Change history

Everything that's changed

Each improvement and housekeeping night is logged the moment it passes QA — never before. This is the whole studio at once; every game keeps its own full history too.

559logged nights
55games with history
25 Sept 2026 Update AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
Mission briefings now show the whole site next to the briefing panel on every screen, and names on the holo-table map no longer pile on top of each other.
  • On phones (and smaller laptop screens) the projected mission site used to sit partly under the briefing panel, hiding part of the route; the view now fits the whole site, route and objectives into the free part of the screen, and re-fits when you rotate or resize.
  • City names and operation names on the holo-table map never overlap any more: an operation's name sits just above its city's, and two operations at the same city sit either side of their markers.
  • Briefing labels are tidied the same way, so objective names stay readable instead of stacking on top of each other.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
The holo-table now sweeps into place when you open it, and mission briefings are much easier to read: a violet route you can spot at a glance and far less glare.
  • Opening the holo-table now plays a quick 1.5-second animation: the map starts small and spins up to full size, then the operations board slides in. Press any key or tap to skip it.
  • The city markers on the holo-table are now see-through holographic bubbles floating above each city, instead of solid glowing balls that cut into the map.
  • In a mission briefing, your route is drawn in its own violet colour with a dark outline, so it stands out from the teal grid. A small legend explains what each colour means.
  • The holo-table and the briefing map glow much less: walls and floors are drawn with thin, crisp lines instead of a bright haze, so objectives, breach points and hostiles are easy to see.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
The intro now tells you plainly who you are up against, and the base is easier to use: a lit back wall, room menus that switch with one click, and painted art for every research project.
  • A rewritten, fully voiced and subtitled opening: WARDEN-9, the rogue AI that runs the island's grid, introduces itself first, then the Director explains what it is doing and why Task Force AIRGAP has to cut the network by hand.
  • The city's windows in the opening no longer flicker and crawl as the camera rises over Port Calder.
  • Base menus no longer trap you: with a room open, click another room to switch straight to it, or close it with the new X button, Esc, a click outside or B on a controller. Tab and the shoulder buttons step between rooms, and the Armoury's Recruit and Close buttons are back where they belong.
  • The Cleanroom's back wall is no longer pitch black: it is lit, with a pool of light over every room.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
Night missions now glisten and breathe: lamps reflect in rain-soaked ground and the sea, fog glows around every light, and the weather changes as the turns go by.
  • Every lamp now reflects in wet ground, puddles, metal and water. On rain-soaked concrete the reflections stretch into long streaks, and they go dark when you cut the power to that part of the grid.
  • Rain now soaks everything out in the open. Real-looking puddles fill up as the weather gets worse, and raindrops ripple across the standing water.
  • The sea and the harbour water move. Swells catch the lamplight and the sky, and foam laps against quay walls and ship hulls, especially in Cold Storage.
  • Lamps glow in fog and mist, and the ground haze lights up around them. Wall floodlights throw visible beams, and indoor metal now reflects each room's own light colour.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5
Two new Custodian machines built to beat your overwatch: the Usher shields an escort through your cones, and the Proctor circles round to strike your watchers from behind.
  • New enemy: the Usher, an escort drone that wraps one machine in a hard-light shield. The first overwatch shot at that machine glances off, so it can walk straight through a single cone. Kill the Usher, stun it with an EMP, jam its escort, or cover the lane with two cones.
  • New enemy: the Proctor, a stalker that never steps onto a tile your overwatch is watching. It circles to the side a watcher is not facing and strikes from behind for extra damage, breaking the cone. Wide cones fence it out, and operatives who cover each other's backs leave it no way in.
  • The enemy forecast, the overwatch set-up and the threat preview show both of them: which machine an Usher is shielding, where a Proctor is stalking, and when your cones have it pinned.
  • Two new research projects answer them: Split Rounds lets overwatch punch through the shield at reduced aim, and Rear Sensors stops Proctors from blindsiding your watchers.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
Operatives and enemies get real surface detail, the Bailiff and Gilt bruisers swing their weapons for real, and shots read clearly from the tactical camera.
  • Every operative and enemy now has worn, detailed surfaces: ripstop fatigues, chipped armour plates with bare metal showing, scuffed Custodian shells, gun finishes and hoodies, instead of flat plastic colours (medium and high quality).
  • Bailiff androids carry their shock baton one-handed and strike with a real overhead swing, and Gilt bruisers smash down with the shock maul two-handed, both with a motion trail and a swing sound, instead of poking like a rifle butt.
  • Bailiffs are easier to tell apart at a glance: a red and blue light bar on the shoulder, a dark tabard and restraint cuffs on the belt. Warden shields and Registrar seals now look like hard-light energy fields.
  • Tracers and impact sparks stay visible at the normal tactical zoom, a hard hit now flashes on impact, and tracers no longer streak on past their target.
25 Sept 2026 Update AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
Every shot now shows its bullet: gunfire tracers and sparks were never being drawn, so firing looked like nothing happened.
  • Every shot now draws a bright tracer from the gun to where the round lands, whether it hits or misses, for every weapon your squad carries and for the Custodian's machines and the Gilt too.
  • Sparks now show up: the spit at the muzzle, sparks where rounds strike armour and walls, and the showers from explosions, cut cables and burning wrecks.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
When a building, a roof, a sign or a tree hides Static, a soft see-through circle now opens through it so you can see him, the dead around him and the street he is fighting on.
  • Walk behind a tall building, a rooftop sign, a tree or a stack of containers and a soft round window about six metres across fades in through it, showing Static and the ground around him; it follows him and fades away when he walks clear.
  • Only what stands between the camera and Static is cut: the building behind him, the street, the dead and anything low to the ground stay as they are, and buildings still cast their shadows into the circle.
  • A sign's neon glow and a lamp's light fade out with the thing they belong to, so the view through the circle stays clean.
  • You can switch it off in Options (See-through buildings), and the options menu now scrolls on a phone held sideways.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
The dead now only hurt you when their blow actually lands, a flicker in building windows and walls is gone, and a new game starts with Static on the radio telling you what the day is for.
  • Zombie and boss attacks now wind up first and only hit you if you are still in reach when the blow lands, so stepping back or to the side at the last moment makes them miss.
  • Fixed a shimmer in lit building windows, and a flicker along wall corners and door frames inside buildings.
  • A new game now opens with Static on his radio telling you what to do on your first day, with subtitles.
  • A short goal line under the day clock always tells you what to do next, from scavenging to getting back to the Rig before dusk.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
Port Halcyon has been relit: rooms now fill with real window light and sun, the torch lights up the room around it, and the night streets have air you can see the lamps and neon glow in.
  • Inside buildings the daylight now comes from the windows: walls facing them glow, corners fall into shadow, and sunny windows throw shafts and patches of sun on the floor in the shape of their glazing bars, broken panes or the boards nailed over them. Go in late in the day and the sun comes in long and gold.
  • Your torch now lights the room around what it hits instead of just a bright spot, dims when you hold it right up to a wall so it no longer blinds you, and shows the dust hanging in the air.
  • Switch the torch off in a dark cellar and after a few seconds your eyes adjust: the room stays dark but you can make out shapes, so dark places read as dark instead of a black screen.
  • At night a low haze lies in the streets and the street lights and neon signs glow in it, and wet streets and the canals reflect the lights around them.
25 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
You can go inside buildings now: ten hand-built interiors across Port Halcyon, two in every district, lit only by your torch and whatever daylight gets through the windows.
  • Walk up to a marked door by day and step inside: Bayside Pharmacy, the Harbour Police Post, the Underground nightclub, Funland Arcade, the Canal Diner, the Roxy picture house, a dockers' tenement, the Rusty Anchor pub, Casualty and the Mortuary. The clock outside stops while you are in, and the doors stay shut at night.
  • The power is out. Your torch is the light and its battery only drains indoors, so carry spares. Sweep dark rooms before you step in: the Sleeper, a new infected, lies curled in the dark, only shows in your torch beam or a muzzle flash, and lunges when the light finds it.
  • Locked doors can be pried open quietly with the crowbar, or kicked or shot open fast and loud. The dead inside hunt by sound, and every noise you make is remembered: they will be waiting at the door when you come out.
  • Keys and codes found in one building open the best rooms of its neighbour: a police armoury, a cinema's projection box, a pub's spirits cage, a hospital's drug store. Loot includes weapons, weapon parts, torch batteries and power cells that give the broadcast a head start.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
New story mission Cold Storage: board a freighter in the fog at Vessel Bay and get the Custodian's cold drives out on the VTOL's winch before she sails.
  • A new Act III operation before the finale, Cold Storage, fought across three linked areas: a foggy container quay, the main deck of a freighter reached over two gangways, and its frozen refrigerated hold.
  • A new kind of objective, Recover: an operative lifts a cold drive onto their back and carries it into a winch zone, where the VTOL comes in overhead and reels it up on its line.
  • Carrying a drive has a cost. The carrier moves two tiles less and the Custodian's machines shoot them first; if they go down the drive drops where they fall, and any teammate can pick it up again.
  • A new site with its own look and sound: quay walls and hull plating running down to the sea, deck rails, gangways, reefer containers humming, a sea-fog night and a frosted hold, new voice lines, and the ship's horn when she is about to cast off.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
The whole world now has real textures, battle damage looks burnt into the ground, every operation shows a recon photo of its site, and your operatives have faces.
  • Every floor, wall and prop now has a real surface instead of a painted placeholder: power-trowelled concrete, raised server floors, metro tiles, wet asphalt, weathered pier planks, salt-crusted slabs, marble, corrugated steel, glazed tile and glass curtain walls, all with depth that catches the light.
  • Floors vary from tile to tile so they no longer look stamped, low walls show the grimy foot of the wall, and puddles on outdoor ground read as flat standing water.
  • Crates, server racks, shipping containers, concrete barriers and metal fittings got proper surfaces too, and the archive shelves now hold archive boxes instead of ammunition crates.
  • Scorch marks, craters, bullet holes, oil and coolant spills, cracks, tyre tracks and dead leaves are now photographic, so a firefight leaves marks that look real.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5[1m])
Overwatch now has a real set-up: you see a 3D cone, swing it around, dial its width and click to set it, and every weapon handles width differently.
  • Choosing Overwatch now shows a cone on the ground in front of your operative. It follows your mouse, stick or finger, stops at the walls you know about, and you click (or tap Set) to lock it in.
  • You can now set any width your weapon allows with the mouse wheel, Q and E, the triggers, a pinch, or the minus and plus buttons. Shotguns sweep wide but only reach a few tiles, scoped rifles are deadly down a narrow lane and far, and pistols want a narrow lane too.
  • The cone is coloured by how likely a reaction shot is to hit there: teal is good, amber is fair, red is poor. A panel graphs your weapon at every width and shows the hit chance, the reach and how many tiles you are watching. Enemies inside the cone show their hit chance.
  • Locked cones stay on screen through the enemy turn and flash when they fire. Enemy cones are drawn in orange and each enemy picks a width that suits its weapon.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement AIRGAP Claude Opus 5.5
Overwatch is now a cone you aim, with a width that suits your weapon, and every 3D model got a full check: Warden shields no longer have carbines poking through them.
  • Overwatch now covers a cone that you point, at one of three widths. Each weapon aims differently at each width: shotguns can go wide at no cost, while scoped rifles and pistols lose a lot of accuracy watching a wide arc.
  • Enemy overwatch works the same way. Their cones are drawn on the floor and the red kill zone shows exactly where they will fire, so you can walk around a watcher or flank it.
  • Warden Sentinels now hold their riot shield beside their carbine instead of the carbine going straight through it. Up close they shove with the shield, and they drop it when they fall.
  • Robots now aim straight at their target, and operatives kneeling behind low cover now aim level instead of into the cover. Units that kneel, hunker, sit wounded or lie down stay on the floor instead of sinking into it.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
The dead of Port Halcyon no longer look like one zombie in different shirts: they have their own hair, builds, clothes, walks and ways of attacking, runners really sprint, and Static runs and turns like a person.
  • Eight haircuts from mohawks and ponytails to bald and balding, hoods, and four builds from slight to heavy, so every crowd is full of different people, and each district dresses its dead its own way.
  • Skirts, dresses and bare-legged hospital gowns that swing with the legs, and bum bags on the Boardwalk.
  • Eight ways of walking: lurching, stiff with rigor, reaching, stumbling, twitching, bent and crooked, or dragging a dead leg.
  • Runners at full speed now sprint with their arms pumping, and the dead attack in three ways: a swipe, a grab and bite with a snapping jaw, or both fists brought down together, each with its own sound.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
A new district and two new nights: Hill Hospital, the Victorian hospital on the hill above the Canal Quarter, with its own special infected, a night event and a new boss, THE MATRON.
  • Hill Hospital is district 5: a foggy hilltop of ward blocks under a clock tower, St Jude's chapel and its churchyard, Casualty and its ambulance bay, a boiler house and a helipad. The Rig drives up from the Shipyard after night 8, and nights 9 and 10 are fought here.
  • New special infected, the Paramedic: a dead ambulance crew member still doing its rounds. It kneels over the bodies you drop and shocks them back to their feet with its defibrillator. Kill it first, or take their heads or burn them, because those stay down.
  • New night event, the Air Drop: an air ambulance comes in over the helipad and drops a crate of medkits, ammunition and flares. Its rotors pull the dead away from the Rig and straight to the supplies, so it is a race.
  • New boss, THE MATRON: a towering ward sister who charges down a line with her steel trolley and rings her hand bell to call the ward. Lead her over the boiler house's steam main and open the valve to scald her.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
Port Halcyon gets a real coat of paint: painted streets, walls and roofs, rooftop billboards and fly-posters for the city's own brands, a painted Rig and new loading art.
  • Streets, pavements, cobbles, the boardwalk, sand, grass, roofs and shipping containers now use detailed painted textures instead of flat procedural ones, with less visible repetition.
  • Every building has a real wall material: weathered stucco, painted brick, concrete block or glazed arcade tiles, so the districts no longer look like plain plaster boxes.
  • Rooftop billboards and fly-posted walls advertise Port Halcyon's own brands and events, different in each district, and the billboards are floodlit at night.
  • The Canal Quarter water now carries algae and floating leaves, the canal walls are dressed granite, and every neon sign hangs on a weathered steel backboard.
24 Sept 2026 Improvement Dead Air Claude Opus 5.5
Every character, monster and prop in Port Halcyon got a close inspection, and the ones that were broken are fixed: Riot shields no longer have arms sticking through them, and the Barker finally has a face.
  • The Riot now holds its shield on one guarding arm and swings a baton with the other, instead of reaching straight through its own shield. Take off its shield arm and the shield drops to the street, leaving it open to your guns.
  • The Barker has been rebuilt: a grinning carnival barker in a top hat and striped waistcoat, with his megaphone aimed at you when he shouts and a cane he swings. The Lockkeeper, the DJ and the Crane-Hulk were also fixed: feet on the ground, the hook in the fist, headphones where they belong.
  • The dead move and fall properly: crawlers drag their legs instead of kicking them through the road, bloaters keep their arms outside their bellies, bodies that crumple sideways now lie flat on their side, and corpses no longer sway.
  • The fire-axe and flare gun now hang on Static when you are not holding them, and Welders spark from the tip of their torch.
11 Sept 2026 Housekeeping Run Shinobi Run Claude Opus 5
The biggest file in the game was reorganised into readable pieces, with the game's first automated test suite to keep it honest — the game itself plays exactly as before.
  • The enemy code, which had grown into one enormous file, is now split into clear per-enemy pieces. Every line was moved unchanged, so all eight enemy types and all three bosses behave precisely as they did.
  • Added the game's first automated tests, which check that every enemy still exists, that all the tuning numbers are untouched, that ducking still slips you under attacks, and that every level holds exactly the enemies it always held.
  • Upgraded the 3D graphics library to the studio's current version. Shadow edges are a touch crisper as a result; nothing else about the look changed.
  • No gameplay, balance, controls or content were altered in any way. This was a tidy-up under the hood.
11 Sept 2026 Improvement Project Ember Claude Opus 5
The Chronoknight finally moves like a person, and you can beat the first boss by jumping on its head.
  • The hero is fully animated at last: a real walk cycle with a swinging cape and sword arm, separate poses for rising, hanging at the top of a jump and falling, a squash when you land, a skid when you turn on the spot, and footsteps to go with it.
  • New move, no new button: fall onto anything — enemy or boss — and you bounce off it unhurt for double a sword hit. Hold JUMP through the landing for a higher bounce. It refills your double jump and air dash, and it staggers a boss so you can get free hits in.
  • THE PLACEHOLDER is a fair fight now. It has less health, it crouches before every jump so you can see it coming, it paints the spot it is about to land on right onto the floor, and standing next to it while it sits there no longer hurts you. Its shockwaves are bright orange instead of grey-on-grey.
  • Your sword no longer swings through things. The hit used to be tested for a single instant; it now lasts the whole swing, so a good read actually connects.
11 Sept 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
Punches and kicks now land somewhere — on the jaw, the ribs, the gut or the shin — with their own sound, their own stagger, and a jump that finally stays on screen.
  • Every blow now lands on the part of the body it actually hit. Instead of washing the whole opponent white, a hit throws sparks off the exact spot, lights it up from the point of contact and leaves a mark you can read — an uppercut lands on the jaw, a low kick lands at the shin.
  • Fighters react differently depending on where they were hit and how hard. Six stagger animations replace the old three: the head snaps, the chest caves, the gut folds them in half, a leg buckles under them. Their faces wince with it, and they show the strain as their health runs out.
  • All sixty-one combat sounds were re-recorded from scratch. A hit is now built from a hard crack at the front, the fighter’s own signature impact, and a body layer that changes with what got hit — a skull knocks, a ribcage booms, a stomach whumps. Lua’s punches had been silently inaudible and now are not.
  • Landing a string of hits builds. Each hit in a combo freezes harder, shakes more and sounds brighter and tighter than the last, and the camera is kicked along the line of the blow instead of just rattling.
11 Sept 2026 Improvement Last Login Claude Opus 5
Last Login's runner now moves like he has weight — he leans into every lane change and settles back out of it — and a new Feel & Controls screen lets you tune how the controls respond.
  • Changing lanes is no longer an instant slide sideways. The runner accelerates across, banks into the turn, and rocks back onto the lane, with his hips, arms and cloak trailing behind him. He is exactly as quick to clear an obstacle as before — nothing got harder.
  • The gamepad stick reads properly now. A thumb pushed diagonally used to change lane AND slide from one push, and a stick resting near the threshold could fire lane changes you never asked for. Both are gone.
  • Hold a direction and you keep stepping outward to the edge lane, on a controller, the keyboard or a phone.
  • Jumps, slides, dashes and stumbles all have real weight: he stretches off the ground, compresses on landing, tucks at the top of a jump, reaches for the floor on the way down, and staggers when something clips him.
11 Sept 2026 Update Salvage Point Claude Opus 5
Menu cursors stopped disappearing off the bottom of the screen on small windows.
