Dead Cells adds more difficulties, accessibility options

polygon.com:

Dead Cells, the high-difficulty Metroidvania rogue-like from Motion Twin, just got a hefty update. The “Breaking Barriers” update brings a suite of new accessibility features and difficulty levels to the game fives years after it initially released in early access.

Breaking Barriers is “all about making Dead Cells more accessible to everyone,” the developers explained in a video. The update will add two main sets of options to the game — accessibility and an assist mode — and it’s live on Windows PC and consoles now.

The accessibility options will help players with visual cues and mobility, whereas the assist mode will allow players to tweak the difficulty of the game. The assist mode will bring completely new options, like 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 rather starting over entirely. There’s a lot of new features and you can check it all out in the patch notes.

The developers said while they initially imagined Dead Cells to be “tough but fair,” this was barring some players from playing the game. “The new options that we’re introducing here should allow these players to make specific, tailored adjustments to the game to remove the barrier preventing them from having that experience, rather than introducing arbitrary difficulty options,” a developer said.