Developer Motion Twin’s wonderfully crunchy rogue-like platformer Dead Cells has just received a massive new update on consoles, bringing, among an enormous list of other things, a stable 60FPS on Switch.
That’s certainly an extremely welcome addition, given the sometimes unpleasantly wayward frame rate that plagued the Switch version at launch but, remarkably, it’s far from the most significant element introduced in the new patch.
Pimp My Run, as the new console update is known (it’s been available on PC for a while), ushers in a vast array of impactful balances and adjustments, touching everything from item drops to skills, and mutations. Enemy auto-scaling is a thing of the past too, meaning you’ll actually feel more powerful as you progress through later levels, while Cooldown Reduction has been reworked, and Legendary weapon drops are no longer tied to boss encounters.
Elsewhere, time challenge doors have been removed from stages and placed into the areas in-between, so that the emphasis is back on speed rather than tracking the elusive buggers down. There’s also a new type of challenge, with its own in-between door, which rewards players for defeating a fixed number of enemies without being hit. All of which should make Dead Cells feel notably different, even if individual adjustments don’t sound like much on paper.
Pimp My Run’s final addition, however, is a (literal) game-changer. Once the update is installed, players who’ve managed to beat the game at least once will have access to a new Custom Mode editor, enabling tinkerers to set the rules of a run precisely to their tastes.
Once unlocked, Custom Mode offers the tools to adjust everything from run timers and gold reserves, to starter weapons, chest curse levels, and item drops. There are even special gameplay modifiers that can be applied, such as having enemies drop an active bomb on death, or having doors explode, or forcing players to keep killing in order to stave off an untimely demise. Full details on all of the above can be found in the exhaustive patch notes.
Dead Cells’ Pimp My Run update is available now on PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Switch.