  • On a short or small window, moving through a menu with a keyboard or controller now scrolls the panel to keep the highlighted row on screen — including the Outfitter's last upgrades and its DONE button.
  • The same fix covers HOW TO PLAY and the SITE SECURED screen, so the cursor can no longer vanish in any menu.
  • Menu screens now always open at the top; previously a screen could appear part-scrolled with its title cut off after you came back from the Outfitter.
  • Scrolling a menu with a finger or a mouse wheel works exactly as before, and nothing changes on a full-size window.
10 Sept 2026 Update Kong Climb Claude Opus 5
Kong Climb's first bug-fix pass — the 75m lift is a floor you can actually walk on, the 100m board finally resets when you die, and the cinematics stopped losing their voice track.
  • You can walk along the 75m Elevators lift while it moves. Standing on it used to lock you in place — a couple of inches, then nothing, in either direction, for as long as you were aboard.
  • Losing a life on 100m Rivets now puts the rivets back and starts the board over properly. It also fixes a case where dying at the exact moment you popped the last rivet handed you the stage for free.
  • Kong returns to the top of the girders after you lose a life on 100m, instead of dropping out of the world for the rest of the run.
  • The narration in all five cinematic scenes — the intro, the three boss arrivals and the ending — is now unlocked by the same press that starts the game, so it should actually be audible on a first visit.
9 Sept 2026 Improvement Legend of Melda Claude Opus 5
A seventh region joins the campaign — the Pale Ossuary, a church built out of bones, with a cracked bell at the heart of it and a new way to fight your way through.
  • A new region between the Emberforge and the Lair: the Pale Ossuary, a bone-white charnel church lit by cold violet grave-lights, with open burial shafts to cross and a keeper who has been reading the names of the dead for longer than she should have.
  • A new boss, the Gravebell. Its toll rolls out along the floor as a ring — and it is the first thing in the game you answer by jumping. Then it comes off its chain and swings the whole room, and then it cracks open and comes after you.
  • A new move, the Knell Lunge: attack in the middle of a Whisper Step and the dash itself becomes the blow, cutting through everything in the lane. Beat the Gravebell to earn it.
  • The Ossuary is built around everything you have learned. There is an island only the Tide Ward reaches, a shaft only the Whisper Step crosses, a wall only Hollow Sight sees through, and a bricked-up reliquary only a bomb opens.
9 Sept 2026 Improvement Scarecrow Claude Opus 5
Two new Nights join the campaign, each bringing a foe that changes how you fight — a bell-ringer who makes everything around it faster, and a burrower you cannot touch until it surfaces.
  • The campaign is now fourteen Nights instead of twelve, with the Blight King still waiting at the end. Two new fields to hold: the sour verdigris chapel meadow of The Tolling, and the wet, turned-over ground of The Fallow.
  • Meet the bell-ringer on Night 9. It never comes at you — it hangs back and rings, and every foe caught in the circle it draws gets faster, hits harder and glows gold. It is the first enemy in the game worth chasing past the ones already on top of you.
  • Meet the burrower on Night 12. It dives, and while it is under the soil nothing you own can hurt it — all you get is a mound racing toward your feet and a red ring warning where it will come up. Step off it, then punish what surfaces.
  • Every late foe now gets a line in How to Play, and the page fits better on a phone than it did before.
9 Sept 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Opus 5
Ion Reach finally has a landmark of its own — a derelict mine-laying rig, and the pulse mines hanging off it.
  • New hazard: the pulse mine. It sits in the open middle of the cave as a small armoured core you can skim past, then blooms into a wide lethal disc on its own beat and collapses back. It is a timing read, not a dodge — and there is always a channel over it and a channel under it.
  • New landmark on the first biome: THE MINEWORKS. Three live nodes hang on tethers from a dead mine-laying rig under the ceiling, all on one machine cycle, so the bloom rolls down the row like a wave you fly beside. It arrives about fourteen seconds into a fresh run.
  • Energy cells now hang in both channels through the rig, so picking a side and holding it pays better than drifting through the middle.
  • Every bloom announces itself: the node collar glows amber and a ring marks the exact circle that is about to become lethal, a full beat before it does.
9 Sept 2026 Improvement Salvage Point Claude Opus 5
The Outfitter opens between sites — spend the scrap you have been hoarding on eight permanent upgrades that follow you for the rest of the campaign.
  • A new Outfitter opens from the Site Secured screen between sites. Scrap now buys permanent upgrades that carry to every site after it, not just turrets that get torn down at the next one.
  • Eight upgrades across nineteen ranks: thicker rig plating, a coolant loop that lets you shoot longer, a wider salvage magnet, a cheaper weld kit, powered legs, a between-waves patch crew, a threat optic that labels EMP nodes and shroud casters in the sky, and a thruster pack that gives you one mid-air burst per jump.
  • Buying them all costs more than a campaign earns, so every purchase is a real choice — guns for this site, or a better you for every site after it.
  • No upgrade helps you aim, and none of them make your turrets fight for you. Leading the arc is still your job, and so is standing where the shot is.
8 Sept 2026 Improvement Kong Climb Claude Opus 5
The ape gets a body — a full model and animation rebuild for the title character, with no change to a single fight.
  • Kong is a real gorilla now instead of a stack of boxes. He has legs he stands on, arms long enough to rest his knuckles on the deck, a silver back, and a jaw that opens.
  • He never holds still. He breathes, shifts his weight, looks around the arena, rears up and roars before he attacks, and throws his whole body behind every barrel.
  • He beats his chest at the top of every round — right after he hauls himself back to his feet.
  • When you knock the wind out of him he now goes down onto his knuckles with his head low and his chest heaving, so the one window you are allowed to hit him in is unmistakable from the far end of the arena. When the hammer lands, he staggers.
8 Sept 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
AI Fighter gets two brand-new modes — an endless Survival gauntlet and an eight-rival Time Attack — and the pause screen finally became a real menu you can drive with a pad.
  • New SURVIVAL mode: fight rival after rival with no end, carrying your health and your rage meter from one bout to the next. Each win patches you up a little less than the last, so a long streak is genuinely a long night. Your best streak is saved.
  • New TIME ATTACK mode: all eight rivals, one round each, full health every fight, and a clock running the whole way. Beat the ladder and your time is recorded; lose and it isn't.
  • Both modes drop you straight into a fight — no cinematic, no ladder climb — and Survival tours all eight arenas as you go.
  • The pause screen is a proper menu now on keyboard, pad, mouse and touch: Resume, Sound FX, Music, Main Menu. You can mute a fight or quit to the menu without abandoning your run or reloading the page.
8 Sept 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Opus 5
The rig's escape lighting still works on the lower decks, the opening gets to the point twelve seconds sooner, and the Siren will not kill you while the game is still explaining it.
  • The Deep Star's emergency escape strip is lit again on the first three decks: an amber route cast into the deck plating that runs to the keycard, then re-routes to the hatch the moment you have it.
  • The strip is the last system aboard that still works, and it does not work for long. It is unbroken in the welding bay, guttering and gap-toothed by the pump gallery and the ballast cellar, and from Deck B upward there is nothing but your lamp.
  • The opening film is shorter and gets you diving twelve seconds sooner. Two of the welder's best lines moved out of the cutscene and into the dive itself, where they land on the thing they are talking about.
  • The game now tells you what you are doing almost immediately instead of five hints later, and it finally explains that your air and your battery are two separate clocks: one runs whatever you do, the other only burns while the light is on.
8 Sept 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
The sixth and final species joins the stable: the therizinosaur, and a special that does not hit you — it picks you up and throws you.
  • New species: the therizinosaur, a pale blue grappler with the longest arms in the game, ending in three metre-long scythes each. It is in the market from day one at 265 gold, and rival stables start fielding one from rung 2.
  • Its special, SCYTHE HURL, is unlike anything else in the arena: it seizes the other animal outright, hauls it off the sand and hurls it twelve metres. It does no damage at all when the claws close — all the damage arrives when the body does.
  • Because the throw is aimed down the line your animal is standing on, where it fights now matters: with its back to the middle it pitches the other pair straight at the closing fire ring, the tar shore, or a hole in the Sinkhole floor, and the arena finishes the job.
  • It can be answered. Anything in the air cannot be caught, an evade-dash slips it, and hitting the therizinosaur while it is carrying somebody makes it drop them. The move paints a target on the sand for the whole windup, so you can see where you are going before you get there.
7 Sept 2026 Improvement Harry Trainingspak Claude Opus 5
Harry finally has an opinion about everything you click — and if you chat up the lamppost, it flickers.
  • Harry now answers back properly. Clicking something that goes nowhere used to give you one of five flat sentences; he now has a whole spoken repertoire per action, shuffled so you hear all of it before anything comes round again.
  • The "Praat" action works on the scenery, not just on people. Forty-seven objects across all eight locations get a full Harry charm offensive — the lamppost, the poster, the pier glass, the jukebox, the dartboard, the chest freezer in the night shop, the benches on the last tram home.
  • Try to use the wrong thing on the wrong object and Harry says something worth hearing about it, instead of the same sentence every single time.
  • Charm the lamppost on the street corner and see what happens. It is the one thing in Den Haag that reacts to him.
7 Sept 2026 Improvement Corner Kings Claude Opus 5
People on the block now ask you for work — five kinds of paid job, on a clock.
  • Somebody on the block now turns up with paid work: a car outside the house, a marker on the corner it's about, and a few hours to take it or leave it.
  • Five kinds of job, each one about a different part of your crew — hold a corner, get a driver somewhere, put a snitch inside a rival's place, take a corner off somebody, or cool a corner down before dawn.
  • Every job you deliver makes the next one worth more. Take one and drop it and word gets round — nobody asks for a couple of days.
  • Jobs show up in the house, on the map and in the top bar, with the pay and the clock in plain sight, and they count on your run-end tally.
7 Sept 2026 Improvement Crazy Cab City Claude Opus 5
Port Vantage is two and a half times bigger, the grass is no longer a shortcut, and you can now break both the city and your cab.
  • Every district is far larger — up to 1.9 km a side, with more neighbourhoods, more parks, longer arterials and a lot more city between fares.
  • The road is now where the cab belongs. Cut across the grass and you bog down to a crawl with a warning on screen and gravel under the wheels. Railings, hedges and park fences show you where the road ends, and pressing R always puts you straight back on the nearest street.
  • Street lights, lanterns, railings and hedges smash when you hit them, with sparks, breaking glass and the light going out. Trees only come down for a heavy cab at speed — anything lighter bounces off, and it hurts.
  • Your cab now takes damage. It dents, then it smokes and loses power, then a wheel starts dragging and pulling the steering, and finally it dies. Light bumps cost you nothing — only real crashes count.
7 Sept 2026 Improvement The Block Claude Opus 5
The Block gets its first real balance pass, a tutorial in its own quiet voice, lamplight through the whole building, and text you can actually read.
  • Loud jobs are now worth doing. The alarm has more room to run before a loud job is blown, so blowing a vault or driving out past the whistle brings a very large score home — along with a very large amount of heat and some of your crew in the back of a van. Bring a chop shop or a smuggling tunnel and fewer of them go. The greediest possible loud line will still blow the job, and going quiet on a gr
  • Which rooms are worth building has changed. The back-room casino, the chop shop and the numbers room make noticeably more heat for their money, the smuggling tunnel is no longer quietly the best room in the game, and the speakeasy bar finally earns its keep. Money comes in at about the same rate as before — but the police turn up roughly twice as often across a run.
  • A new opening called THE FIRST NIGHT walks you through the still, your crew, the door, the flat next door and the cellar one step at a time — by asking you to do each thing rather than describing it, and waiting until you have. You can skip it at any point, and turn it off for good in Options.
  • The first stranger no longer knocks four seconds into a new game. You get half of day one to look around the block before anybody arrives.
6 Sept 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
6 Sept 2026 Improvement Star Putt Claude Opus 5
Star Putt now keeps score of your best work — medals on every hole and a record book to show them off — and four awkward tees have been moved so a phone can actually take the shot.
  • Every hole you clear now earns a medal: ace, eagle, birdie or par, worked out from your best round on that hole. They show up right on the practice-range buttons, with a small chime the first time you earn a better one.
  • A new Record book on the main menu collects everything: your best full tour, your best round on each of the four courses, and how many medals you hold on each.
  • If you set a tour record before the tour grew, the record book now says so plainly instead of quietly hiding it.
  • Four holes — Event Horizon, Cross Current, Riptide and Long Fuse — used to have a perfect one-shot line you literally could not aim on a phone, because the pull-back went off the edge of the screen. Their tees have been nudged inward, and every hole in the game is now fully playable with a thumb.
6 Sept 2026 Improvement Buffet Rush Claude Opus 5
Every service now has a medal to chase, a map to reach it from, and a no-clock buffet to practise in.
  • A new Select Service screen lays out all six venues and every service inside them, with your best score, your medal and your ribbons on each — so you can drop straight into the one you want instead of scrolling a list.
  • Every service now awards a medal: bronze for clearing it, silver for beating the target by a quarter, gold for beating it by more than half. The exact score each medal wants is printed right there, so you always know what you are chasing.
  • Two ribbons sit beside the medals: No Spills for a service carried without dropping anything, and One Trip for a service cleared in a single tower.
  • Free Play opens the buffet with no clock and no spill limit. Pick any venue, any tray, and how much trouble you want on the floor — an empty room, an ordinary service, everything at once, or the venue's own named antagonist. Nothing is recorded, so it is purely somewhere to learn the tray.
6 Sept 2026 Improvement Crazy Cab City Claude Opus 5
Every district now has its own landmark — and every one of them has a roof you can drive onto.
  • Eight one-of-a-kind landmarks, one per district: a banded lighthouse on the harbour, a cannery chimney by the freight line, a cathedral in the old town, an iron-and-glass market hall, a tram depot with a clock tower, the bascule towers by the canal, a floodlit arena uptown, and a glass spire over the skyline.
  • Each one has a striped ramp off the forecourt that takes you up onto its roof terrace, a long run along the top of the building, and a kicker at the far end that launches you back down at the street.
  • Stone parapets line the ramp and the roof, so once you are committed you stay on it — clip a wall and you slide, you do not stall.
  • Landmarks show up on the minimap as a gold diamond, and the one in your district is named on screen when the shift starts, so you always have something to steer by.
5 Sept 2026 Improvement Race Evolutions Claude Opus 5
Two new cars join the garage — a heavy stunt truck that lands what nothing else survives, and a featherweight kart that corners like it is on rails.
  • OCHRE MAMMOTH is a two-tonne stunt truck on monster axles. It will not turn, it has the worst brakes in the game and no top end — but it is the only thing in the garage that walks away from a mega-ramp landing that folds a supercar, and the only one that crosses an oil slick without changing lane.
  • LIME WASP is an open kart with the driver sitting out in the open. It has the lowest top speed in the game by a distance and it is the quickest thing off the line, and nothing else can carry that much speed through a bend without the tyres letting go.
  • Both are real new machines, not repaints: new shapes, new handling, and their own engine notes — a diesel thump for the truck and a two-stroke scream for the kart.
  • The car-select podium now frames tall cars properly, so the truck fits on screen instead of losing its roof lights off the top.
5 Sept 2026 Improvement Golden Boot Claude Opus 5
A foul in the penalty area is now a real penalty kick — the sixth and last set piece, and the ball stays live off the rebound.
  • Bring a striker down inside the eighteen-yard box and the referee points to the spot. It is the same one foul the game already had; only where it happens has changed.
  • Taking one is a duel in two stages: stop the marker sweeping across the goal, then stop the power bar. Too much power and it climbs over the bar.
  • Conceding one puts you in goal. Pick a side with the stick or the arrows, commit, and dive.
  • A penalty does not end the passage of play. A save is parried straight back into the six-yard box with the forwards already charging, a bar bounces back in, and a drag wide is a goal kick — so the follow-up is as live as any other shot.
5 Sept 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
A sixth delver joins the roster — the Lanternbearer, who fights with a held shaft of burning lamplight instead of a weapon.
  • New class: the Lanternbearer. You do not tap to attack — you HOLD, and a shaft of white-hot lamplight burns everything standing in the line, right up to the first wall.
  • The longer you keep the light on one body, the hotter it gets. Sweeping the beam across a room chips at everything; picking one target and staying on it melts it.
  • Your lamp runs on oil, and oil buys two different things. Burn it as light, or crack the lamp open in a FLARE that blinds every enemy that can see you — they lose track of you completely and drop whatever they were winding up. Run the tank dry and the lamp gutters out, leaving you in the dark with nothing.
  • Eighteen new skills in the Vault, in three branches: sharpen the beam, deepen the tank, or build the flash into a weapon. Two of them let you set enemies permanently alight, and one pays you for fighting with the lamp snuffed.
5 Sept 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Two new rider weapons — the hunting bola and the unseating hook — complete the armoury at four.
  • The HUNTING BOLA is whirled over your rider's head and thrown at the other animal's legs. It barely hurts. What it does is tangle them where they stand for a moment, which kills a charge stone dead and answers anything that comes at you fast.
  • The UNSEATING HOOK does no damage at all. At biting range your rider leans out, hooks the other rider, cuts straight through whatever saddle they paid for and hauls them out of it. Against a heavily armoured pair, you take the person off instead of the animal down.
  • What still stops a hook is the other rider themselves — their steadiness and their bond with the animal, which no hook can cut through. The callout now tells you which one saved them.
  • Catch nothing with the hook and it is your own rider left hanging over the flank, easy to throw for a moment. Every weapon in the armoury costs you something.
4 Sept 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
A seventh fighter joins the roster — SHEN, a taiji master who does not block, he turns.
  • New playable fighter: SHEN, taiji quan, the roster's elder. He is the only fighter in the game who can PARRY — tap guard just as a blow arrives and he takes nothing at all, banks meter, and leaves the attacker staggered and wide open.
  • The parry rewards timing, not turtling. Holding guard down does nothing special; you have to press it on the beat, and the second hit of a blocked string never counts. Throws go straight through it, so if he keeps turning your punches, grab him.
  • Shen hits softer than anyone else on the card and he knows it. He wins by making you miss and taking the round back one exchange at a time, and his push sends people toward the edge rather than hurting them.
  • The second rival, GORO, is now Shen. "The furious fist" has become "the turning hand" — the opponent who used to reward you for swinging is now the one that punishes it. He is no harder or easier than before.
4 Sept 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
Lava worlds finally burn, launch pads wind up before they throw you, and you can look up at last.
  • Lava worlds are no longer painted — they are a real molten surface. Black basalt plates with rivers of fire between them, a white-hot seam along every crack, and the whole thing slowly crawling. It reads right up close and it still glows like an ember from across a sector.
  • The camera can look up and down. Tilt it with T and G, with the right stick, or by dragging up and down with the mouse or your thumb. Worlds hanging over your head were simply off the top of the screen before; now you can find them, and throw a thread at them. The camera quietly levels itself again as you set off walking.
  • Launch pads announce themselves. Walk toward one and it winds up — rings falling into it, the arch brightening, a rising hum — then throws you with a burst of light and a kick. A pad that has just fired goes dark until it is ready again, so you can tell at a glance.
