6 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The whole picture now talks — every line of every cutscene is voiced, plus the two act bosses.
- Every cutscene in the campaign is now fully voice-acted. All 131 lines, from the club in 1929 to the rooftop double-cross, are spoken rather than read off a timer.
- Seven voices join the cast: Ilona and Don Luigi return, and Mario, Chief Brannigan, Sal the Butcher, Don Moretti and a very unlucky waiter get voices of their own.
- Sal and Chief Brannigan now shout at you mid-fight, and Ilona has a parting word for each of them when they go down.
- Scenes are timed to the performance instead of to a stopwatch, so lines land properly and no longer get cut off mid-word.
- A short beat of air now sits between lines, so a conversation plays like a scene rather than a rattle.
- Subtitles are unchanged and the picture still plays hands-off; press E, a controller button, or the NEXT thumb button to move it along, and mute silences the voices with everything else.
31 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Two new kinds of opponent close out Ilona's rise: a tommy-gunner who takes a whole lane of the room away from you, and a street duellist your stiletto simply bounces off.
- A tommy-gunner now works the later shootouts. He does not shoot at you — he plants, lights a strip of floor, and rakes it with a full drum. Standing in that strip and trading shots does not work; walk out of it sideways, or get something tall between you and him.
- Meet him at Pier 9, in the precinct bullpen, on the wing of the bank lobby beside Vinnie, and twice in Luigi's back room. One even comes through the door with Luigi's last wave of muscle.
- The Moretti knife-man is out on the rough blocks, and he is the first man in town your stiletto does not beat. A pale steel arc on the ground shows what he has covered. Swing into it and your blade is knocked wide, you lose your next swing, and he comes back at you with the point.
- Two ways to take him: let him lunge and hit him while he is over-extended and the gold ring is up, or get round the side of his guard. He holds it while he walks in, so patience and footwork beat mashing every time.
- The speakeasy raid is untouched. It is still the gentle one, on purpose.
- New sound for all of it: the rattle of a Thompson emptying a drum, and the ring of two blades meeting.
26 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Three new chapters between the precinct and the bank job — a car chase across the rooftops, a night casing the First National, and a walk through the outer blocks to round up a crew.
- New driving chapter, "Over the Rooftops": the Moretti bagman takes the vault schedule up onto the garment-district roofs, and Ilona takes the coal ramp after him. The road up there has holes in it — hit every ramp with enough speed on the clock or you go down the airshaft.
- Seven gaps to jump over a mile of tar, each one calling out the speed it wants before you reach it, with skylights, water tanks and vent pipes out in the lanes to scrub the speed you were counting on.
- New chapter "Three Angles on a Bank": three vantage points out in the rough blocks north of the club — the rail cut, the alley door, and the bar the night watchman drinks in.
- New chapter "Rounding Up the Crew": a job this size needs people. Find Pauly the Wheel, "Deaf" Enzo and Tessa Tick-Tock out in the southern blocks and talk them into it — this is the first errand where the objective is the conversation, not the pickup.
- Three new bracketing cinematics, including the first look inside the First National itself, in daylight, as customers.
- Note for returning players: the story has six new steps in the middle of it, so saved files from before tonight start a fresh game.
22 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Three new shootout rooms open up the middle of the picture — the Morettis' pier, their restaurant, and the precinct they'd been paying off.
- Act 7 to 9 are new: after the speakeasy you take Pier 9 at two in the morning, close Don Moretti's restaurant twenty minutes after last orders, and break into the bought 14th precinct for the bank plans. Thirteen playable beats now, up from ten.
- Every room is a different shape of fight, not the same room redressed. The pier is long container lanes where the middle of the floor is somebody's firing line. The restaurant has no long shot anywhere in it — booths, laid tables and a kitchen pass, so every approach is a walk-around. The precinct's desks you shoot clean over but have to pick your way through, and the filing cabinets on the walls
- The precinct is the first room where the men shooting at you wear uniforms — and there's a drunk in the holding cage watching the whole thing.
- Three new cutscenes bracket them, each in a place the picture hasn't been before. Chief Brannigan is back, too: he survived the ditch, and he's on desk duty in a neck brace.
- Two new room soundtracks — the harbour creaking outside the shed, and a precinct at three in the morning with a telephone nobody answers.
- Saved games from before this update start a new game rather than resuming in the wrong chapter, because the story got six beats longer in the middle.
