album syndrome, is a well-documented phenomenon in music where breakout artists sometimes struggle to replicate the heights of their debut in their second album, but does that ever happen to game studios? The developers behind Dead Cells certainly felt that pressure while making their next roguelike launching this month.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, Thomas Vasseur and Yannick Berthier of Dead Cells creator Motion Twin talked through the sometimes overwhelming pressure of following up one of the best and most successful roguelikes in history with their next game, Windblown, another similarly gorgeous action game.
"It's awful and very, very cool at the same time," Vasseur says. "Because when you want to do better, it's like you're running after another thing. So I think we needed this pressure to be effective in the development, but when it is too hard for us to think about that, we just remember what we are doing. We just wanted to make a game to play together." Vasseur even likens that rush to the feeling of storming through a World of Warcraft dungeon as a seasoned veteran. "We really want to have this kind of feeling to rush. It's hard to be in the shadow of Dead Cells."
The pressure indirectly put onto Motion Twin newcomers, who joined after Dead Cells rocked the world, was slightly different. As one such new recruit, Berthier felt he had to "reach that level" and thus spent "all my nights for a year and a half to, I don't know, kind of fill myself with knowledge that I missed in my previous experiences because I wasn't working on such games."
"The added pressure is like you have millions of players that are waiting to check what you will do, and that will compare with Dead Cells, so you have to be at the level to be able to give them something else that will matter to them and that they will consider interesting," he continues.
Despite the mental pressure of trying to live up to something as successful as Dead Cells, Motion Twin also acknowledges that it's "lucky" to have that financial success to fall back on. "Not all indie teams have the chance of working based on the success of something else that can buy the groceries, as you say, so that's a huge benefit," Berthier says. Dead Cell's popularity meant the team could spend years working on Windblown without having to take on jobs-for-hire or releasing 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.
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