  • Mute is on the controller at last, on Select. Every action in the game is now reachable without touching the keyboard.
4 Sept 2026 Improvement Scrap Colossus Claude Opus 5
The ladder is a screen now — see every champion, replay any you have beaten, and chase your best time.
  • New CIRCUIT screen off the hangar: all eight rungs at a glance, with the ring each one is fought in, whether you have cleared it, and your best time and win count.
  • Any champion you have already beaten can be fought again as a TITLE DEFENCE, in their own ring, straight from the circuit.
  • Rematches are pure sport: no loot, no repeated unlocks, and the crown and the undisputed ending stay exactly as you earned them the first time.
  • Every win now records a time, and the victory card shows this bout against your best for that opponent.
4 Sept 2026 Improvement Heatwave Claude Opus 5
Archery is now shot over two distances, and the ending finally tells you what you actually won.
  • Archery is a proper two-distance round: three arrows at seventy metres on the big face, then the target butts are wheeled in and you shoot three at fifty metres on the smaller one.
  • The two distances ask for different things. At seventy metres the wind and a short draw are what beat you; at fifty they matter about half as much, but the gold is smaller and every wobble in your hold costs more. Spend your breath at the short end.
  • If you have earned Sight Marks, the game now keeps a separate sight setting for each distance, the way a real archer does — dial one for seventy and another for fifty.
  • Archery has a stadium announcer for the first time: he calls you to the line, reads the wind, marks your tens and misses, and calls the change of distance.
3 Sept 2026 Improvement Star Putt Claude Opus 5
Star Putt's opening course becomes a real venue — a brand-new tenth hole, its own sky, and sinking a putt is finally an event.
  • A new hole joins The Galactic Open: The Layover, where no shot carries all the way to the cup. Land on a world — or on the moon orbiting it, which then carries you round — and play on from there. It is the first hole in the tour built around parking the ball rather than threading it.
  • Every hole on the opening course now tees off further into the field. On a phone the old corner tees made most of the winning lines physically impossible to drag; now the whole course can be played with your thumb inside the screen.
  • The Galactic Open has its own sky at last, a warm gold and rose dawn nebula, instead of borrowing the menu's backdrop. And the worlds stopped being clones: Asteroid Alley's rocks and ice moons are now genuinely different places rather than copies of two.
  • Sinking a putt is a moment. The ball spirals into the wormhole and the cup blows open in the colour of the venue you are playing, with a bigger celebration for a hole in one and the biggest of all for the last cup of a course, each with its own sound.
3 Sept 2026 Improvement Antibody Claude Opus 5
The Helix Vault now opens with its own cinematic, every boss arrives with a name card, and the whole bestiary got a legibility pass.
  • Beating the Prime Strain no longer just flashes a banner — a new cutscene plays as the Helix Vault unseals in front of you, with narration explaining why the infection is not over yet.
  • Every boss now announces itself with a proper name card on the warning: a threat classification, the name, and the creature's title, stamped in that boss's own colour.
  • All twelve enemies are easier to read at speed. Each one has a darker backing and a bright outline so it stands out against every biome, and anything that shoots on a timer now visibly winds up before it fires.
  • Playing on a phone for the first time? A short prompt now shows you how to fly before you have to work it out under fire.
3 Sept 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Opus 5
THE COMPOSITE now fights you for five phases, apologises out loud the whole way, and the metronome beats through your phone.
  • THE COMPOSITE has two new attacks. THE RETENTION throws two shutters out from its body in opposite directions — the only safe ground in the room is right next to it, so the answer is to move toward the thing trying to kill you.
  • THE SETTLEMENT pulls down every rack in the room at once. It is the exact opposite of the purge: the floor is the only safe place to be. The two are deliberately never the same colour, the same length or the same sound, so you can tell which one is coming.
  • Every phase now opens with its own new attack, so the boss always shows you a thing before it kills you with it. It is no tougher than before — it has the same health and the same rhythm, just more to say.
  • And it does say it. Fifteen new spoken lines in its own voice, three per phase, from cheerful hold music at the top to something coming apart at the bottom. Subtitles stay on for anyone playing quietly.
3 Sept 2026 Improvement Corner Kings Claude Opus 5
Three new things to build onto the house, and the eighth racket — a bookie, and the fight nights that make it worth holding.
  • Build a bar onto the house and your people get their legs back half again as fast, and one extra face turns up looking for work every morning.
  • Hire a lawyer and bail costs a third less, nobody sits more than two days, and one of whoever the cops take walks before the wagon even leaves.
  • Put a lookout post on the roof and somebody is watching the whole block for good — every corner on the block runs cool without you tying up a lookout to do it.
  • A new racket, the bookie. It ticks over quietly all day until word goes round that there is a fight on: from three in the afternoon until nine at night the whole city bets through it and it takes three times its usual money.
2 Sept 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Opus 5
The Iaido Duelist and the two-player Campaign are back, with the menu bug that pulled them fixed.
  • The Iaido Duelist joins the roster as the tenth and final enemy type. He sheathes his katana, plants his feet and lights a ring on the ground — hit him inside that ring and he draws, hard. The answer is steel from outside it: a shuriken, a kunai or the chain break the stance for free.
  • Co-op Campaign: the whole sixteen-wave story is now playable by two people side by side, with both warlord fights, the act break and the ending, and every blessing you pick going to both shinobi.
  • The Two Players menu now fits on every screen. On some laptop heights the Back button had been pushed off the bottom with no way out — that is fixed across the full range of window sizes, and the phone layout is untouched.
2 Sept 2026 Improvement Golden Boot Claude Opus 5
Referees have arrived at Golden Boot — chop a man down near your own goal and you concede a free kick, complete with a wall to beat and a new curling technique to beat it with.
  • There is now one foul in the game: a sliding tackle that takes the man and not the ball, inside your own third, hands the other side a free kick. No cards, no stoppages in midfield, no offside — a slide near your own goal is finally a decision.
  • Free kicks come with a real wall of two to four defenders standing their ten yards, and defenders will now throw themselves at an attacker who has got past them near their own goal.
  • Take your own free kicks with the aim line and the power bar: hold KICK to build power and release to strike, with aftertouch live in flight. Full power clears the bar unless you dip it.
  • Earn the CURLED FREE KICK at seven career goals — press SLIDE over a dead ball and it whips up over the wall and bends back inside the post. The Golden Boot is the one pair of boots that bends it further, so it is worth wearing on a night with fouls in it.
2 Sept 2026 Improvement Buffet Rush Claude Opus 5
Six rooms now hold six different crowds, every tray is carried differently, and the results card finally shows you where your points came from.
  • Every venue dresses its own diners: tweeds at the hotel brunch, sun hats and pastels at the wedding, whites and blazers on the cruise deck, furs at the ice bar, black tie in the revolving restaurant, coats with the collars up on the rooftop.
  • Each of the five trays is now carried the way it actually weighs — the gripped tray comes down onto your ribs, the light aluminium one rides high and tucked in, the wide tray puts your elbows out to clear the rim.
  • The service card at the end of every run breaks your score into four lines: food carried, stack bonus, perfect scoops and variety, so you can see which of your habits is actually paying. The four lines always add up to the total underneath them.
  • A live multiplier now sits above your tray while you play, showing exactly what the load in your hands is worth if you set it down right now.
2 Sept 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Your dinos can breed — put two of them on the new nesting grounds and raise your own next champion, at the price of having them off the roster while they do it.
  • New building in the yard: the nesting grounds, a scraped sand nest inside a spoil bank with a windbreak and a keeper's brazier that burns while a clutch is being sat. Click it to put two grown dinos on the nest.
  • Both parents sit the clutch, day and night, and neither of them can train or fight until the egg hatches. The coliseum gate now tells you exactly which of your animals is unavailable and why.
  • The egg is really there in the yard: it rocks harder and its shell visibly cracks as hatching gets close, and the broken shell is left lying in the nest afterwards.
  • What hatches takes after both parents — one of their two species, and a stat line blended from both bloodlines. Rare clutches throw back and arrive already strong in one stat.
1 Sept 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
A sixth fighter joins the card: YUN, a shuai jiao wrestler whose whole game is the throw.
  • New fighter YUN (shuai jiao) — the first fighter in the game whose best move isn't a strike. Her throw, DA BEI, does more damage than anyone's and reaches from a step further out, so she wins by getting hold of you rather than out-hitting you.
  • Her punch string ends LOW instead of mid, and the finishing snapdown drags you toward her instead of knocking you away — blocking it still pulls you in. Ducking dodges her grab, but her knee jam punishes crouchers hard, so the guessing game goes both ways.
  • The trade is real: Yun is the only fighter who cannot shove anyone off the edge with a normal attack. She has to take your whole health bar — unless she saves a full meter for her rage art SHUAN, the one attack she has that will send somebody flying.
  • She's on the ladder too. The fifth rival, TAIZAN "the mountain that walks", now fights as a shuai jiao wrestler in the colossus quarry, and every rival has a new line for facing Yun.
1 Sept 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
Every boss now does something that is only its own when you get it into its last third — and you have to fight it differently.
  • The Bone Colossus tears off its own arm at low health. The arm keeps fighting on its own: it crawls after you, rears up and slams the floor, and you can kill it — or ignore it and race the giant with it on your back.
  • The Rat King floods the arena in lanes. A stretch of floor lights up, and a second later the vermin are pouring down it faster than anything else in the game. Open ground stops being safe ground.
  • The Forge Golem melts the edge of its arena, and it stays melted. The room you are fighting in gets smaller, and being shoved backwards suddenly costs something.
  • The Hollow King raises three Hollow Thrones that ward him. While one still stands your blows barely scratch him, so you stop fighting the king and go break the sources — which is what this dungeon has been teaching you since floor one.
1 Sept 2026 Improvement Crazy Cab City Claude Opus 5
Other cars sit on the road instead of sinking into it, the ramps finally have a run-up you can hit, the trees grew bark, and there is a minimap so you can see where your next fare is.
  • Every other vehicle on the road - street traffic, rival cabs, trams, parade floats and the freight train - had been driving about twenty centimetres buried in the tarmac. They now sit on the road properly, and they lean with the camber of the street instead of digging one side in.
  • Ramps used to begin with a step you bumped into rather than a lip you could climb, in every district. Each one now rises smoothly out of the road, so you get onto it at speed and keep that speed over the top. The take-off angle is unchanged, but because you no longer lose anything on the way up, jumps now carry about fifteen per cent farther than they used to.
  • There is a minimap in the top-left corner. It shows the streets around you, every passenger waiting nearby as a dot in that passenger's own colour, your drop-off as a gold diamond once someone is in the back, and rival cabs as small red squares. Anything too far away to fit is pinned to the edge pointing the way, and a red N always marks north.
  • The big direction arrow now works with an empty cab too. It points at the nearest waiting fare, shows how far away it is, and takes that passenger's colour so the arrow and the dot on the map are always the same person. It turns gold once you are carrying someone.
31 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
31 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
The last four items land — leave air behind you, throw the hunters a decoy, and breathe slower in the dark.
  • Marker Buoy: drop a buoy holding thirty seconds of air and swim back to it later. The long descent finally has a rhythm instead of one unbroken clock — and a buoy lights its own patch of water, so you can find your way home to it. It only starts holding air for you once you have swum away from it.
  • Chum Pod: bait that makes every hunting thing in range chase the cloud instead of you. It is not a smoke screen — it pulls in whatever had not noticed you yet, which is either your escape or your problem. One pod in the water at a time.
  • Scrubber Core: a cartridge that makes your air last nearly twice as long for forty-five seconds. It runs off the lamp's cell, so the whole time you are breathing slow you are seeing short.
  • Supply Drum: an old expedition's stores, and the only thing down there that puts a buoy, a pod or a flare back in your kit. Crack one and the smell brings the neighbourhood for five seconds.
31 Aug 2026 Improvement Corner Kings Claude Opus 5
A fourth boss takes over the docks, and the city gets three nights of its own — a police crackdown, a war between rivals, and somebody in your house who talks.
  • Sofia “the Harbourmaster” Kroon now runs THE DOCKS. She never pushes a corner and never comes for your house — she takes 30 % of every smuggling payout in the city and of anything you run on her docks, and sends a collector round in daylight to take it. She introduces herself in person the day the docks appear on your map.
  • Three ways to deal with her: pay the fixer for a truce, plant a snitch on any corner she owns so the manifest gets cooked and she only gets half, or go and take her HQ. Give her nothing to collect and she spends the round putting another body on the docks instead.
  • Crackdown nights: word goes round at dawn, and from ten that night every corner you work burns twice as hot with far more raids. Cop cars all over the city and the clock turns red. Pull people off anything warm, or take the night off.
  • Rival wars: some nights the bosses go for each other instead of you. Two whose turf touches spend the night on their own border, and whatever they drop belongs to nobody — free corners, if you are watching for them.
31 Aug 2026 Improvement Crazy Cab City Claude Opus 5
The ground came back, and Port Vantage got a railway.
  • Fixed the big one: whole stretches of every district were solid but invisible — you could drive across grass, courtyards and parkland that simply were not drawn. All eight districts now show the ground you are driving on.
  • Park ponds no longer sink halfway into the hillside they sit on.
  • New hazard, the level crossing: a freight line runs straight across Cannery Row and Skyline, and every road it meets has half-barriers that drop with flashing lamps and a warning bell about four seconds before the train. Beat it or wait for it.
  • New hazard, road works: lane closures in Market Quarter and Skyline, with a striped board and a skip you have to steer around, and cones you are welcome to scatter.
30 Aug 2026 Improvement Whiteout Claude Opus 5
The Last Ridge — a new pre-finale mission and the Grapnel, an enemy that drags you across the ice.
  • New Mission 11, "The Last Ridge": seven turns on a ridge of narrow passes, with every enemy type the campaign has taught you fighting on the same board. The Frostmaw is now Mission 12.
  • New enemy, the Grapnel. Its shot barely wounds — instead it hauls whoever it hits one square back along its chain, out of the doorway you were holding and into whatever else is aimed at you.
  • The chain is shown before you commit: a brass arrow and a brass square tell you exactly where you will be standing when everything else strikes, and the End Turn damage readout already counts what happens to you there.
  • A Grapnel cannot drag what it is already standing next to, so for once the safe move is to close the distance rather than keep your range.
30 Aug 2026 Improvement Mole Mayhem Claude Opus 5
King Mole and General Gnaw are no longer just big moles with more health — each now has a real second phase you have to fight your way through.
  • Wound King Mole past half health and he digs in: he roars, vanishes underground, comes up somewhere new, and leaves buried royal mines behind him. From then on he keeps tunnelling — watch for the churning ground under him and the marker showing exactly where he is about to burst out.
  • His royal mines are marked with a glowing ring so you can walk around them, and a well-placed shot will set one off from a safe distance. Land one near the King himself and he wears it.
  • Wound General Gnaw past half health and he calls in the barrage. Three patches of ground get a red crosshair, and on his next turn they are flattened by falling bombs.
  • The barrage marks are re-drawn at the start of every one of your turns, so they always show the ground you are standing on right now. Move, and you live. Stand still, and you very much do not.
30 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
A fifth fighting animal joins the stable — the club-tailed ankylosaur, whose special breaks the arena floor open and leaves it that way.
  • New species: the ankylosaur, a low, wide, heavily armoured fortress with an oversized bony club on its tail. It is the hardest animal in the game to knock off its feet and it has the best guard — but it is slow, and it would rather reshape the fight than win a race.
  • Its special, GROUNDBREAKER, is unlike the other four. The animal sets its feet, whirls its whole rear around and buries the club in the sand — and the floor splits open in a line running away from the blow.
  • The crack stays. For eleven seconds it is broken ground: bad footing that saps speed and grinds at anything standing in it, and both animals will go around it rather than through. A fight that started in an open bowl ends up being fought in the gaps.
  • It is aimed, so it can miss. The line it is about to open is painted on the sand for the whole wind-up, and stepping off that line is enough.
30 Aug 2026 Improvement The Block Claude Opus 5
Heists — plan a job, pick who goes and whether you go loud or quiet, then rob a gasworks, a bank or a diamond exchange out on the street.
  • You can now plan and pull a job. Pick one of three places on the city street, pick two to four of your crew, and decide whether you are going in loud or quiet. Then the job plays out where you can see it, in three beats — the way in, the room, the way out — and you answer each one by pointing at something on the pavement before the clock runs out.
  • Loud and quiet are two different jobs, not two difficulty settings. Loud parks a car across the pavement with the lamps on and takes more, faster, in front of everybody. Quiet goes round the back in the dark and comes away with less that nobody can describe. The same payroll job costs about seventy heat loud and about six quiet.
  • What you built decides what you can do out there. A chop shop puts a getaway car on the table, a smuggling tunnel puts an open manhole on it, a lookout or radio buys you extra seconds on every beat, and a pigeon loft means fewer people remember your faces. Anything you cannot do is still shown to you, greyed out, with the reason.
  • A job pays in cash and in swag — hot goods sitting in your building, making heat until somebody comes to buy them. A police raid carries the lot out to a van unless you have a stash room downstairs.
29 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Opus 5
Act four, "Above the Storm" — four new levels, a storm that hunts you, and the campaign's last stretch to the Storm Keep.
  • Four new levels take the campaign from twelve to sixteen: The Chimney Stair, The Lightning Road, The Cloud Sea and The Thunderhead, the climb out of the foundry and up to the keep's own foundations.
  • The storm is now a hazard in its own right. Lightning rods stand on the decks, and when one lights up you cannot duck it and you cannot jump it — the only answer is to not be standing there. The warning is long and it is drawn on the ground beside you.
  • The Cloud Sea breaks out above the weather into the only daylight in the game: three long platform bridges over open sky, the widest crossings anywhere in the campaign, worked by kite riders with all the room they want.
  • Storm Keep is still the last level and the Storm Shogun still ends the story. Saves carry across untouched — if you were partway through, Continue picks up exactly where it left off, and if you had already beaten him, the keep stays yours.
29 Aug 2026 Improvement Skull Tide Claude Opus 5
The drowned fleet gets a hunter of its own, and your gun crews learn a second way to load.
  • A new enemy: the wraith brig, a drowned hull that sounds, vanishes under the sea where no cannonball can reach her, and comes back up right alongside you.
  • She always tells you where she will surface — a pale green ring stands on the water for the whole time she is gone. Sail off it, or have a loaded broadside pointing into it.
  • She comes up helpless for a moment, so a captain who reads that ring lands a shot and a half.
  • A new refit at the Shipwright: Chain Shot. Fire on a target beyond sixty metres and the crews load bar-and-chain instead — less damage to her hull, but her rigging comes down and she makes half her speed for six seconds.
29 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
A fifth Delver joins the dungeon — the Summoner, who barely fights at all and instead raises a bone servant to do it.
  • New class: the Summoner. Its own attack is the feeblest in the game on purpose — what you actually play is a bone servant you raise, place and command.
  • One button, two verbs. Press SP to raise a servant wherever you are aiming; press it again to recall it. Recalling saves the servant's remaining health, so pulling it out of a losing fight is how you keep it. Letting it break leaves you alone for ten seconds.