19 August 2026UpdateClaude Opus 5 (1M context)
Fixed a large black rectangle that could appear around street lamps outdoors on real graphics cards, introduced by the same day's lighting work.
- The new light-shaft cones produced a number the graphics card could not represent at the very rim of the cone, and the bloom pass then smeared it into a black stair-stepped box around every lamp.
- Clamped at the source, and the bloom pass itself now refuses to pass bad values through — so no future effect can paint the screen black this way.
19 August 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
The city got its noir back — grain, vignette, light shafts off every street lamp, rain you can see falling, and gunfire that throws sparks and brass.
- A film-noir grade over the whole game: soft bloom on the bright things, moving grain and a vignette pulling the corners down.
- Street lamps and headlights now throw visible cones of light through the air, and your car's headlamps cut beams ahead of it.
- Every scene has its own fog — thick on the street, smoky in the finale, clear on the drive.
- Firing a gun now flashes, sparks, kicks brass casings onto the ground and knocks plaster dust off whatever you hit. Enemies, allies and bosses all get it.
- Rain falls as real streaks with ripples spreading in the puddles, and the wet surfaces reflect the night sky.
- Collision, prop placement and every character were left alone.
15 August 2026HousekeepingClaude Opus 5
The physics engine this game runs on moved up a version. No gameplay was touched.
- The physics library was updated to its current release, which closes a deprecation warning the old version printed to the browser console on every single load.
- This is pure maintenance: no levels, balance, controls or content were changed, and the game's test suite passes exactly as before.
- Worth knowing: the new release changes how bouncing and ground-snapping are timed internally. Nothing was deliberately retuned, so if something feels different, that is worth telling us about.
15 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Four real defects fixed at the root — chiefly the one leaving a frozen copy of everything you killed standing at the spawn points.
- Enemies, pickups and projectiles were never actually being taken out of the world when they died or were collected, so every trip between areas left more frozen leftovers piled at the spawn tiles. They are properly removed now.
- A defeated boss can no longer come back to life.
- Objective markers had come loose from the rooms they belonged to. They are tied to their room again, with a chevron on the ground to point the way.
- One of the gangster models was rotating the wrong way on an axis.
- The stutter when you move between areas turned out to be the graphics card compiling shaders on the first frame, not the game thinking. The next area is now built and warmed up quietly behind what you are looking at.
14 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Every act now ends on a named opponent — Sal the Butcher blocks the back lot, and Chief Brannigan takes the whole road.
- New boss: Sal “The Butcher” Provolone ends Chapter 3 with a stiletto duel in the back lot. He telegraphs every lunge with a red lane on the ground — dodge it late, or bait him into a crate and put him on the floor.
- New boss: Chief Brannigan ends Chapter 5 in his prowl car. Ram him, read his charge, and swerve — a missed charge leaves him sideways in the kerb where hits count double. He calls in backup as he loses ground.
- Two new chapters of story, each with its own cinematic bracketing the fight, plus new lines from Don Luigi reacting to both.
- The back lot is now stacked with crates you can use as cover — Sal will smash them himself as the fight turns against him.
- Cars take a fairer beating: a wrecked ride no longer loses three hearts in two seconds when something stays on your bumper.
- Both bosses are lit for the night streets, with a new crate-smash and a wailing police siren.
- Note: this update replaces the mission list, so a save from before today will start a fresh picture.
5 August 2026ImprovementClaude Sonnet 5
Two real bosses now close out the bank job and the campaign.
- Vinnie 'Two-Ton' Carbone ends the bank heist — he flanks his own cover, loses it at half health, and gets faster once he's exposed.
- Don Luigi is the campaign finale, calling in two extra gunmen at each of his two phase breaks.
- New boss health bar across the top of the screen, with a wind-up telegraph before every heavy attack.
- Fixed the boss bar colliding with the save toast and the flash banner on short landscape phones.
26 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Mafioso now plays on a phone, and the bank and the back room stopped letting you win by standing still.
- Full touch controls: a thumb stick to move and drive, and buttons that change with the scene — HIT, TALK and JUMP on the street, FIRE in a shootout, BRAKE behind the wheel, NEXT through a cutscene, plus a pause button on the far side so you can always reach the options and the mute switch.
- Hold your phone sideways and the picture fits properly; turn it upright and the game pauses and asks you to turn back. The on-screen help now names the buttons under your thumbs instead of keys you have not got.
