Aim follows the camera
Every player attack now aims where the camera looks, not where the character happens to be facing. Aimed bow shots keep tracking the crosshair while you move, with the nocked arrow held visibly on the string. The practical effect is that lock on became optional: you can fight a group by looking at the one you want to hit. Lock on is still there for people who want the camera to do the work.
Blocking, guard strain, and a guard that breaks
Every non boss attack is blockable now, without exception. In return, blocking has a cost: a guard strain bar that fills on every blocked hit. Let it break and your guard stays down until it has refilled completely. Turtling through a room used to be the optimal strategy in the early build; now it is a choice with a price, which is what a block should be. Your guard also covers the whole front half circle, for both the shield and the energy shield spell, so a hit from a slight angle no longer sneaks through a raised shield.
Executions inside combos
The posture break execution is part of the combo now rather than a separate move you stop to perform. The slow motion on an execution lasts two seconds and stacks if you chain them. The posture bar also refills during an enemy's stagger, so an execution window is a window, not a free kill.
Fire Whirlwind
The charged heavy on the sword was re-authored as a single turn Fire Whirlwind. One turn, big arc, done. The sword now holds its charge on the pose the spin starts from, so a full charge reads as a wind up.
The undead problem
A corpse could stand up and die again if you reloaded at the wrong moment. Corpses now resume their death animation at their true age on load, so a body that was on the floor stays on the floor. Enemies killed under slow time also hold their fall until the slow ends, which was a Chronomancy fix that turned out to be a feature.
Menus and the run
- Continue resumes the last cleaned room after a reload, and dying always returns to the main menu with the cursor released.
- The Challenge leaderboard is a podium: gold, silver and bronze, best time shown once, in its own dark window on the main menu.
- Quit to Menu ends a live challenge cleanly, and Start new run works after quitting. New Game keeps the challenge leaderboard; erasing it is a separate, confirmed action in Settings.
- Shader variants are warmed behind the loading screen, so the first swing in a run no longer freezes the frame while the GPU compiles.
- Every room now draws at any distance. Previously, far walls could pop in.
- The Warden's quake is a two fist ground slam, and his scream uses recorded takes rather than a synthesized one.
Published on 4 October 2026 with the first batch of devlog entries. Drafted from the project's commit log and decision records with AI writing tools, then edited by Alexis Rivard.