  • The servant fights on its own, holds a line so the things that charge you go for the bones instead, chews spawners while you kite, and eats missiles that were meant for you.
  • A full eighteen-skill Summoner tree in the Vault, in three branches: tougher and deadlier bones, a hex that shapes fights rather than winning them, and ways to keep a very fragile delver alive. Six capstones, including two servants at once, a servant that sweeps everything in reach, and a hex that drags bodies to your servant instead of pushing them away.
29 Aug 2026 Improvement The Block Claude Opus 5
The block now has a city around it — send your people out into the docks, the market and uptown, and decide what they do out there with your finger on the glass.
  • Send a crew member out on a prowl. There is a whole city street either side of the block now — the docks to the west, the market and then uptown to the east — and they walk it while you watch.
  • Two or three times on the walk they stop in front of something: a lorry with its tailgate down, a night watchman with a lamp, a lit window over a drainpipe. Point at what they should do before the clock over their head runs out. Standing there is an answer too.
  • What they bring home pays in money and reputation. Who saw them do it pays in heat, and if enough people saw it, one of them knocks on your door wanting paying for their silence.
  • Five new rooms, twenty in all: a numbers room, a steam laundry, a furnace that burns evidence and money, an athletic club that is the only room that makes a person better at their job, and a pigeon loft that means fewer people remember your prowler’s face.
28 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
A fifth fighter joins the roster: BORA, a taekwondo competitor who fights at head height and makes you pay for every button.
  • New playable fighter: BORA, taekwondo — the only fighter on the card wearing armour, and the first whose whole game happens above the waist.
  • She is the slowest fighter in the game on every single button and the hardest hitting after Ozeki: her roundhouse and her axe kick are the biggest strikes in the game, and whiffing either hands the round over.
  • Her punch string ends in an axe kick that drops from overhead and knocks you down — so ducking under her fists puts your head exactly where it lands.
  • She has her own armour-cracking impact sounds and her own cold violet hit sparks, and her own bow-and-raised-fist entrance and victory.
28 Aug 2026 Improvement Corner Kings Claude Opus 5
Corner Kings gives you a block before it gives you a city — a wider, quieter map, a guided first shift, and faces for everyone in it.
  • The city has been rebuilt with wide roads and real space between buildings, so you can actually see the street you are working.
  • A new run now starts on THE BLOCK alone. The rest of the city is dark and fenced off, and each rival’s district opens the first night his cars come out for you — the docks open once you are holding enough corners to be worth robbing.
  • A short guided first shift walks you through your first moves on the actual street: pick a crew chip, put them on your corner, start the clock, take a loose corner. Skippable, never repeated, and switchable in Options.
  • The map stops shouting. Corner symbols and defender counts fade out when you pull back and come straight back when you zoom in to work, so an overview looks like a city instead of a wall of icons.
28 Aug 2026 Improvement Crazy Cab City Claude Opus 5
The cab finally has the power its speedo always claimed, the city has roads long enough to use it, and the taxi looks like a taxi.
  • Fixed the real reason the cab felt gutless: a physics bug had been quietly building up an invisible brake, capping every cab at little over half its stated top speed and, on a hill, shoving it back down. Cabs now pull hard from a standstill and hold their top speed.
  • The cab will never roll backwards under throttle again, however steep the street. Stop on a hill with no pedal pressed and it holds itself instead of sliding away.
  • Every district is bigger and opened up, with two or three wide expressways running clear across the city - long, fast, and nearly free of junctions, so there is finally somewhere to open the throttle.
  • The taxi is a proper taxi now: cab proportions, a lit roof sign, a checker band down the doors, grille, lights, plates, mirrors and hubcaps. Rival cabs and street traffic got the same treatment.
28 Aug 2026 Improvement The Block Claude Opus 5
The people of the block finally look like people, the intro plays without the menu on top of it, and the door stops hammering.
  • Everyone in the building has been redrawn. Long coats with lapels, a shirt and a tie or a waistcoat, real hands and shoes, a face you can read, a lit cigarette here and there, and a shadow under their feet so nobody floats an inch off the floorboards.
  • Seven kinds of hat instead of one — fedora, flat cap, bowler, homburg, newsboy, a copper's peaked cap, or nothing at all — so the crew, the tenants and the people on your step are all recognisably different people.
  • You can now tell who is at the door from the silhouette. The beat cop has the tunic and the nightstick, the detective the belted coat and notebook, the fence a bundle over his shoulder, the envoy pinstripes and a carnation. A client with cash in hand looks exactly like a client with cash in hand — which is still the point.
  • Starting a new operation no longer leaves the main menu sitting on top of the opening scene, and nothing pops up over the ending either.
28 Aug 2026 Improvement The Block Claude Opus 5
Some of the people knocking are police now — and when the raid finally comes, you get to fight it.
  • Recruits at your door can be undercover officers, and a client with cash in hand can be a sting. Nothing on the outside tells them apart.
  • New door option: check who they are. A charm hand on the pawn shop counter, or anyone paranoid or cautious in the crew, can screen a stranger — it costs seconds off the clock and it is not a certainty.
  • Make one and you can shut the door on them or feed them a false story. Miss one and nobody tells you: your heat starts climbing on its own, they never get unhappy, and sooner or later somebody knocks wanting money for the name.
  • New crew trait, Cautious: the best pair of eyes you can have at the door, at the cost of a little earning.
28 Aug 2026 Improvement The Block Claude Opus 5
The Block grows downwards and upwards — dig out a cellar under the road, clear the roof above the top floor, and start caring about what you build next to what.
  • Dig out a cellar under the street. Nobody sees a shovel, so it costs no heat at all, and work down there is 30% less visible than work upstairs.
  • Clear the rooftop for a lookout post and a radio room. Everything up there is more exposed, but you get a whistle before a raid arrives and extra seconds every time the law is on your step.
  • Eight new rooms to build: a stash room that keeps your money out of police hands, a smuggling tunnel your people can escape through, a chop shop, a speakeasy bar, a back-room casino, an air shaft, a lookout post and a radio room.
  • Rooms now react to their neighbours. A press next to an air shaft makes far less heat, a casino next to a bar earns a third more, and nobody sleeps in bunks next to a running press. Green and red badges on the shared wall show it, and the build menu tells you before you spend.
27 Aug 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Opus 5
The kunai bandolier, the Storm's Eye and the Storm Avatar — a fourth weapon, a fourth arena and a third warlord, and the storm now opens its eye every tenth Endless wave.
  • A fourth weapon: the kunai bandolier. One kunai hobbles a light enemy, two stake it to the flagstones, and a third tears the set out in a burst. Heavies and warlords shrug it off entirely, so it never trivialises a boss.
  • A pinned enemy is rooted, not stunned — it will still swing at anything already in reach. Staking a foe is a position, not a kill.
  • Your steel is finite and it stays where it lands. Five kunai, one back every few seconds, and every one that misses or works loose stands in the floor waiting to be picked up — spend it, then go and fetch it back.
  • Press Q, or the left bumper on a controller, to throw a kunai straight away. You can also hold the shuriken button — right mouse, or the STAR button on a phone — to bring the bandolier up and paint the line your throw will take. Holding always sends one shuriken out first; Q and the left bumper are the two routes without it.
27 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
Five new creatures move into the trench — one for every depth, each with its own tell and its own answer.
  • The shallows finally have something with teeth: the spearfin hangs high above you, flares its sail, and spears straight down a line it has already locked. Slide sideways — it commits to where you were, not where you are.
  • Duskfangs hunt in threes and think as one. They ring you and send exactly one runner at a time, so watch for the one that goes still and lights up its jaw — the hole it leaves in the circle is your way out.
  • Not everything glowing in the midnight is salvage. The lantern mimic sits perfectly still and shines like a pearl; up close you can see the rim of shell around the light, and a sonar ping calls it red. Read it right and it pays better than the pearl it copied.
  • Rock grazers crawl the trench walls and want nothing to do with you until you crowd them. Then they spit the rock back out, and the silt hangs in the shaft for over a minute — your lamp cannot reach through it and your props cannot hurry in it. Kill one and it empties its gut into the water you still have to climb through.
27 Aug 2026 Improvement Corner Kings Claude Opus 5
A sixth kind of crew — the snitch — plus two new rackets, a casino and a laundromat, and a building on every corner in the city.
  • The SNITCH is a new kind of crew you send onto somebody else’s corner on their own. Nobody starts a fight, because nobody knows who they are — but while they’re inside, that corner defends at half strength, so your muscle takes it in half the time.
  • A planted snitch gets you word from inside: hours before a boss makes his move, you’re told exactly which of your corners he’s coming for. That corner is marked on the street so you can get somebody on it.
  • Snitches never fight, but they do get made. The odds are worse inside a boss’s own headquarters, and worse again if you leave them out there until they’re exhausted — bring them home now and then.
  • CASINOS are the biggest night in the city and the fastest way to get the police interested. Leave nobody standing over the floor and the house keeps most of the money.
27 Aug 2026 Improvement Crazy Cab City Claude Opus 5
Every passenger is now somebody, and five new rival cabs are working the streets against you.
  • Five kinds of passenger, each wanting a different drive: the Tipper pays huge but hates waiting, the Thrill-seeker pays double for drifts and big air, the Nervous one pays a bonus if you get them there without a single slide or scrape, and the V.I.P. pays double fare and buys you far more clock.
  • You can tell who is waiting before you stop: the glowing ring on the kerb is colour-coded, and each passenger looks the part — a sun hat, a green mohawk, a clutched bag, a briefcase and a sharp suit.
  • Every personality speaks up when you pick them up, cheers your stunts or yelps at them, and the card in the corner tells you exactly what they are paying for.
  • Six rival cab crews now work Port Vantage instead of one: the Scout races you to the nearest fare, the Poacher wants the exact fare you are going for, the Blocker parks itself in front of your bonnet, the Tailgater shunts you from behind, the Bandit ignores one-way signs entirely, and Vega — the best cab in the city — hunts fares while you are empty and gets in your way the moment you are carrying
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Poker Tiles Claude Fable 5
Two new boss blinds and six new accessoires fill out Poker Tiles' full roster.
  • Creeping Frost: a new boss that freezes one more tile after every swap you make — match through the ice before the board locks up.
  • The Croupier: a new boss whose dealer rotates a column of cards down every third swap, breaking up the hands you were building.
  • Six new accessoires in the shop: The Kicker, Roulette Wheel, Rainbow Chip, Low Ball, Tip Jar and Speed Dealer, each with its own scoring twist.
  • Every new boss and accessoire has its own painted portrait or icon, and freezing tiles now crackle with a new sound and ice animation.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Race Evolutions Claude Fable 5
Every crash now plays a quick, skippable slow-motion wreck cinematic before you're back on the road.
  • Wrecking the car cuts to a trackside camera that slides past your tumbling car in slow motion, with debris flying and a banner naming what got you: a crash, a tire barrier, the wrecking ball, or the water.
  • The whole thing lasts about a second and a half and any key, button or tap skips it instantly, so crashing never slows the game down.
  • New impact, debris and checkpoint sounds make the hit land.
  • During the crash replay, Escape and the pause button skip it instead of quitting or pausing mid-tumble.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Legend of Melda Claude Fable 5
Two new abilities complete the hero's kit — the Whisper Step dash and Hollow Sight.
  • Bregan the Woodcutter now teaches the Whisper Step: double-tap a direction (or Shift, left bumper, or the new STEP button on phones) to dash — untouchable while it lasts, and long enough to clear a small pit.
  • The Trapped Villager in the caves grants Hollow Sight: walls that were only shadow reveal themselves as violet veils you can walk through.
  • Five hidden caches open up with them — a corner of the Thornwood across a new pit, and veiled pockets in the caves, the drowned halls, the Emberforge and the lair, each holding a heart shard.
  • Both abilities are saved with your progress and show in the item bar and the controls list.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Scarecrow Claude Opus 5
Two brand-new enemies and three new Nights take the campaign from nine nights to twelve — and the narrator finally counts them right.
  • Three new Nights join the campaign, each with its own field: the Hexrow's bruised violet boundary strip, the Gleaning's bare pre-dawn dirt full of blowing chaff, and Crowfall's pitch-black last stand before the King.
  • Meet the hex-post: a rotted witch-stake that never chases you. It plants itself, then grows a creeping fence of thorns around the ground it stands on. Dash the fence for free, or fell the post — but ignore it and it takes the field a circle at a time.
  • Meet the winnower: a hunched thing behind a huge nailed shield. Hit the shield and almost nothing gets through; hit its back and it hurts far more. You cannot kill it by backing away — you have to get around it, or bait the shield-charge it cannot steer and punish it while it recovers.
  • Crowfall is the campaign's one rhythm night. It goes quiet, warns you, and then the murder closes in from every direction at once instead of rolling in from one side.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Foxblade Claude Fable 5
A third boss joins the road to the shrine: the Lantern Keeper, an aerial duel fought with nothing beneath you.
  • New boss late in Act 5: the Lantern Keeper hovers over a bottomless gorge and can only be reached by chaining cuts along the road of lanterns he hangs whenever his guard opens.
  • Every cut you land on him hangs a road back to your ledge, so a good hit never leaves you stranded over the void.
  • Three phases that raise the pressure: the road starts going out behind you, one lantern is a flameless decoy, and embers rain on your only footing.
  • A new entrance scene with its own voice line, a fresh night-sky backdrop over the clouds, and a road-timer under his health strokes so you always know how long the way across will burn.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
The campaign is complete — sixteen sectors, and the last one closes the necklace and lights the final Star Gate.
  • Sector 16, The Whole Necklace, is here: the finale, and the only sector that is a closed ring instead of a chain. Worlds circle a great Beacon that hangs far above them, out of reach of your longest jump and your longest thread.
  • Everything in it runs on one twenty-five second heartbeat. Eight worlds sail home one at a time, the heaviest ground in the sector lets go of you, and a ladder of three rungs stands between the ring and the star — all on the same beat, for eight seconds a lap. Miss it and you wait for the next one.
  • New in the finale: a world that rings while it is still moving, a second tidal world whose weight you have to plan around, and twenty star shards, the most in any sector — two of which only exist during that eight-second window.
  • Finishing the game now plays a proper ending: three narrated shots over your own restored cosmos, in the same voice that opened it. It can be skipped, and Keep Exploring still drops you back into the cosmos afterwards.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Scrap Colossus Claude Fable 5
The eighth and final challenger, The Parts King, joins the ladder with his own ending.
  • A new boss waits after Slagheart: The Parts King rebuilds every plate you knock off him from the wreck piles in the yard, so the fight is a race to strip him faster than he repairs.
  • Knock him over and his repairs stall; every rebuilt plate is weaker than the last.
  • When he starts losing he tears his own armour off and doubles his rate of fire.
  • Beating him plays a new narrated ending and marks your machine undisputed.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Fable 5
Hyperdrift gains a fifth biome, the Ash Mantle, between Mag-Storm and the Core.
  • A new stage, the Ash Mantle: an acid-green, ash-choked cave that sits between Mag-Storm and the Core, faster and tighter than anything before it.
  • Nothing new to learn, everything to re-read quicker: a collapsing roof, its own blast-door vault and a snaking run-out into the gate.
  • Endless mode now cycles five biomes, with eight fresh, verified Ash Mantle layouts.
  • Time attack is now a five-stage race, so best times start over; your old record is kept.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Mole Mayhem Claude Fable 5
Act II — The Deep: five new battles, medics and bombardiers, two new arenas, the Burrow Queen boss, and a narrated intro cinematic.
  • The campaign continues past General Gnaw into five underground battles, ending against the Burrow Queen — a real boss who summons her brood and stomps the ground once you wound her.
  • Two new enemy ranks: medics patch up wounded moles, bombardiers seize the high ground and rain airstrikes.
  • Two new battlefields: a dripping cavern with its own echoing atmosphere, and a volcano where falling in means lava.
  • The game now opens with a short narrated cinematic showing how diplomacy went (badly). Skip it any time.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Salvage Point Claude Fable 5
Four new sites and a tenth debris type — the campaign is now twelve sites long, with a solar-flare hazard, a fault-line site, a plateau defence and a shield-casting enemy that forces you to look up.
  • Four new sites join the campaign before the finale: a twilight shelf, a flare-battered relay station, a split fault line, and a high mesa with no cover.
  • New enemy: the Shroud Caster. It hangs high and shields everything falling beneath it. Turrets cannot see through the field, so you have to take the caster down yourself.
  • Solar flares on Flare Station knock every turret dark for five seconds after a warning klaxon. Your gun still works. Use it.
  • The Fissure refuses turrets on its cracked lips, so your perimeter has to spread out. The Mesa ends with every kind of debris in the sky at once.
26 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
The circuit has a third venue — the Sinkhole, where the floor itself is the thing trying to kill you.
  • New arena: the Sinkhole, a shelf of cracked flagging at the bottom of a limestone shaft, fought at rungs 3, 6 and 8. You can see every plate seam in the floor from the moment you walk in.
  • Its pressure is nothing like the other two. Nothing closes in on you — instead single plates crack, sag and drop away into the cave below, leaving permanent holes you have to fight around. The arena loses ground in chunks, anywhere, including under your feet.
  • Get caught standing on a plate when it lets go and you lose a chunk of health and a long, ugly moment hauling yourself back over the lip. A pteranodon already in the air simply flies over the whole problem.
  • Every hole stays for the rest of the round and slowly widens, so a fight fifty seconds in is a completely different shape from the one that started.
25 Aug 2026 Improvement Whiteout Claude Opus 5
Deep Winter — a new tenth mission and two new enemies that break the rules you have been playing by.
  • New mission: Deep Winter, the last leg before the Frostmaw. Seven turns on the campaign's most open board, with the middle deliberately left bare — you will need the room.
  • New enemy: the Hoarfrost Wisp. It has no front and no back. Wherever it settles, all four squares around it freeze at once — the one it aimed at and the three it did not. Never crowd it; kill it at reach, or drop it down a crevasse.
  • New enemy: the Rimeskitter. It moves and bites only corner to corner, so the square directly in front of it is the safe one and a body in its lane blocks nothing at all. Wall its corners instead — and note that one shove flips which half of the board it can reach.
  • Two new lesson cards teach both of them the first time you meet them, and each enemy has its own sound and its own figure on the ice.
25 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Opus 5
The ending is no longer a cutscene — you swim the last 180 metres of the riser yourself, with the Siren coming up the shaft behind you. Plus a new deck lit only by things that want you lit back.
  • THE ASCENT: the escape is now played, not watched. The last hatch drops you into 180 metres of open riser and you swim it. Forward is wherever you are looking, so climbing means looking up — and the lamp still stops the Siren dead, but only where you point it. You can climb or you can hold it off. Never both in the same second.
  • The Siren climbs the shaft behind you and lunges when you get close to daylight. It telegraphs every lunge, and light or a dropped flare during the wind-up turns it away. Four collapsed deck plates block the way up, each with one torn hole you have to find.
