Dead Cells
Image: Motion Twin

Prepare yourself, folks: it's time to go deep-diving into the patch notes for Dead Cells' upcoming 'Update 21', destined to hit consoles (including the Nintendo Switch, obvs) in January 2021. You would be forgiven for thinking that 2021 is still a few months away, but apparently there are only ten days left in the year. Smell you later, 2020.

The press release offers a handy TL;DR:

Colour scaling rework
Malaise rework
New mutations
New mob, weapon, outfits & diet
Backpack rework
Hand of the King lore room
Usual QoL fixes

...But we know you want more info than just that. Putting aside the quality of life stuff and the tweaks to scaling and balancing, which are all par for the course in a roguelite patch, let's get into the new stuff.

There are five new mutations: Acrobatic Preparation, Porcupine Backpack, Tortoise Wheel, Fatal Cadence, and Ranger's Gear. We'll not detail them here (spoilers!), but we will say that a few of them interact nicely with the updates to the Backpack.

Speaking of the Backpack, it's now a meta upgrade that you can unlock at the Collector, and can be used with any weapon. You can store most things in the Backpack, and more importantly, you can adjust the opacity. Ghost backpack!

Fan feedback has meant that the much-requested Katana weapon has finally been added to the game, alongside new outfits (including two festive ones) and a fan-suggested mob: the Demolisher, who wields a deadly Explosive Crossbow. Time to re-enact that Samurai Santa dream you had, maybe?

Now that all the guff is out of the way, let's talk about the real meat of this update: THE CHEESE DIET. While we're all getting chunky from actual cheese over Christmas, the elves at Motion Twin will be figuring out a way to make our Dead Cells characters do the same! Hooray for video game realism!

Alongside other in-game diets, which change your healing items to suit your dietary requirements, the "Cheese Diet" will soon be available, meaning that enemies will now drop Gruyère and Camembert. As the developers themselves say, "No self-respecting French studio can pass up the opportunity to let you eat cheese!" Hopefully they'll also be adding a room where you can lie down and fart afterwards.

If you want to peruse the patch notes in even more detail, head over to the Dead Cells website.

Are there any mobs and weapons you can't wait to see? Tell us here! Maybe the Motion Twin peeps read these comments? You never know.

[source dead-cells.com]