Dead Cells just got a big update. The high-difficulty Metroidvania rogue-like from Motion Twin released the Dead Cells Breaking Barriers update. It brings a suite of new accessibility features and difficulty levels to the game to help get more players excited about playing it.
The Breaking Barriers update is about making Dead Cells accessible to everyone. The update adds two main sets of options to the game – accessibility and an assist mode. And it’s live on Windows PC and consoles now.
The assist mode brings completely new options to the game. There’s now an “auto-hit” mode that will target nearby enemies. And a continue mode that will allow you to restart each run at the beginning of the biome.
The accessibility options will help players with visual cues and mobility. The assist mode will allow players to tweak the game’s difficulty. You can change the default health of enemies by a percentage to make them easier to kill, and you can make trap and enemy damage hurt you less.
Important Features
- Continue mode – each time you die, you can resurrect from the beginning of the biome. (this effectively already existed by quitting the game when you die, now it’s just ‘official’).
- Auto-hit mode – automatically target nearby enemies with your primary melee weapon.
- Adjustable trap damage, enemy damage and enemy health in % increments.
- Option for slower parry window and trap speed
New Gameplay Options
- Hold to jump.
- Hold to roll.
- Shield toggle option, instead of long press.
There are a lot of new features, and you can check them all out in the patch notes.
Whilst the game was designed to be “tough but fair,” the developers found that this barring some players from playing the game. Some players can’t get past specific points of the game, which can ruin their enjoyment. There are also players with disabilities who have found the game inaccessible. The new options introduced should allow these players to make specific, tailored adjustments to the game to suit their playing needs.
“Hopefully, we don’t need to justify adding accessibility options,” Evil Empire wrote in its post, “but we’d had quite a lot of feedback that the game can be inaccessible for a wide range of reasons. Dead Cells is intended to be ‘tough but fair’ [but] we realise that the way the game is designed can put up barriers to reaching this experience for some players. These new options are designed to allow tailored, specific adjustments of the game for those who need it, to make this ‘tough but fair’ gameplay accessible, instead of adding arbitrary difficulty levels which don’t actually address players’ needs.”
Personally, this is great news. Dead Cells is one of my favourite games, as anyone that follows our Thumbstick Tuesday posts can tell. I’m playing it almost every day either on my Nintendo Switch or Xbox Game Pass. It’s wonderful seeing a developer that not only regularly updates but adds quality of life changes for players as well.