  • Whatever air, battery and flares you carried off the last deck are what you have in the riser. Hoarded flares finally pay off: one sinks, burns, and drives the thing back down while you climb.
  • NEW DECK — THE BLOOM NURSERY: a spawning chamber where the only light comes from the growths, and the growths sting whatever they can see. Down here the Siren does not hunt you. It hunts light. Your own lamp is what tells it where to go.
25 Aug 2026 Improvement Heatwave Claude Opus 5
Heatwave gets its sixth and final event — the 110m Hurdles, ten barriers, three strides between each, and a stride pattern that decides everything.
  • New event: the 110m Hurdles. Ten barriers, the first at 13.72 m and the rest every 9.14 m, then fourteen metres of flat track to the line. Three tiers of qualifying standards, same as every other event.
  • The gap between the barriers never changes but your stride does. The beat bar works out the interval that gets your last contact onto the take-off point and asks you for it — hold the pattern and you skim the barriers, lose it and you spend the race in the air. There is a GROUND readout on screen the whole way round showing exactly how much of the race your feet have actually been on the track.
  • Three contacts between barriers means you leave from the same foot every time. Take four and you arrive on the wrong one — chop a short stride to get back, or reach for the barrier and risk sending your trail leg round the outside of it, which the officials will not miss.
  • Barriers you crowd get clipped, and barriers you really crowd go over with you and stay flat on the track behind you. Running straight through one is legal and leaves you on the floor for half a second.
25 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
Eleven new relics take the in-delve trinket pool from eight to nineteen, each one a verb the dungeon did not have before.
  • Eleven new relics to find in chests and from bosses, and none of them is a bigger number: break a spawner and it detonates, open locked doors without keys, stand still until the pack loses your trail, earn a chest every tenth kill, crush enemies against walls, pay for wounds in gold instead of blood, break the pack's nerve with a kill they can see, choke a wounded spawner so it stops producing, tu
  • Every relic works for all four delvers, so a Cleric and a Knight get the same use out of the same find.
  • Bodies you leave can no longer be raised by necromancers if you carry Gravebind — the first hard counter to them in the game.
  • The relic display now collapses to a compact rack of icons once you are carrying more than six, so a late run does not bury your health bar. Fits properly on a phone too.
24 Aug 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Opus 5
Shinobi Storm gains its third battleground — the Moonlit Rooftops — and the Eaves Stalker, the one enemy at home up there.
  • New arena: the Moonlit Rooftops. Wet kawara tile, lantern-lit alleys dropping away below, rain, thunder and a bell tower — and a floor you can fall through. Two alleys and three light-wells cut the roof up; three plank bridges are the only walk-across.
  • Mind the gaps. Step over an edge and you go down into the alley, losing a slice of health and your position — but a shadow-dash clears any gap in the arena, and you get a moment's grace on the lip before you drop.
  • The alley cuts both ways. Knock a light enemy over an edge and it is gone for good. Heavies and warlords are far too planted to be shoved off, so the roof will not fight your hard fights for you.
  • New enemy: the Eaves Stalker. No sword, just climbing claws — he paints the tile he means to land on, then crosses an entire alley in one pounce that comes down in a burst of broken tile. Step off his lane and punish the landing, or swat him out of the air mid-flight.
24 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
AI Fighter gets a fourth fighter — LUA, a capoeirista who fights from the floor up.
  • New selectable fighter: LUA, capoeira. She is built completely differently from the other three — lean and long-limbed, bell-bottomed trousers, beaded locs, and a low swaying ginga stance where one hand stays down.
  • Her whole game is the low line. She has the fastest low poke and by far the fastest trip in the game, so she can knock you down from ranges the others need a slow sweep for.
  • She also has the biggest launcher of any normal attack in the game, a back-handspring kick that fires from a crouch, and a spinning heel rage art that comes around at chest height with both hands on the floor.
  • Her punch string changes level on you: two high hits and then a spinning mid kick, so guarding it high the whole way eats the last one.
24 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
The Twilight now has something in it you cannot see — THE HOLLOW, a glass-bodied light-eater on a dead diver's boat, plus four new pieces of salvage that give back ammo, hull and light.
  • A fourth boss, THE HOLLOW, waits around a derelict submersible between 1000m and 1450m. Its body is glass: your lamp goes straight through it, and so do your torpedoes. It can only be hurt while the water it is in is lit.
  • Light it however you can — pop a flare, ping the sonar, or fire into the dark and read the flash of your own torpedo. Best of all, wait: when it opens up and drinks your lamp, the stolen light shows inside it, and that is your window.
  • It drinks your light as it comes. The closer it gets, the less of the abyss you can see, and at half health it takes the derelict's beacon too and leaves you as the only lamp down there.
  • The dead boat arms you before the fight starts: its torpedo racks float clear of the hull, outside the range that wakes the thing feeding on it. Its cargo bay only opens when the Hollow breaks.
24 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Your riders now carry weapons — a charging lance or a horn bow — every fight you win teaches your dinosaur something, and the game finally tells you it has been saving all along.
  • Riders can be armed at the market's new armoury. A riding lance couches for a full charge with enormous reach and a knock that throws riders clean out of the saddle — but miss, and your rider is left hanging over the neck with no guard for a moment. A horn bow does nothing at all up close and rains arrows on anything further off, which finally makes a defensive order worth shouting.
  • Weapons are worn where you can see them. Your rider carries theirs around the yard and into the sand, and rival stables start arming their own riders from about the third rung, so the lance you bought is an edge and not a cheat.
  • A weapon belongs to the person, not the animal. Arm whoever you like — but a rider who wears out and retires takes it with them.
  • Winning a fight now makes your dinosaur better, not just richer. It comes back a point stronger, faster or deadlier depending on how you won: land your specials and it learns its special, take it two rounds to nothing and it learns speed, grind it out and it learns strength.
23 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Opus 5
The duck gate that trapped you is fixed, ducking now looks like a real shinobi slide, and two new enemies close out the roster at eight.
  • Fixed a trap in Grove of Whispers: after crawling under the fallen gate there was no room to stand back up before the crates, and you could get stuck there for good. The gate and the crates have been moved apart, and one held jump vaults the stack cleanly out of the crawl.
  • Ducking is a proper slide now. Moving, you drop into a low shinobi slide with a lead leg out, a hand skimming the ground, a trailing scarf and a spray of grit; standing still under a gate, you settle onto one knee instead.
  • The whole ninja has been rebuilt with rounder, jointed limbs — real elbows, knees and ankles, a hooded head, wrapped forearms and shins, and a longer scarf that trails behind you. Every enemy and all three bosses got the same upgrade.
  • New enemy, the Lanternbearer: a rival drifting overhead under a burning paper lantern who marks the ground beneath you and sets it alight. The fire stays lit and it outlives him, so keep moving — and think twice before cutting him down while standing underneath.
23 Aug 2026 Improvement Skull Tide Claude Opus 5
The Leviathan rises — a third boss that is not a ship, fought with your broadside at the very top of the bounty ladder.
  • A sea beast now comes up in the deep water beyond your legend: a huge head ringed by tentacle limbs, each one its own target with its own hull on the bar.
  • Shot glances off its scaled crown, so the arms are your way in — cut one away and it hurts the beast, cut them all and it sounds early.
  • Watch its eyes. When they come up the jaws are about to open, and a broadside down the open throat bites harder than anything else you can do to it.
  • The arms rear and slam the sea where you are heading, marking the water first — hold your course into the ring and you will wear it.
23 Aug 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Opus 5
The browser no longer freezes when you fire or lose your suit, and the toolkit is finally the full ten.
  • Fixed the stutter the game has had since launch: firing a weapon, losing the exosuit or lighting a flare could lock the browser for up to a fifth of a second. The longest hitch during play dropped from 230 milliseconds to a single frame, and normal frame rate is unchanged.
  • THERMAL LANCE — an oxygen lance that cuts a straight line clean through everything in front of you, and leaves the far end of the cut burning so you can see what you just walked into.
  • CABLE SPOOL — a drum of live cable that leashes whatever it hits to the spot it landed. It keeps fighting; it just cannot follow you. And the arcing cable means the thing you tied up is the one thing you can always see in the dark.
  • INSPECTION MIRROR — does no damage at all. It stands where you throw it, throws your headlamp round the corner, outlines every body near it, and every radio-guided machine in the room turns to look at it instead of you.
23 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Saddles: four grades of tack you can buy for a specific dinosaur, so a big hit is far less likely to throw your rider out of the seat.
  • Every dino can now be fitted with better tack from its own panel on the ranch — a studded saddle, a banded war saddle, a horned war saddle, or a champion’s rig. Each grade holds the rider on better than the last.
  • Tack is bought for one particular animal and stays on it. It never wears out and it cannot be sold or moved to another dino, so the question the purchase asks is which of your dinosaurs is worth the good saddle.
  • It protects against ordinary violence, not against everything. A heavy blow that used to unseat a rider now often does not, but a special — a seismic slam, a talon dive — still throws them. No saddle in the game makes you safe from those.
  • You can see it work. When a hit would have unseated your rider on the tack they used to wear, they pitch off the blow, catch the pommel and haul themselves back up, and the HUD calls HELD ON and names the saddle that saved them.
23 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Specials you can actually read, a med tent that gets better when you upgrade it, and two new training rigs in the yard.
  • Every special move now announces itself: the ground lights up in that species colour, the animal glows, the move name flashes on screen, and you are told what it left behind - poisoned, burning, bleeding, knocked down. All four are now unmistakably different from each other, and from an ordinary heavy swing.
  • A pteranodon climbing for a talon dive paints a ring on the sand where it means to land, so you can see it coming from the moment it takes off. Eight new sounds give each special its own windup and its own impact.
  • Upgrading the med tent now makes treatment cheaper AND stronger at every tier, instead of quietly making it worse value. A top-tier med bay treats for 8 gold and clears three days at a stroke, against 25 gold for one day before. The herbalist draught gets cheaper too, and the price is shown before you spend the honor.
  • Dinos fall ill far less often - roughly once every six days instead of every three - the illness is shorter for a small stable, and nothing can get sick on your first day.
22 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
22 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
Two new sectors take the campaign to fifteen, and the worlds themselves have started to ring.
  • A new hazard: some worlds now toll. A seam of light on the surface gathers, then a wave of light runs out across the whole near side of the world — and the only way past it is to be in the air when it reaches you.
  • Every ringing world warns you three times before it commits: the seam is lit even when the world is quiet, the rings contracting into it during the windup show you exactly how far the wave will travel, and a dark band runs out ahead of the crest.
  • Sector 14, Stonesong: a new cluster built entirely around learning to read the wave, from a slow first toll you watch from safety, through a world with two seams at once, to heavy ground where you get far less air to clear it with.
  • Sector 15, The Last Weave: the biggest, busiest cluster in the game so far. Creeping rime, a sweeping blade, a squall, a rolling boulder, a crumbling bridge with a current across it, worlds that weigh half or half again what they should, and two that ring — all in one place.
22 Aug 2026 Improvement Scrap Colossus Claude Opus 5
Two new challengers come for your crown, and a sixth ring to fight the first one in.
  • After you take the title from Colossus Rex, the yard sends contenders after it. Two new champions now wait at the top of the ladder.
  • THE WIDOW mounts every gun below her waist and circles you at a fixed distance, hull square on, firing at your knees. All that plate on your chest and head does nothing here — refit low or lose.
  • SLAGHEART is a furnace hulk who spends heat instead of managing it: the hotter he runs the faster he walks and the harder he hits, and he will wade into molten slag to stoke himself. Cook him and his guns lock out — that is your window, and he spends it swinging a maul.
  • THE WASH is a rain-lashed flooded pan where footing never comes back properly: both machines recover their balance at half speed, so chip damage you would shrug off anywhere else will put you on your back. Its low spillway weirs stop a knee gun and nothing higher.
22 Aug 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Opus 5
The rift's last chamber opens: two new hazards to read and REACTOR HEART, the wide-open reactor hall that stands between you and the escape.
  • ARC BEAMS: two emitter heads face each other from opposite walls and strike a lethal filament straight across the middle of the tunnel. It is the opposite of an iris gate — the centre is what goes deadly, and you commit to the channel over it or the channel under it. Both heads spool amber and a dashed ghost line shows exactly where the beam will land before it lands there.
  • PISTONS: wall rams that punch across the cave and pull back flush again. They come in banks on one machine cycle, each ram a half beat behind the last, so a bank hammers past you like a press line. There is always a safe window — you just have to fly on the beat to use it.
  • REACTOR HEART: the finale of The Core. The tunnel blows out to more than double width into a furnace hall, three arc beams sweep the approach in a zigzag, and a huge pulsing reactor sits in the middle of the room as the last thing you have to fly around. A garland of energy cells hangs close to it, so the tight line pays.
  • Three new sounds — the ram's clang, the arc's crack, and the reactor's slow heartbeat — and a painted reactor hall lighting the chamber from behind.
21 Aug 2026 Improvement Kong Climb Claude Opus 5
Act IV — The Summit: four new boards, a final boss who tears the arena apart, and an ending shot at the real top of the tower.
  • Four new boards take the climb from twelve floors to sixteen: 325m Neon Yards, where the conveyors run the way you are going and deliver you straight into the pistons; 350m Collapse, where the decking cracks, shakes and drops away a second and a half after you stand on it; 375m Ascent, a service hoist that carries you fourteen floors past burner landings and barrel chutes; and 400m King of the Tow
  • The final boss fights back by taking the floor with him. Four hits, four phases, and for every blow you land he rips a span out of the crown and drops it into the city — until you are fighting on islands with holes between them, against an ape who jumps them better than you do.
  • The ending has moved to the summit. Beating 400m rolls a new cinematic shot on the crown with fresh narration, and the win screen now tells you the tower is conquered.
  • Two new things the tower can do to you: floors that fail under your weight, and a lift that leaves whether you are ready or not. No new enemies — Act IV is a test of the eight you already know how to read.
21 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Opus 5
Act three finally has a boss — the Foundry Oni, the smith who forged the Storm Shogun's armour, waiting on the floor of his own hall.
  • The Foundry Oni now guards the end of The Oni's Forge, a huge horned smith with a forge maul and armour glowing at the seams. He is the third boss of the campaign.
  • His hammer slam sends two ridges of white-hot, buckled floor racing out along the deck. They are ankle high, so crouching will not save you — this is the one attack in the game you have to jump.
  • The crucible above the arena tips and drops a curtain of molten iron. The safe gaps are marked in blue a beat before it falls, and one is never where you are already standing, so every pour costs you a run. He narrows it down to a single gap once he is hurt.
  • Get too close and he answers with a flat hammer sweep. In his last third he slams twice in a row and calls his forge hands in off the line.
21 Aug 2026 Improvement Antibody Claude Opus 5
A sixth act opens under the Infected Core — the Helix Vault, three new pathogens, and a final boss that has to be shot through a moving gap in its own armour.
  • Killing the Prime Strain is no longer the end. The infection wrote itself into the host's own genome, and the Helix Vault is where that copy lives: a new final act with five waves, its own cold blue nucleus backdrop and its own music.
  • Chimera Zero, the new last boss, wears a calcified shell with a single aperture that sweeps back and forth — you have to fly to where the gap is pointing to land a shot, while a braided double helix of fire pours down. Halfway through, the shell splits open and it fights with attacks stolen from every boss before it.
  • Three new pathogens with three new problems: a siphon that makes the toughest thing on screen bulletproof until you kill the siphon itself, a seeder whose slow spores steer after you, and paired chromatin coils strung together by a filament you have to fly around.
  • Your bomb still cuts through all of it — armour plate, siphon shield and boss shell alike.
21 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Opus 5
A twelfth deck, the Derrick Well, and the Weave — a creature that closes the corridors behind you.
  • New deck: Deck A — the Derrick Well, a drilling well and its bays, sitting between the Riser Spine and the Moon Pool.
  • New creature: the Weave. It never chases you and it cannot kill you — it grows over the doorways around it, so the route you learned on the way in may not be there on the way back.
  • Hold your dive lamp on a sealed doorway and the growth withers back and lets go, at the cost of extra battery. A flare burning in the gap does it faster and leaves your hands free. Left alone, it eventually releases on its own — a dead lamp will cost you time, never the run.
  • The Weave will never close the last way to the keycard, the hatch, a supply or the way out, and it never grows over a doorway you are standing in or shining your lamp at.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Kong Climb Claude Fable 5
Each board now has a look of its own — cold and tight on ice, warm in the furnace, desaturated with lightning gusts in the storm — and the sky above the tower is finally visible.
  • The picture is graded live: colour drains and dips on death, pushes warm when the boss is winded, spikes white on a boss hit or an arced power-up, and pops on a stage clear.
  • Each board has its own look, applied as it loads.
  • The sky behind the tower now shows through above it, with its animated stars, moon and nebulae.
  • The right things glow and the wrong things stopped: stripes, rails, the gold hammer and trim were re-tiered above the glow threshold, and beams, kerbs and cleats deliberately left below it.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Opus 5
The shinobi has a third weapon — a kusarigama chain you wind up and let fly, with two beats and three blessings of its own.
  • New weapon: the kusarigama. Hold the chain button to wind the weighted sickle overhead, release to strike. The longer you hold, the further and harder it lands — but winding slows you down, so there's a real decision with a brute walking at you.
  • Its first beat is the hook: hurl the chain out and drag a foe off its feet all the way back to you, stunned and ready for the katana. Finally there's an answer to the throwers, war-drummers and storm acolytes who spend the whole fight hanging back out of reach.
  • Its second beat is the sweep: a huge circling arc of chain that reaches nearly twice as far as the katana and shoves everything around you away. Pull one in, then clear the rest off.
  • Brutes, shieldbearers, naginata guards and warlords are too heavy to drag — the chain bites them harder instead, so they still have to be fought the old way.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Project Ember Claude Fable 5
Restoring a room is the showcase it should always have been — a ring of warm light sweeps out, tiles scan in behind it and embers fill the air.
  • Restoration now opens with a warm lead ring and a ring of embers sweeping outward, tiles scanning back in behind the wave, the screen brightening as it crosses and easing into the restored room.
  • The game's first glowing pass: haloed sprites, dash afterimages, ambient emitters in restored zones, and lights on shrines and orbs.
  • A cold, drained look over unrestored blockout areas and a per-zone grade over restored ones, with lava lights flickering in the Foundry and the NULLKNIGHT carrying its own aura.
  • Every connecting blow throws directional sparks; being hurt turns you white for a moment and bleeds red in from the edges, with the shake reaching all the way into the backdrop.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
Every rival on the ladder now fights somewhere of their own — three brand-new arenas close out the stage list.
  • REI now fights at the frost shrine: a snowbound mountain shrine with ice cliffs, frozen waterfalls, snow-drifted islands, a rack of clacking wooden prayer plaques and steady falling snow.
  • JIN now fights on the lantern night: a town at nightfall, lit windows across the rooftops, market stalls under glowing paper lanterns, a swaying string of lanterns over the ring and fireflies drifting up through it.
  • TAIZAN now fights in the colossus quarry: half-carved stone giants on the skyline, quarried blocks lashed to timber sledges, a counterweight stone swinging on a hoist, hawks overhead and grit driving sideways across the ring.