- Two new kinds of goon. The bruiser walks in behind a steel plate that shrugs off anything you fire into his front — you have to get round him, and he turns slowly enough that you can.
- The bagman does not fight at all. He grabs the take and runs for the back door, and if you are busy shooting somebody else he leaves with it. Drop him first and the bag is worth an extra $150.
- The bank and Luigi’s back room finally got waist-high cover you can shoot straight over but still have to walk around — until now only the speakeasy played that way. The speakeasy itself is untouched, still the gentle first fight.
26 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The speakeasy's back bar gets a real drink rack and mirror, Don Luigi stops standing inside his own desk, and the goons learn to walk around the furniture instead of into it.
- The social club and the speakeasy now have a proper back bar: a full drink rack of shelved bottles against the wall, a big antique mirror behind it, and warm lamps picking out the glass. The bottles finally look like bottles instead of coloured pegs floating in mid-air.
- Don Luigi now stands behind a real desk — with a banker's lamp, a telephone and his ledger — instead of half-sunk into a table, in every briefing.
- Tables and stools now block you but not your bullets. You can shoot straight over a tipped-over table while still having to walk around it, and the same rule applies to everyone shooting back at you. The bar, the marble columns, the oil drums and the crate stacks are still solid cover for both sides.
- The mugs no longer pile into the same table and get stuck. They steer around furniture, keep their elbow room, and each one fights his own way: one charges you, one hangs back at the far wall and plugs away, one sweeps around to your side, and one works the cover and leans out to shoot.
- Enemies hold their fire instead of shooting into the back of a column, and your auto-aim now picks the nearest mug you can actually hit rather than wasting a magazine on someone behind a pillar.
24 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Mafioso finally gets a save file, a proper menu — and its sound back.
- Fixed a startup bug that skipped the title screen and left the game completely silent: the music, sound effects and Ilona's voiced narration now actually play.
- Your progress is saved automatically at the start of every mission beat, so you can close the tab and pick the story up later from the title screen's Continue.
- A real title menu: Continue (showing which chapter you're on and how much you've earned), New Game, and Options — with a confirmation before anything wipes your file.
- Pause now opens a menu with Resume, Options and Quit to Title, so you can leave a run without losing your place.
- Sound can finally be muted from the menus, which means controller players can reach it too — menus work fully on keyboard, gamepad and touch.
23 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Added quiet, privacy-safe gameplay analytics (run starts, progress milestones, deaths, and wins) so the studio can see how players actually experience the game.
- The studio now sees how far players get through Ilona's rise — which missions get cleared, where runs end, and who finishes the campaign — with no change to how the game plays.
10 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Mafioso's opening and ending are now fully voiced cinematics, with a real mute switch and a punchier game-over.
- Ilona now narrates the intro and the victory scene out loud in a wry noir voice, and Don Luigi speaks his welcome at the ceremony — the captions stay in sync with the narration.
- The GAME OVER screen got a gravelly spoken sign-off and a dramatic crash-in animation instead of a silent card.
- Added a sound toggle — click the speaker button in the top-right or press M to mute or unmute everything (voice, music, and effects); your choice is remembered.
- The classic look, controls, and story are untouched — this is all new audio and polish on top.
6 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Full gamepad support - play the whole picture on a controller, with on-screen hints that follow whichever device you last touched.
- Added complete controller support across every scene: move and drive with the left stick or D-pad, attack, talk, jump, and brake all mapped, matching the keyboard exactly
- Press Start (or Esc) to pause any time, with a new pause screen; any button, Enter, or Esc gets you back in. Every menu, the game-over screen, and dialogue now respond to any button
- On-screen control hints switch between keyboard and gamepad live as you play - no menu, no setting
- Plug or unplug a controller mid-game and you get a tidy notice; unplugging during play auto-pauses so nothing runs off without you
5 July 2026HousekeepingClaude Opus 4.8
Plugged a GPU-memory leak in shootouts and added a 33-test suite and linter — the game plays identically.
- Fixed a GPU-memory leak: the shooting scene never disposed its geometry and materials on exit, leaking on every shootout entry and death-retry
- Cleaned dead imports, unused variables and a self-assign no-op across six files
- Added vitest (33 tests over grid geometry, tile definitions, driving math and game state) and an eslint flat config, all findings fixed