A massive, free Dead Cells update gives one of the best roguelike games on Steam a trim and spruce up with new weapons, a dedicated speedrun mode, and additional training options, alongside the introduction of the Dead Cells Castlevania DLC bosses to its boss rush mode. Dead Cells patch notes 34.0 also include plenty of rebalancing, so read on for the full details.
The Dead Cells Clean Cut update introduces two new weapons for you to go all Sweeney Todd on the denizens of its many dungeons. The Sewing Scissors are a Survival-scaling weapon with an incredibly potent trick for advanced players: they’ll instakill all enemies hit if any one of the enemies dies to the attack’s standard damage. Catch even a tiny rat, then, and you’ll be able to bring down some of the biggest baddies with collateral damage.
The Giant Comb, meanwhile, is a Brutality-scaling weapon that launches enemies into the air on first hit and will deal guaranteed critical damage to enemies that are off the ground, making it ideal for any juggle combos you can set up.
Elsewhere, a new NPC can replace your character’s head with a “Bobby version,” while a new speedrun mode comes with full in-game tracking like the daily challenge, but on a full-scale run. It’ll keep track of your completion time per biome, as well as recording your personal best times.
Boss rush now gets a new ‘DIY mode’ that lets you personally decide which foes you’d like to go up against, and the three additional Return to Castlevania bosses are now available there as well as in the training room. The training room itself also includes a bunch of new options to spawn weapons exactly to your specification, tweak enemies to the difficulty level you fancy, and even smack a training dummy for a straight-up DPS check.
Dead Cells update 34 – patch notes
Here are the full patch notes for Dead Cells update 34:
New Weapons
- Sewing Scissors (Survival): Instakills all enemies it hits, as long as at least one of them dies to the weapon’s standard damage.
- Giant Comb (Brutality): Throws your enemies upwards, and deals critical damage to airborne mobs!
New NPC
- Turns out, the Tailor was hiding a daughter all along, and by some coincidental massive stroke of fortune, she has just the skills to replace your head with the flame “Bobby version” on most skins. Crazy world…
New Speedrun mode
- The brand-new Speedrun Mode features in-game time tracking for speedrunners, or anyone else who wants to know how much time they’ve spent trying to make it to Hand of the King and failing. Activate this mode to track and display the completion time of each biome and track your previous best times.
Upgrades
- We’ve added a new “DIY” mode in Boss Rush. With this mode, you can choose whichever bosses you want to face in a run.
- The 3 bosses from Return to Castlevania have also been added to Boss Rush and Training Room.
- Enhanced bosses have been tweaked in the Boss Rush.
- Training Room has multiple new options for you to practice your skills:
- New UIs to spawn a specific weapon with a set Level, Quality and Legendary-ness.
- New UI to choose a certain number of scrolls.
- New UI to choose the overall scaling level of the Training Room, based on the values of a selected biome.
- Added the mini-bosses to the mob spawners.
- Added a bunch of different traps to the mob rooms.
- Added the Return to Castlevania Bosses.
- Bosses aren’t scaled down to level 1 anymore! (no more 20 minutes fights).
- Changed the UI to select mobs to a grid-based one.
- Added a Training Dummy for DPS calculation.
Reworks
Mutations
- Combo: there is a true combo meter now! The mutation has been changed to enable a damage increase with every melee hit in a 2.5 sec window (of course the window refreshes after every hit). It scales exponentially, go crazy with it!
- Tainted Flask: it can recharge even if your flask is not totally empty. We also added 1 more elite into every biome when the mutation is equipped.
- Networking: you can just mark enemies with ranged attacks now, there doesn’t need to be an actual projectile stuck in the mob’s body.
- Berserker: it now stacks and renders you immune to stuns.
- Necromancy: It scales with the max health of the mobs you kill, which means you can get more healing by killing a stronger enemy. The cap of up to a “maximum 50% HP” is eliminated, but healing power is less effective as you get closer to max health.
- Frostbite: now stacks with slow effects and acts as a full stack on frozen targets.
- Dead Inside: now doubles your life but prevents ALL healing sources except healing with recovery.
- Disengagement: there is no longer a cooldown but can only trigger once per biome. (I know, I know…)
Other
- Slow effect stacks up to 5 times. Each stack has a greater slowing effect, then the affected enemy is frozen at the fifth stack.
- The Mimic can now appear randomly in shops outside of the Bank biome. Mwahahaaaa
- Switched the Dracula Castle (Hard) Cursed Chest chance to 10%.
- Added a new Petrification affect icon (when you’re frozen by Medusa).
Rebalancing
Weapons
- Whip Sword: whip form now passes shields.
- Whip Sword’s transformation attack hitbox tended to bug, it should now be consistent with its visual FX, which means it won’t only hit one single target anymore.
- The ghosts gathered by Death Scythe’s have a slightly smaller explosion radius.
- Bible is a heavy weapon.
- Throwing Axe can no longer roll Fire Bullet affix.
- Alucard’s Shield has better parry windows, and the whole combo instead of “the next hit” crits.
- Rebound Stone: it deals slightly more damage and has a smaller but longer window before being able to “catch it” (i.e., trigger the crit). Its cooldown now starts upon its destruction.
- Holy Water has a bigger vertical hitbox and deals damage in a more logical way. By logical, we mean the flame itself can cause damage now.
- Medusa Head deals more damage and bumps further.
- We added some security measures to prevent the Cat from being targeted by enemies. There is also a long cooldown when the Cat is killed by the Queen.
Mobs
- Medusa’s flurry attacks should now have a small pause after the end of the attack.
- Haunted Armor (the one with an axe) should now activate at a slightly longer range.
- Elite Merman should now fire 2 big fireballs instead of a big one and a normal one.
Bosses
- Dracula (Humanoid)’s fire pillars are now slightly easier to avoid (in terms of intervals) but are not rollable anymore.
- Dracula (Demon) is now a beast, along with Buer, Werewolves and Medusa (Crowbar wise).
A full list of bug fixes can be found on the Motion Twin website.
Check out more of the best action-adventure games on PC if you’re after more ways to make mincemeat out of myriad monsters, or find your next favourite among the best indie games in 2023.