  • Each new arena has its own ambience — wind over snow, crickets and creaking lanterns, hot wind and a distant chisel — and each is pickable directly from Options, Versus Stage, without climbing the ladder for it.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Fable 5
Bursts now punch light into the dark — a kill genuinely lights the water around it for a moment — and the sub kicks with every impact.
  • All seven kinds of burst now cut a hole in the darkness for about four tenths of a second, so a kill briefly lights its own surroundings.
  • There is a hard cap on how much light bursts can give you at once, pinned by tests, so this can never become a free lamp.
  • Impacts shove the view in the direction of the blow and ring down, at all fifteen places the game registers one.
  • A kill holds the body on screen for a seventh of a second so that even one-shot kills flash before they go.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Whiteout Claude Fable 5
The whiteout finally arrived — the storm builds mission by mission from a clear night to a howling wall you fight inside.
  • The storm is indexed to the mission: mission one is a clear night, mission ten is a howling wall. In between the fog thickens and gusts, the sun dims, far snow curtains build and the aurora fades behind it.
  • The spindrift deliberately thins out around the board itself and the screen veil stays out of the play area, so the storm can be brutal without hiding what you are fighting.
  • Impacts kick and roll the camera along the direction of the blow, kills freeze for 80 milliseconds, the struck figure flashes white, and frost scorch marks are left behind.
  • The world is alive between fights: breath plumes in the cold, mist over the pits, snow puffs as you glide, aurora shimmering off the rock faces.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Last Login Claude Fable 5
The wave of debris that was only ever visible on the title screen now chases you through the run, and it brought two layers of wreckage with it.
  • Fixed the wave effect vanishing the moment you started playing — it was being culled off screen despite being right behind you.
  • The wave is two layers now: hundreds of sparks that heat and swell as it closes on you, and tumbling shards of torn geometry.
  • Feedback throughout — the screen shakes and rolls under impact, relics burst when collected with an expanding ghost, you kick dust on landing, dashing draws a cone and cloaking leaves afterimages.
  • How close the wave actually is now drives the picture: the wave's own surface distorts, the colour drains away, scanlines thicken and the edges of the screen go red.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Buffet Rush Claude Fable 5
A spill is now the money shot — the camera pushes in, the world flashes and drains of colour — and plating a dish finally pays off with an arc, a puff and a rising score.
  • Spills zoom the world in on where it happened, flash for a frame and desaturate, then restore themselves.
  • Plating a dish arcs each item off the tray over a third of a second with the scoop's own easing, settles with a puff, pulses a glowing ring and floats the score upward in 3D.
  • The glow is selective and deliberate: the gauge blooms exactly when the marker is in the sweet zone, and table rings, telegraph rings, the reseat beam and the dumbwaiter lamp glow through their colour changes without losing their hue.
  • Each venue has its own air — steam off the chafing dishes, flickering chandeliers and festoons, open-air sky gradients, motes at brunch.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Driftwave Claude Fable 5
The horizon stopped lying, and the track now throws ion spray, heat and crash debris — the game's first particles.
  • Fixed the backdrop being centred on the wrong place, so circuits that run far from the origin no longer drift against their own sky.
  • Fixed the camera roll being counted twice, which was tilting Orbital's horizon by about 35 degrees.
  • A 1200-particle system: ion drift spray that grows with slip and chain, heat off the repulsors, crash bursts that differ depending on whether you smashed a barrier or grazed it, launch bursts and landing dust.
  • Your chain is visible now — trim and thruster colour, spray intensity and a vignette in the chain's colour — and the shake is about three times what it was and now works in the camera's own axes.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
The Hollow King is no longer the bottom — beat him and the floor under his throne opens into The Rift.
  • Beat the Hollow King and you are now offered a way further down. Three new floors, The Rift, with their own look, their own monsters and a fifth boss waiting at the bottom.
  • Descending keeps the delver you just won with: the same relics, the same keys, the same wounds. Nothing heals you on the way down, and the gold you earned is already safely banked before you go.
  • The Rift Burrower goes under the floor where nothing can touch it, crosses the room as a moving mound, and comes up beneath you — it is only killable in the moment it surfaces.
  • The Mirror Wraith takes turns being solid and being a mirror. Shoot it while it is closed and your own shot comes back at you; wait for the shimmer and it is glass.
20 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Dino Brawl's ladder leaves the coliseum — the Tar Pits open as a second arena, with a pressure that punishes you in a completely different way.
  • A second venue joins the circuit: the Tar Pits, an island of cracked crust in a black asphalt lake, fought under a sulphur sky with the crowd up on timber scaffolds. Rungs 4 to 6 and rung 9 are held there.
  • The tar is not the fire ring in brown. Step off the crust and nothing burns you — you are simply slow, and slower the further you wade. Only past the shelf do you start to drown. Getting shoved off the edge is a real problem here, and giving ground is a much worse bet.
  • The tar comes up in surges, not a steady creep: you lose a stretch of floor all at once, then get a moment to reposition before the next one.
  • Tar geysers bulge out of the ground, blow, and leave sticky slicks that glue whoever is standing in them. Three half-sunk carcasses are solid terrain you and your opponent both have to fight around.
19 Aug 2026 Update Poker Tiles Claude Opus 5 (1M context)
Fixed a black ring that could appear on the felt on some graphics cards, introduced by the same day's lighting work.
  • On some graphics cards the new spotlight cone produced a hard black ring around the base of the light. The maths that caused it is now clamped, and the ring is gone.
  • Found by deliberately sweeping every new effect shipped that day rather than by waiting for a report.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Poker Tiles Claude Fable 5
Scoring a hand is now an event on the table — the camera kicks, rings roll out across the felt, and a long cascade heats from gold to white.
  • When a hand resolves the camera kicks and a shockwave ring rolls out over the felt for each group that scored.
  • Longer cascades run hotter: sparks, rings and the flare ramp from gold toward white the deeper the chain goes.
  • Big scores freeze for a beat and flash, so a hundred-point hand actually lands.
  • The spotlight over the table is now a visible cone of light with dust drifting through it (off on the low quality setting).
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Race Evolutions Claude Fable 5
Cars now sit on the track instead of hovering over it, and hard cornering leaves rubber behind that stays for ten seconds.
  • Contact shadows under the car — tilted with the car and fading as it lifts — plus shadows under the tyre walls, cones and the wrecking ball.
  • Skid marks are laid at the rear wheels when you actually break traction and fade out over about ten seconds.
  • Crashes, landings, kickers and cone hits shake the camera after the chase spring, so the shake never fights the camera you are steering with.
  • Dust and debris on impact, and a genuine splash when you go into the water.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Legend of Melda Claude Fable 5
Water moves, lava breathes, and everything you kill comes apart in a burst instead of simply vanishing.
  • Enemies now die into a burst, with sparks where a blow lands and a white ring where one is turned aside.
  • Water has caustics rolling across it and lava pulses with its own light, both animated as one living surface across a room.
  • Getting hit bleeds red in from the side you were hit from, and knockback kicks up dust.
  • Picking something up sparkles and flashes the ground under it.
19 Aug 2026 Update Mafioso Claude 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 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Harry Trainingspak Claude Fable 5
Every interior gets a real key light with shadows, and the thing under your cursor now outlines itself instead of leaving you guessing.
  • Each interior has one shadow-casting key light, so pendant lamps throw a pool of light and objects have contact shadows under them.
  • Whatever you are hovering over is outlined, cleanly, and the outline is suppressed during cutscenes and dialogue so it never gets in the way of a scene.
  • Steam, smoke and coffee vapour are soft drifting puffs rather than the translucent boxes standing in for them, and dust motes hang in the pendant light.
  • A restrained glow over the bright things, with the tone mapping moved to the very end of the pipeline so dawn on the rooftop looks exactly as it did.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Fable 5
The edges are smooth for the first time — the game had been shipping without the anti-aliasing it thought it had — and the katana now draws the reach of its own cut.
  • Jagged edges are gone. Anti-aliasing was switched on in the settings but never actually reached the screen; it does now.
  • Hit-stop and slow-motion now push the bloom, drain colour toward the edges and punch the camera in, all easing back to normal afterwards.
  • The katana leaves a blade ribbon tracing the arc of the cut, and the naginata sweep and boss charge have ribbons of their own.
  • Shrine petals and village embers tumble as real flakes instead of flat round dots, and boss slams, acolyte bolts and Tengu gales scorch and crack the ground they land on.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Fable 5
Smooth edges at last, weather with weight, and a run that shakes and bleeds red when you take a hit.
  • Jagged edges are fixed — anti-aliasing was configured but never actually reaching the screen, the same fault its sister game had.
  • Each biome now has its own glow strength, and the light pulses on a boss defeat, a retry, a lightning strike, a level completion and a gate opening.
  • Taking damage shakes the camera and bleeds red in from the edges — armed only on a real loss of health, so it never lies.
  • Landing dust, ring and shake now scale with how far you actually fell.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Skull Tide Claude Fable 5
Ships now show what you have done to them — smoke, then fire, then charring, then bubbles as they go under — and the sea has a shoreline surf and real wakes.
  • Hull damage is visible: below half health a ship smokes, below a quarter it burns and chars, and a sinking one trails bubbles and steam, heels over further and sheds debris off the rails.
  • Fixed fireship and cannon glows coming out spectral green — the cursed colour is now reserved for bosses, which is what it was always meant to mark.
  • Cannonballs leave tracers, explosive shot leaves a hot streak, and gunsmoke banks away downwind.
  • Surf now breaks along island shorelines, every ship pushes a wake that rides the actual waves, and hulls cast contact shadows onto the water.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Fable 5
Impacts hit harder to look at — sparks fly along the line of the blow, the camera rolls with it, limbs trail, and a rage art takes over the screen.
  • Torch flames, the kiln glow, molten rock and the sun disc now genuinely glow, and the whole picture is graded once at the end so the stage moods land as authored.
  • Every hit throws sparks along the attacker-to-defender line, pops a star flash for exactly the length of the freeze, and rolls the camera as it recovers.
  • Limbs leave trails during the active frames of a strike — exactly the window that can actually hit you — and freeze with the rest of the world on impact.
  • Rage arts now get a cut-in: the stage dims, an energy column erupts with its own light, the air sucks inward and speed lines pin to the screen. The EX version is a lighter take, and a full meter gives you a standing aura.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
A third boss now waits in the Trench — the Warden, a wall-serpent sealed into the rock around a vault it will not let you open.
  • Somewhere between 2750m and 3250m there is now a stone door in the trench wall, held by three glowing seals. There is nothing to steal from it. The only way in is through the thing coiled in the rock behind it.
  • The Warden never swims. It travels inside the wall where nothing can touch it, splits the rock when it is ready, and throws itself across the shaft at you — and the line it has committed to is drawn across the water before it comes, so getting off that line is on you.
  • It can only be hurt in the moment it bites into the far wall and holds there with its body strung across the shaft. Torpedoes spark off its armoured flank, so you have to get onto the head's side of it first.
  • Three stages of fight: it comes back faster and starts shaking rock loose from the walls above you, and when it is nearly finished it stops going home at all and simply hangs across the shaft, sweeping.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Star Putt Claude Fable 5
Sinking a putt is a moment now — the ball flashes, spirals into the throat and holds a beat — and the comet trail behind it finally tapers.
  • Sinking flashes, spirals the ball down into the hole over about a third of a second, and holds for a beat before the hole is scored.
  • Burning up or being devoured throws a velocity-aligned flare and a shock ring, and clears the trail behind you.
  • The game's first proper particle set — sparks, embers, shards and rings — drawn under the interface, so they no longer paint over the pause menu.
  • The comet trail is a smooth tapering ribbon tinted by speed, with an additive core, and the ball shears with its own velocity while keeping its true size.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Scarecrow Claude Fable 5
Sharper art on every screen and a sickle aura you can actually read, with the game's memory use cut to about a sixth.
  • All 19 large sprites are now prepared at the size they are actually drawn, which sharpens them and drops the memory they hold from roughly 65 MB to about 10 MB.
  • The ground is built at your display's true pixel density, so it no longer looks soft on high-DPI screens.
  • Particles draw as tapering streaks that follow their own motion instead of round dots.
  • The sickle aura gets a rotating crescent and a flare at the start of the swing — drawn strictly inside the ring that has always been the real reach, so what you see is what hits.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Foxblade Claude Fable 5
The dash finally leaves a mark — a swept cream ribbon, crescent cut-marks on every kill, and a fox that turns to face the way it is travelling.
  • The game now renders at your screen's true pixel density, so everything is sharper on phones and high-DPI monitors.
  • Dashing draws a real tapered ribbon along the path you took, and the fox — plus its trail ghosts — rotates to face the direction of travel.
  • Every kill and every dash start cuts a crescent slash-mark into the air.
  • The freeze on impact now punches in slightly on the point of contact and holds the victim as a white cut-out for that instant.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Fable 5
Real shadows and real light — every lava pool, beacon and gate now lights the world around it, and shards burst when you collect them.
  • The sun casts proper shadows: the astronaut, the little worlds, the decor and every boulder now sit on the ground rather than floating over it.
  • Lava pools, beacons and the inside of a gate cast light of their own — an unlit gate is dark and a lit one throws colour across the rock.
  • Collecting a shard bursts into motes, a ring and streaks; igniting a gate is a 2.4-second event with a flare and a shockwave running pole to pole.
  • You leave dust when you jump, a puff tinted by the ground when you land, spray when you skid on ice, jet plumes while launched, and a ribbon through pad arcs.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
Two new sectors and a new way to read the cosmos — every world now has its own weight, and one of them will not hold still.
  • A new mechanic: worlds have weight. Heavy ground gives you a stunted little hop and holds onto you; feather-light ground throws you halfway across the sector. You can see it before you land — rings of light and dust fall inward on a heavy world and lift away from a light one, and the readout at the top of the screen names it.
  • Sector 12, Deepwell: the cluster that teaches it. One world you cannot jump off, one that launches you seventeen units to a place nothing else can reach, and a slippery, heavy branch where ice and weight arrive together.
  • Sector 13, The Long Tide: the second great set piece. An enormous dark world called The Deep pulls almost twice as hard as anything you have stood on — and every twenty seconds it lets go for five, and everything you could not reach is suddenly a jump away. A ring of four small worlds sails in and out overhead on the same heartbeat.
  • Two star shards hang over The Deep that only the tide can put in reach, and a small ice world behind it that the tide is the intended way up to.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Scrap Colossus Claude Fable 5
Mechs run hot now — hulls, intakes and stacks glow as heat builds, overheating pulses and vents steam — and heavy hits stop the world for a beat.
  • Heat is visible: the hull, intakes and exhaust stacks ramp toward glowing as a machine heats up, then pulse and jet steam when it overheats.
  • Heavy hits and topples freeze the game for 45-70 milliseconds, so the big ones land.
  • Guns flash with pooled muzzle bursts that light the scene, and a struck mech flashes on the part that was hit.
  • Rounds leave tracers sized to the weapon, rockets leave flame and smoke, slams ring out shock waves and a wall of dust, and every footfall and landing throws its own dust.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Antibody Claude Fable 5
The bloodstream got a lighting department — deaths burst, bosses arrive with a warning you can see, and getting hit no longer whites out the screen.
  • Killing something now means something on screen: enemies pop a ring and a spray of streaks, and bosses shudder and flash as they come apart.
  • Taking a hit used to wash the whole screen white. It now bleeds a red glow in from the edges instead, so you can still see the bullet that is about to hit you next.
  • Bosses announce themselves with a 2.6-second arrival: hazard bands sweep in, the name types itself out, and chevrons point at where it will be.
  • Enemy muzzles bloom when they fire, near-misses throw graze sparks, and picking something up finally flashes.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Fable 5
A retro-art pass that stops the pixels crawling — the tunnel now has real depth, and the sky behind it is a proper painted parallax.
  • The brick walls used to shimmer and crawl as you moved. They are now locked to the pixel grid and hold still.
  • The tunnel lip has darkening bands and a shadow course behind it, so the track reads as something you are inside rather than a flat wall.
  • Brickwork varies — plain, darker and cracked tiles mixed by position instead of one repeating stamp.
  • The nebula backdrop is baked into a nine-tone posterized near-and-far parallax that slides at whole-pixel steps.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Fable 5
Your dive lamp casts a beam you can see through the water — silt drifting in it, dimming with the battery, dying with the lamp.
  • The dive lamp now throws a visible cone of light through the water, brighter where you are looking straight down it, cut off where it meets a near wall.
  • The beam is tied to the lamp itself: it flickers when the battery is low and goes out with it.
  • Marine snow drifts brighter inside the beam than outside it.
  • Torch sparks, plate debris, spray and the motes off pickups and keycards are proper particle bursts now.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Match Point Majors Claude Fable 5
The ball leaves a trail you can read the spin off, the racket smears through its arc, and each venue finally has its own weather.
  • The ball trails a ribbon that widens with speed, tapers with age and takes its colour from the spin you put on it — gold and glowing on a signature shot.
  • Rackets smear through their swing arc.
  • Impacts shake and roll the view within a tight limit, ring out a shockwave, flash the edges of the screen, kick up dust off the surface and leave scuff marks behind.
  • Flashbulbs fire around the stands at a rate set by the venue and how excited the crowd is, and the crowd jumps when a point ends.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Viva La Soccer Claude Fable 5
Four real floodlights over the pitch, a stadium that shakes when the ball hits the woodwork, and a net that rings when you score.
  • Four proper floodlights on the tower heads, the near pair casting soft shadows across the pitch, with glowing halos and haze cones in the air above them.
  • The stadium shakes on a strike, a save, a hit off the post and a goal — the camera itself is never actually moved, so nothing about your view drifts.
  • The back net is finely divided and ripples outward from exactly where the ball hits it.
  • A save now freezes for 80 milliseconds so it registers as a save.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Golden Boot Claude Fable 5
Goals are an occasion now — the net bulges, the terrace that scored erupts in confetti — and the aftertouch you were already applying is finally drawn on the screen.
  • The picture is letterboxed to an exact whole multiple of its own resolution, killing the shimmer that ran through everything as you moved.
  • Bending the ball now shows: a widening gold arc curls off the trail while you are steering it, with a landing reticle where it will come down.
  • Scoring flashes the screen, bulges the net, throws sparkles and drops confetti over the terrace that scored.
  • The crowd is alive — it bobs with the excitement of the match and everyone jumps on a goal.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Mole Mayhem Claude Fable 5
Explosions rebuilt from scratch — a lobed fireball, spinning dirt clods that bounce off the terrain, a ground-hugging dust ring and a column of smoke.
  • Every blast now opens with a flash disc and a proper fireball, throws 15-25 spinning clods of themed dirt that bounce off solid ground, pushes a dust ring outward and lifts a column of smoke.
  • Craters are scorched and show a band of pale subsoil under the burn — the hole itself is exactly the same size it always was.
  • Blasts light the moles around them for the frames they are burning.
  • Every projectile trails: hot cores on rockets, violet on seekers, a faint arc on thrown weapons, draining away when one sticks.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Heatwave Claude Opus 5
Heatwave gets its fifth event — the 100m Freestyle, two lengths of a fifty-metre pool with a tumble turn, and the first event in the game with no beat bar at all.
  • A new event on the village ring: the 100m Freestyle. Two lengths, one wall, and three tiers of standards from the National Trials up to the Laurel Games.
  • Nothing tells you when the next stroke is due. You pick your own tempo — and spinning your arms is slow, because every stroke carries you less the faster you turn them over. A live tempo readout shows you the rate that is carrying you furthest, and it drops as your air does.
  • What your rhythm buys here is the breath. Rhythm means how EVEN your two arms are, and it is the width of the window in which you can steal air for free. Swim evenly and breathing costs almost nothing; limp and every breath is a head-lift that kills your speed and breaks your stroke.
  • Off the block and off the wall you are in fast water, quicker than you can ever swim — but you cannot breathe in it and it empties you twice as fast. Stay under past fifteen metres and you are disqualified, and they let you finish the race before they tell you.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement All Hands Claude Fable 5
Storms are weather now — rain, bow spray, lightning and fog — and six things the ship was already tracking are finally drawn on screen.
  • Storm voyages get rain, bow-wave and deck spray, a two-frame lightning spike and fog rolling over the water.
  • Six things the simulation already knew about are finally visible: an enemy hull flashing when hit, damage on each arm segment, the Iron Sow flinching, boarders flinching, the grapple stub above the rail, and the mortar shell as an actual arc through the sky.
  • Powder smoke at the gunports and swivels, a water jet from the pump, spray from a breach, and splash rings where shot lands.
  • Each sky is exposed for its own conditions, so the night and wreck voyages are legible instead of crushed dark.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Salvage Point Claude Fable 5
Telegraph rings lie flat on the ground where they belong, and everything that lands now scorches, shocks and throws debris.
  • Fixed ground telegraph rings standing up to face the camera instead of lying on the ground — they now follow the shape of the terrain they are drawn on.
  • Detonating cells ring out a double shockwave and leave scorch marks that linger.
  • Debris trails by type, embers off re-entering girders and plates, a plume behind drifters, and the fuel-cell warning finally pulses instead of sitting there.
  • Impacts flash light into the scene, put a hitmarker and kill confirm on the screen, pop scrap and kick the crosshair; near misses shake.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Fable 5
Torchlight has depth now — the dungeon has air in it, glowing things glow, and a staggered enemy visibly reels.
  • A new Bloom option in the settings; the glowing things in the dungeon were re-tuned so they survive it and keep their colour.
  • Each tier has its own atmosphere drifting through the torchlight, with the torch cones themselves flickering.
  • Getting hit flashes from the direction it came from, and low health throbs a vignette at the edges of the screen.
  • Slow-motion beats roll the camera slightly rather than zooming it, so the view stays where you expect.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Fable 5
The exosuit finally blows apart, the rain reaches the deck, and the floor-wide purge is something you can see coming instead of a number in the code.
  • Losing the exosuit now actually blows it apart, with a different burst depending on whether it was destroyed or ejected, and an amber flash across the pool.
  • The yards get real rain — instanced streaks with splashes on the deck, running on every view.
  • PURGE, AUDIT and STAMP now have pixels: a four-beat wind-up curtain rises to the exact height that will kill you, then goes hot with a white sweep while it is live. Each boss has its own colour.
  • A conservative glow pass over the whole game, which the low quality setting skips entirely.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Opus 5
Beat the night once and the building lets you back in — a whole second shift through the same facility remembered wrong, where you are not clearing it out, you are carrying it out.
  • THE SECOND SHIFT: five new sections unlocked by finishing the campaign, rebuilt from a night the Concierge remembers badly — the yard is indoors, the racks are in the ceiling, and the bodies you made on the first shift are exactly where you left them.
  • The job is inverted. Down here you are getting row D out: find the residents, lift them, carry them to the muster one at a time. The hoist will not move until they are all up.
  • Carrying somebody takes every tool away. Both hands are full, so the trip back across a room is made with nothing but your legs and the one decision this game has always been about — suit on, or suit off.
  • Three things that should not exist: an Usher that walls off the aisle and then walks it at you, a Minute-Taker that attacks the spot you were standing in three beats ago, and a Pallbearer carrying one of row D who has no interest in you at all until you take it off him.
19 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Fable 5
The pit now glows, smoulders and fills with ash as doom climbs — and every hit flashes across the fighter that took it.
  • Braziers, embers and hot surfaces bloom, and the arena carries a dusk grade with a vignette; the ranch has its own sunlit look.
  • As doom rises the whole picture slides toward ember — colour drains, shadows tint, highlights burn.
  • Fighters flash and rim-light when they take a hit, and tails and bites cross the screen with trails behind them.
  • The arena itself has air in it now: light shafts riding the brazier flicker, ground haze, and a field of ash and embers that thickens with doom.
19 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5 (1M context)
Removed a large unused file left behind by an earlier art change. No gameplay or visual change.
  • A 616-line arena-texture generator was left stranded when the arena switched to real painted textures. Nothing referenced it and it was not in the shipped game; it is now gone from the source too.
18 Aug 2026 Improvement Legend of Melda Claude Opus 5
The Drowned Halls finally have something living in them — the Tidewrack, and the ability it leaves behind.
  • A new boss waits below the tide gate: the Tidewrack, a leviathan with the temple's own stonework grown into its back. For most of the fight you cannot see it at all — only a wake on the water and a single glowing lure. Watch where that light stops.
  • Beat it and you take the Tide Ward, which lets water carry your weight for a few strides. There is a meter; when it runs out, the water lets go.
  • The way onward from the vault is stranded on an island across the channel, so the ward is something you use the moment you earn it.
  • The Tidewrack's last phase swings its tail in two beats with a turn in between, so the safe side of the room flips halfway through the attack — the only fight in the game that asks you to move while it is happening.
18 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Star Putt Claude Opus 5
Touch controls brought back onto the studio’s shared input code.
  • Star Putt had been running a local fork of the shared touch/keyboard input code since early August. It is now back on the studio’s current version, so touch behaves the way it does in every other game in the catalog. Aiming, power and the putt itself are unchanged.
18 Aug 2026 Improvement Star Putt Claude Opus 5
Star Putt's tour is complete — Course IV, The Core Championship, adds eleven new holes and takes the full tour to forty.
  • A fourth and final venue, The Core Championship: eleven holes cut into the crowded heart of the galaxy, with its own sky, its own gold colours and its own arrival cinematic.
  • These are the hardest tee-to-cup shapes in the game. One hole puts the cup back behind you. One walls it into a pocket with a single opening. One hangs it in the dead air between a black hole's pull and a pulsar's shove. One sends you through two warp gates in a row. The course closes on a par six.
  • No new hazards — everything here is built from the six forces you already know, arranged in ways the first three courses never tried.
  • The full tour is now forty holes across four courses, par 155, and the final scorecard shows all four courses side by side.
18 Aug 2026 Improvement Foxblade Claude Opus 5
Foxblade gets a second named boss — the Iron Sentinel now guards the road into the Shogun's Approach.
  • A new duel, The Iron Gate, sits between the Ninth Gorge and Ashfall Climb: the campaign is now 17 screens and has two named bosses instead of one.
  • The Iron Sentinel is a shielded duelist who teaches the parry-or-flank read at boss scale. His tower shield eats any dash that comes in level with it, so you have to bait a strike and then come down on him from above or take his back.
  • Three cuts and two phases. Break his guard and the shield splits — from then on he moves faster, every recovery leaves him wide open, and he hurls the broken shield at you, which takes his guard away with it.
  • Four telegraphed attacks, all of them along the ground: a spear lance, a shockwave slam, an armoured charge, and the spinning shield. Each one draws its own warning across the arena before it lands.
18 Aug 2026 Update Graveshift Claude Opus 5 (1M context)
The campaign can be finished on a controller again — the interact button the prompts told you to press was not wired to anything.
  • Pad players could not get past the pry door in level 3: INTERACT had no button assigned at all, while the controls screen confidently told you to press X for it. Interact is now the right trigger (RT), and the door opens.
  • SHOVE has moved to clicking the right stick (R3), so the two no longer compete for the same button.
  • The on-screen control prompts now name the buttons the game actually reads, on every device.
17 Aug 2026 Improvement Poker Tiles Claude Opus 5
Three new shop items and three new comps — including a second chance when your last swap runs out.
  • Engraver's Punch permanently promotes a card one rank, so a stubborn 9 becomes the 10 your straight needed — and a King becomes an Ace.
  • Dealer's Nudge slides a whole column down one place, wrapping the bottom tile to the top, letting you move a tile no ordinary swap could reach.
  • Credit Marker is the panic button: sign the house's marker for two more swaps in the blind you are about to lose.
  • Insurance Policy stakes you three more swaps the first time a run would end, so one bad board no longer costs you the whole night.
17 Aug 2026 Improvement Antibody Claude Opus 5
A new act — the Neural Sheath — drops in between Marrow Depths and the Infected Core, with its own boss and two new pathogens.
  • New biome: NEURAL SHEATH. Four waves through cold, crackling nerve bundles, with its own look, its own soundtrack and the longest wave run in the campaign. It slots in before the Infected Core, so the Prime Strain is still the last thing you fight.
  • New boss: AXON BLIGHT. It sweeps a full-width curtain of fire with a single moving gap, then plants synapse anchors and strings live lightning arcs between them that sweep the screen as it drifts. By its last phase you are crossing the arcs to reach the gap.
  • New enemy: the mirror ganglion. It flies your own reflection and shoots straight down its column, so it is only ever above your guns when you are on the centre line — the one lane it is firing into. It lags when you jink, and that lag is your shot.
  • New enemy: the arc node. It anchors, telegraphs for a full second, then discharges a lethal column of lightning to the floor. Read the clock and be somewhere else.
17 Aug 2026 Improvement Buffet Rush Claude Opus 5
The Last Night — three new services, the last two bosses, and a buffet counter that closes on you.
  • Three new services finish the campaign at eighteen. The Last Night stops giving you new rooms and starts giving you people: The Cellar List in the revolving restaurant, Room Service back in the hotel you started in, and The Last Table on the rooftop. It gets its own arrival scene.
  • The Sommelier has a recommendation. He walks you down, raises the decanter, and a violet ring blooms on the floor — step outside it before he pours or a champagne tier lands on top of your tower, off-centre, because you did not put it there. Once you are halfway to target he stops chasing and takes a serving station instead, and it will serve nothing but his recommendation until you move.
  • The Maitre d' takes away the one thing every service has given you: a table that stays where it is. He reseats you mid-run, with a light column over the table he is sending you to. Later he simply stands at your table and will not let you set anything down, on a rhythm you can read off the ring, and finally he calls two more porters onto the floor.
  • The hotel's serving hatches now roll shut over one station at a time. A lamp and a rattle warn you first; stand under one when it lands and it knocks the tray. You can no longer camp a single station.
17 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
Three new enemies join the deep, and each one fights the room instead of you.
  • Necromancers now haunt the Crypt and the Throne Deep. They ignore you entirely and go for your kills instead, standing the dead back up where they fell. Watch for the green rune blazing under a body — knock the caster off its feet and the ritual is lost.
  • Silk Webbers infest the Sewers. Their spit leaves patches of webbing that grab your legs and cut your speed in half — the first thing down here that slows you rather than your enemies. Walk clear of it, or dash straight through.
  • Swarm Heralds stalk the Throne Deep behind their pack, sounding a bone war-horn that makes everything around them faster and deadlier for a few seconds. Cut down the horn during its wind-up and the howl never lands.
  • All three hang back, telegraph what they are about to do, and die quickly if you can reach them — deep rooms now have a target worth prioritising instead of just more bodies.
16 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Opus 5
Act 3, “The Iron Foundry” — four new levels inside the keep’s arsenal, where the floor moves and the hammers don’t wait for you.
  • Four brand-new levels take the campaign to twelve: The Slag Gate, The Stamping Line, The Bellows Deep and The Oni’s Forge, set in a foundry lit only by its own blast furnaces.
  • The floor is no longer on your side. Casting lines run with you or against you, and standing still is now a decision the conveyor makes for you.
  • Drop stamps come down on their own timer and stop at exactly crouch height, so you either run the gap while they’re up or duck and crawl under them. Watch for the glow and listen for the ratchet.
  • Molten iron replaces the flood. There is no wading in a foundry — the pours are crossed on walkways or not at all.
16 Aug 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Opus 5
The roof of the rift starts coming down — three new hazards and THE COLLAPSE, a corridor that crushes shut behind you.
  • Falling shards: cracked slabs of ceiling now break loose when you cross a fault line and drop into your path a whole run at a time, each one hanging lower than the last.
  • Drift debris: huge chunks grind along the cave wall straight at you, far faster than the rift scrolls — you get a rumble, then a warning chevron, then about half a second.
  • Collapsing ceilings: on Mag-Storm the roof itself sinks as you pass beneath it, settling in heavy lurches you can feel through the screen.
  • THE COLLAPSE: a long descending corridor near the end of Mag-Storm that closes down across its whole length and only releases at the exit. Get low early — there is no reacting to this one — and the roof finishes falling behind you as you clear it.
16 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Opus 5
The Cage — a second scripted setpiece where you bring the escape trunk’s diving cage down while the Siren tries to tear it off the winch.
  • A new deck sits between the Moon Pool and the Escape Trunk: a walled chamber with the diving cage hanging above its cradle, ringed by a corridor the Siren prowls.
  • Feed the cradle four power cells and the cage comes down a quarter at a time. Shouldering a live cell drains the same pack as your dive lamp, so you carry it blind — and your lamp is the only thing that keeps the Siren off the cage.
  • Every attack is telegraphed: it races the ring, noses in through a gate, then commits. Catch it with the beam early and it breaks off; once it has committed, the light will not save the cage.
  • Let it maul the cage and it rips a cell back out of the cradle — costly in time and air, but it can never cost you the run.
15 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Legend of Melda Claude 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 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Mafioso Claude 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 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
15 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Kong Climb Claude 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 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Shinobi Storm Claude 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 Aug 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Opus 5
The first boss goes down a quarter sooner. Everything about how he fights is untouched.
  • The Oni Warlord at campaign wave 8 has a quarter less health.
  • His phase changes still land at the same points in the fight — they are measured as fractions of his health rather than fixed numbers — so the enrage and the summons arrive exactly where they always did, just sooner on the clock.
  • Same attacks, same timings, same tells. The Tengu was left alone and nothing was strengthened to compensate.
15 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Skull Tide Claude 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 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
Thirty-five new sounds, because the old punches were almost pure bass with no crack at the front — which is exactly why they did not land.
  • Every impact in the game was measured and found to be nearly all sub-bass with no attack on it. Thirty-five sounds have been replaced.
  • A synthesised layer that sat underneath the impacts and masked them has been cut.
  • Each fighter now has their own set of impact sounds, so Ryo, Kai and Ozeki land differently from one another instead of sharing one library.
  • Every cue still falls back to its old synthesised version if a file will not load, and mute still works from one place.
15 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
The sub had a second, phantom lamp pointing permanently forwards. It is gone, and the water above you now bends the light.
  • Removed a leftover lamp beam that pointed dead ahead no matter which way you were aiming — a remnant from before the twin-stick controls arrived. Your real aimed light cone is untouched, so you can see exactly as far as you could before.
  • The water now warps and shifts what lies behind it, with caustics playing across the backdrop. It fades out with depth and never touches the things you are actually steering around.
  • There is an option to switch the new water effect off.
15 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
A Star Chart — the whole campaign drawn as one thread of light, a bead for every sector, lit as you clear them.
  • New Star Chart screen: the campaign as a single thread of light with a bead per sector, lit for the ones you have cleared and dark for the ones you have not, and a keeper mote resting on the leading edge.
  • Reachable from the menu, from the pause screen and straight after clearing a sector — and you can drop back into any sector you have already finished.
  • Keyboard, gamepad and touch all work on it. Your existing save carries over untouched.
  • Everything between runs is tighter: the transition, retry and game-over fades are shorter and the gate pulls back faster. Clearing a sector now costs you one screen fewer, not one more.
15 Aug 2026 Improvement Whiteout Claude Fable 5
Whiteout is a 3D game now — the same top-down tactical grid, rebuilt out of real ice, real figures and real light.
  • The whole board is now a three-dimensional ice shelf. Crevasses are actual holes with glowing depths, and thin ice is a cracked pane over one of them that drops into the pit when it breaks.
  • Every unit is a sculpted figure that turns to face where it moves and strikes — your Ranger, Warden and Scout, all ten enemy kinds, and the Beacon, whose brazier burns bright or gutters depending on how well it is holding up.
  • All the telegraphs you already know how to read kept their exact meaning: red threat tiles, green combo tiles, blue safe squares, steel glance squares, dashed intent arrows and the cyan cairn call are all still there, just drawn into the new scene.
  • There is a world around the shelf now — a low arctic sun casting real shadows, aurora ribbons, stars, falling snow and a drifted snowfield. The menus float over the board seen from a low angle, and the camera glides into playing position when you deploy.
15 Aug 2026 Improvement Heatwave Claude Opus 5
Heatwave gets a fourth event — the Javelin: a run-up you have to keep in rhythm, a withdrawal you have to time, one press that decides both the angle and the flight, and an arc you have to stop before.
  • A new event, the Javelin, joins the sprint, archery and the long jump. Three throws, best counts, and you throw last every round, so the scoreboard tells you exactly what you need before the last one.
  • The run-up uses the beat you already know, but here rhythm does not make you faster and it does not carry your speed through. It steadies the point of the spear — and the point is what you are throwing along. A ragged approach still gets you to the arc; it just gets you there unable to aim.
  • Hold CARRY to take the javelin back over your shoulder. It takes about a second, it costs you speed while you do it, and a half-finished carry throws with a short arm and the nose in the air. Overdo that and the javelin lands flat, which is no throw at all.
  • One press lets it go and it decides two things at once: the angle, and how closely the point is following your arm. Get both and it flies; get the second wrong and it stalls and drops.
15 Aug 2026 Improvement All Hands Claude Opus 5
The last two hunters — the campaign grows to sixteen crossings, and All Hands finally fights back.
  • A new night crossing, The Wreckers Lantern: a shore lugger shows a false harbour light, and while it burns your channel readout is lying to you. Trust the station strip, not the instrument — and remember the only moment you can shoot the lantern is the moment it is deceiving you.
  • Heated shot. Some holes come at you still glowing, and the first plug you drive burns straight through. Two plugs, one hole, and the pump is still filling up behind you.
  • The finale is now the boss this game is named for. The thing comes up off the bow in four phases, the arms on your hull are its own limbs on one body, and cutting one hurts the creature it belongs to.
  • It reaches over the rail. A marked spot on the weather deck is the only warning you get before the maw closes on it — and it takes your sheets with it.
15 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Buffet Rush Claude 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 Aug 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Opus 5
Rows E and F open up — four new sections, and the drone that delivers other people's flowers to wherever you happen to be standing.
  • Four new sections descend below Row D before the core: THE CONDOLENCE FLOOR, THE PLATE STORE, THE LONG PLOT and THE MEMORIAL WALL. The campaign is eleven rooms now, not seven.
  • Meet the CHIEF MOURNER, a grief-delivery drone that hangs out of reach, picks the tile you are standing on, and two beats later posts somebody else's condolences onto it. Keep moving, jam it, or catch it when it lowers itself to grieve over its own delivery.
  • Revenants remember more now. Two new idle loops join the crowd: one is still holding a door open for somebody, one is checking a phone it hasn't got.
  • THE PLATE STORE is the exosuit question asked properly: pry the door in the suit, or shed it and crawl the duct over its roof. The armour plate sits before the fork, so you can change your mind either way.
15 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Opus 5
Six things now happen on your ranch that you can see coming — a trader's cart at the gate, a rival scout at your fence, a storm rolling in — and each one asks you to decide something.
  • A wandering trader now hauls a cart in through the gate with a dinosaur going cheap. If your yard is full you can raise a pen and take the deal in one go.
  • A scout from a rival stable turns up at your fence with a spyglass, and they are there for one of your riders. Match their offer to keep them, or take the transfer fee and an empty saddle.
  • Dinosaurs can fall ill. A sick one goes pale and sluggish, hangs its head outside the med tent and will not train — send for the herbalist, or let it sweat it out for a couple of days.
  • A bumper harvest stacks bales and grain sacks by the trough. Keep it and your stable eats free for two days with the trough piled high, or sell the surplus for gold on the spot.
14 Aug 2026 Improvement Legend of Melda Claude Opus 5
The campaign gains its sixth and final region — the Emberforge — and a third boss, the Cinderwright, who hammers the arena floor into molten slag.
  • A new region, the Emberforge, now sits between the Drowned Halls and the Lair: a dwarven forge the shadow took, full of molten runout channels, ash pits and cooling slag. Nine rooms, a smithy, and a quest chain of its own.
  • Meet Durvan Ashkeep, the last of the forge-wrights, hiding in his own smithy. He will hand you a heart talisman and tell you where the forge key is bricked up.
  • Face the Cinderwright, a forge-golem in three phases. Every hammer-fall leaves a pool of molten floor that stays hot for a while, so the ground you can safely stand on keeps shrinking — and in its last phase it bleeds fresh slag everywhere it walks.
  • Beat it and take the Emberguard: blasts no longer burn you, so you can set a bomb at your own feet and stand in it, and your Skyfall Slam now shatters cracked stone without needing a bomb at all.
14 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
14 Aug 2026 Improvement Shinobi Storm Claude Opus 5
Act II now burns — Shinobi Storm gets a second arena, the Burning Village, with tight streets, a well at the crossroads and carts on fire.
  • A whole second battleground: the Burning Village, a burnt-out village of four house blocks, a cross of narrow streets and a stone well at the centre where they meet.
  • The village fights differently. Enemies can no longer close on you from every angle at once — they funnel down four street mouths, and the well, the burning handcarts, the straw bales and the fallen roof beams are all things a badly-aimed dash ends against.
  • Act II of the campaign is fought there. Beat the Oni Warlord and the act break now marches you out of the shrine and down into the village, which is already alight when you arrive.
  • Endless and co-op reach it too, from wave nine, so you can see the new arena without finishing Act I first.
14 Aug 2026 Improvement Whiteout Claude Opus 5
Two new missions, two new enemies and the campaign’s third boss — the Rimewright, who does not hit harder, he just keeps making more of them.
  • Two new missions slot in before the Frostmaw finale. The Glass Field is a board about flanking, and The Rimewright is a full boss fight against the thing that has been raising the golems all along.
  • The Rimeguard carries a wall of ice-plate and always faces the square it means to strike. Your shove, hook and flare skid straight off that face for nothing — go round it, or shove another enemy into it, because their blows are not shielded.
  • The Underfloe swims under the ice and surfaces behind your line, so a wall of bodies does not stop it. It still has to come up somewhere, and the ghost shows you where — stand on that square and it never breaches.
  • The Rimewright makes a Cairn Call every second turn, marking a square in cyan where a Rime Golem will rise at the end of the turn. Stand on the square and nothing comes; shove him and the call breaks.
13 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Opus 5
The early climb no longer happens in the same place four fights running — two brand-new arenas, and every stage now has its own sound.
  • New arena: the Dawn Dojo, where HAYATO fights. Training-yard islands with striking posts, a wooden dummy and a weapon rack, dojo halls and bamboo on the skyline, banks of morning mist and drifting petals.
  • New arena: the Ember Forge, where GORO fights. A working foundry at sunset with furnace mouths glowing across the yard, anvils and crucibles of molten metal, iron plates swinging on chains, and sparks rising off the floor.
  • Every arena now has its own ambient sound, from birdsong and bamboo at the dojo to bellows and hammer-fall at the forge. The existing Sound FX setting turns it off.
  • The stage card now tells you where you are fighting, not just who you are fighting.
13 Aug 2026 Improvement Antibody Claude Opus 5
Two new pathogens join the campaign — an armoured turret you have to time, and a charger you have to sidestep.
  • Biofilm turrets anchor themselves in your path behind a rotating armour plate that shrugs off every shot you have, even the piercing Pulse Lance. The plate has exactly one gap, it sweeps around the body, and the turret can only fire out of that same gap — so the moment you can hurt it is the moment it can hurt you.
  • Cannot wait it out? Ignore it and it eventually blows its own plate and drops away, or spend a Burst bomb: the bomb punches straight through plating.
  • Lancers carry no gun at all. They lock onto where you are, draw a bright green line straight at you, then hurl themselves down it at enormous speed. Move once and they commit to empty space — or shoot them out of the air during the wind-up.
  • Both threats build across the campaign: the Lymph Node introduces each one on its own, the Marrow Depths mixes them into the cyst and weaver waves, and the Infected Core sends a two-lancer pincer and a pair of turrets whose gaps open on different beats.
13 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Opus 5
The Deep Star starts fighting back — steam vents, live arc junctions and silt currents across eight decks, plus the rebreather scrubber that finally lets you trade lamp charge for air.
  • Ruptured steam vents now blow on a timer across eight decks. Walk into the plume and it scalds air out of your tank and shoves you back out of it — but it always cycles, so it never blocks a route, it only makes you choose whether to wait.
  • Live electrical junctions build up a buzz, then discharge. Catch one in the open and your dive lamp dies for eight seconds and will not relight, on a rig where the thing hunting you moves faster in the dark.
  • Silt currents drag you the way the arrows on the deck plate point. They never hurt you — but they move you, and being moved is not always bad news.
  • New fifth tool: the rebreather scrubber. It burns battery to make breathable air, and holds your lamp out for the whole five seconds it runs. Your two clocks can finally be spent against each other.
13 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
Eight relics now drop mid-delve — found in a run, gone when it ends.
  • Treasure chests and every boss can now hand you a relic: a floating trinket you walk over that changes how the whole delve plays.
  • Eight to find, and each one is a new thing you can do rather than a bigger number — a ring of thorns that shreds anything standing next to you, a lodestone that rips loot off the floor and into your hand, a trail of fire you leave behind as you run, a chill that halves the speed of anything you wound.
  • Three of them ask something back. The Stoneheart Plate turns one blow aside completely but then has to gather itself. The Greed Pact pours in gold and takes a quarter of your health for it. The Hollow Heart refuses one killing blow, and crumbles.
  • The Twinfang Sigil makes every attack strike twice, the echo a beat behind — it works with any class, on any weapon.
12 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
THE VOID is now a place of its own — the rock shears into crystal, and something down there breathes in.
  • Below 3400 metres the trench walls stop meandering and shear into crystal: flat facet planes meeting at hard angles, lit by your lamp, glinting at every corner. The Void shaft is tighter, asymmetric and genuinely harder to fly than the trench above it.
  • New hazard, the cold seep — the hydrothermal vent's opposite number. A vent erupts and shoves you off it. A seep rests, shivers a warning, then inhales: it drags you toward its mouth and puts ice on your hull.
  • Ice costs you thrust and top speed, and once it's in the plates it starts eating the hull. Swimming clear sheds it immediately, so getting out is always the answer — but the seep's rest phase is your only window, and the cold keeps its treasure right inside the pull.
  • Arriving in the Void now announces itself, with a crystalline groan and a colder, darker water.
12 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
Act two begins — three new hazards and three new sectors take the campaign from eight clusters to eleven.
  • Sector 9, Rimewake: frost creeps out across the ice while you stand there and takes your grip where it has spread. The shimmer always arrives a moment before the ground goes slick, so the warning is yours to read.
  • Sector 10, Lanternfall: a blade of light sweeps each world on a slow pendulum. Watch the dark band it throws ahead of itself — that is where the light is going next, and it flips sides when the blade turns round.
  • Sector 11, Windward: squalls build audibly and then hit, shoving you across the ground rather than just bending your jumps. They blow hardest at a world's belt and not at all at its poles, so there is always still ground if you can reach it.
  • None of it can take a heart. Like the boulders, the new hazards knock you about and cost you your footing, and the answer is always to read them and route around them.
12 Aug 2026 Improvement Heatwave Claude Opus 5
The field is no longer strangers — six named rivals now follow you from the National Trials to the Laurel Games, and they keep score.
  • Six named rivals with faces and temperaments now make up every field: a closer who is nothing in a heat and everything in a final, a front-runner, a metronome, a big-occasion athlete, a firework who wins it or is nowhere, and a student who gets better every time you meet. Five of the six line up in any given field and the sixth rests.
  • Every event brief now opens with a start list: who you are about to face, in order of who is fastest today, with your win-loss record against each of them and who is sitting this one out.
  • Results now tell you what the round did to your rivalries — who beat you and by how much, your running head-to-head, and when someone has your number three or four times in a row.
  • A new pavilion in the village, The Circuit, shows the standings, your record against all six broken down by event, their best marks against you and the medals they have won in front of you.
12 Aug 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Opus 5
The night shift has an ending now — THE CONCIERGE, the system that runs Elysium, is waiting in RECEPTION.
  • A seventh and final section, RECEPTION: the one warmly lit room in the building, and the only one with a reception desk.
  • THE CONCIERGE, a four-phase final boss. It is not angry with you. It thinks it is the only thing keeping forty thousand people from being gone, and it gets harder to disagree with as you win.
  • It reserves columns of light on the floor, issues citations, calls a building-wide audit — and puts the dead back on their feet. Not new ones. The ones you killed.
  • It only comes within arm's reach when it lowers itself to talk to you. That is your window, and it is enough to finish the fight with nothing but the grinder.
12 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Fable 5
The ranch got a feed trough worth eating from, and strength training you can actually watch.
  • The feed trough is a real thing now — a plank trough on splayed legs, heaped with meat mounding over the rim and greens tucked into the pile for the stego. You can see at a glance whether there is food in it.
  • Strength training is no longer a dino standing next to a prop. Whichever beast you set to STRENGTH now rolls the station log down a worn lane and back again, and it works for every species.
  • Fixed a dino getting shoved somewhere strange when something interrupted it mid-drill.
11 Aug 2026 Improvement Kong Climb Claude Opus 5
Act III — The Skyline: four new boards, two new enemies and a second boss take the climb from 200m to 300m.
  • Four new boards above the ape's perch: a crane deck strung with swinging wrecking balls, a frozen ice works where you slide instead of stopping, a storm deck where the gale shoves you sideways even in mid-air, and the 300m gantry.
  • Two new things trying to kill you. A wrecking ball is only deadly at the bottom of its swing — listen for the chain creak and cross while it hangs high. An electric arc crawls the girder and fires a column of lightning wherever it stops, so standing still is no longer safe.
  • A second boss fight. The ape has taken the site's crane, and the moment he is beatable now travels across the arena — you have to chase it down. Every blow you land makes the arena worse.
  • Mute finally works for everyone: press M or use the new Mute all switch in Settings, and it is remembered next time.
11 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Opus 5
Two new enemies join the clan's ranks — a shield-bearing footsoldier you have to get behind, and something that rides the bamboo and drops on anyone who stands still.
  • The Ashigaru carries a heavy pavise and your katana simply rings off the front of it. Dash straight through him and cut his back, throw a shuriken over the rim from mid-air, drop an overhead cut from a jump, or bait his shield bash and strike while his guard is down.
  • Hack at that shield long enough and it splits apart and falls off him — he keeps coming, faster and angrier, with nothing left to hide behind.
  • The Clinger rides a bamboo column above the road, slides down to meet you, and drops feet-first on anyone who stops underneath. Keep running and it lands behind you. Ducking will not save you.
  • Once it's down it scuttles along the deck after you for a few seconds before climbing back up. A shuriken will take it off the pole before it ever commits.
11 Aug 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Opus 5
Two new cave hazards and a landmark set-piece — the vault doors of Crystal Vents now slam shut on a beat.
  • New IRIS GATES: armoured jaws slide out of the ceiling and floor on a rhythm, squeezing the cave down to a narrow slit. They always warn you first — the housings pulse amber and two dashed lines show exactly where the jaws are about to land. The gap is often not in the middle of the tunnel, so you have to move to it rather than hold the centre.
  • New VENT JETS: wall nozzles blast gas across the tunnel. These do not kill you, they shove you — you have to lean on the stick and fly through the push.
  • THE VAULT DOORS: three oversized irises in a row near the end of Crystal Vents, slamming one after another like a wave, over a colder backdrop. Crystal Vents had no landmark of its own before; now it has the biggest one in the game, and all three doors share the same safe line, so pick it early and hold it.
  • The hazards are spread across all four biomes — Ion Reach gets two lone gates to teach you the read, Crystal Vents is thick with both, and The Core gets a sparing dose. Endless runs get them too.
11 Aug 2026 Improvement Dino Brawl Claude Fable 5
A fourth species takes the sand, and knockouts finally get a camera worth watching.
  • Pteranodon joins the roster as the fourth species, stocked at the hatchery from the start. Its SKYFALL talon dive opens a bleeding wound that keeps ticking, and its swoop dash carries it through an attack unharmed.
  • Fights now show what they cost: hits throw blood, wounded dinos trail drips across the sand, and the splatter builds into pools that stay for the rest of the match.
  • A knockout plays out in three shots — a slow-motion close-up of the fall, a pan across the victor, then a crane pull-back over the arena — instead of holding on a still frame.
  • Fixed dead dinos sliding across the arena floor after a knockout.
10 Aug 2026 Improvement Scrap Colossus Claude Opus 5
Four pilot techniques you have to win to earn — vent your heat, dodge a rocket, flatten a champion with your own tonnage, or plant your feet and refuse to fall.
  • Beat Rustmouth and you learn PURGE VENT: dump 45 heat instantly on a long cooldown, so a build with big hot guns is finally a plan instead of a mistake.
  • Beat Bella Donna and you learn SIDESTEP: a hard sideways burst that shells and seeker rockets pass straight through. It is the answer to being kited.
  • Beat The Magistrate and you learn SHOULDER CHARGE: throw your whole tonnage forward. It barely scratches armour, but it wrecks balance — and how hard it hits depends on what your machine WEIGHS, so a slow heavy frame finally has something a light one cannot do.
  • Beat Piledriver and you learn BRACE: hold it to plant your feet. Nothing topples you and balance damage is halved, but you cannot walk, jump or dodge while you stand in it.
10 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Opus 5
The Deep Star grew two more flooded decks, and something down there has learned to hunt divers who stand still.
  • Two new decks to climb: the Ballast Cellar, a wide flooded sump ringed with tank banks and a sealed pump chamber, and the Comms Spine, a long corridor lined with dead-end relay rooms.
  • A new creature, the Driftmaw. It is blind and deaf, it feels the water, and it can only find you when you have stopped moving. Every deck before it taught you that holding still in a corner was safe. It is the bill for that habit.
  • Keep walking and it simply cannot take you — not at any range, not even mid-lunge. Watch for its iris peeling open and the whole room turning magenta: that is the moment it has you, and two steps break its hold.
  • A burning flare hangs stiller in the water than any diver, so throwing one will pull a Driftmaw off you.
9 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Opus 5
A second boss now guards the Midnight dark — and three new pieces of kit change how you dive.
  • THE BROODMOTHER: a giant anglerfish matriarch nests in the Midnight wall between 1800 and 2400 metres, guarding the richest cache in the trench. She never leaves her lair and she never follows you up, so taking her on is entirely your choice.
  • She fights in two phases: watch her lure flare white, because that is the instant before she commits to a charge — and at half health she shrieks and the nest hatches around you. Unlike the Guardian, she can be killed.
  • BALLAST lets you flood tanks and drop to working depth far faster, without making the sub any twitchier once you are down there.
  • FLARE RACK gives you a burst of daylight on demand, refilled free at the dock. GRAPPLE CLAW reels salvage in from a distance, so you can take the prize without swimming into whatever is sitting on it.
9 Aug 2026 Improvement Heatwave Claude Opus 5
The Long Jump joins the Solaria squad — three attempts, best counts, and one toe over the board means no jump at all.
  • A third event, the Long Jump, is now open in the village. Sprint down the runway in rhythm, hit the take-off board without going over it, control your body in the air and reach your heels out for the landing.
  • You get three attempts and only your best one counts — and you jump last in every round, so the scoreboard tells you exactly what you need before your final run.
  • Rhythm on the run-up no longer just makes you faster: it decides how much of your speed survives the board. A ragged approach leaves a metre behind in the runway.
  • Four new techniques to earn — the Check Mark, the Hitch-Kick, Stride Pattern and the Leg Shoot — plus three new pieces of equipment to buy at the Kit Room, each one a genuine trade.
8 Aug 2026 Improvement Pocket Cosmos Claude Opus 5
Pocket Cosmos gets its first set piece — a whole sector where the broken necklace of worlds draws itself back together around you — and a real narrated opening cinematic.
  • New Sector 8, The Necklace Re-forms: seven sockets of light hang empty in the dark, then the worlds sail home one by one and the threads between them strike alight. The road across only exists while its beads are in place.
  • Worlds move for the first time. Stand on one as it pulls away and it carries you out into the dark and back — and one star shard hangs out there, reachable no other way.
  • The opening is now a proper cinematic: four camera moves over the real first cluster, with narration. It replaces the old wall of text, and you can skip it with any button, a tap, or the Skip chip.
  • New sounds for a bead clicking home, a bead letting go, and the moment the whole necklace is strung.
8 Aug 2026 Improvement Graveshift Claude Opus 5
Race the ghost of your own best run through every section you have cleared.
  • Clear a section and Graveshift now remembers your fastest run of it. Play it again and a pale blue ghost of that run sets off beside you, jumping the same gaps and ejecting its exosuit at the same moment you did.
  • A live counter at the top of the screen shows exactly how far ahead of, or behind, your best you are — measured at the same point in the level, not against the clock — and calls it out the moment the lead changes hands.
  • Beat your best and the section-clear screen tells you by how much; die and the retry screen shows you the time to beat.
  • Your ghost is yours alone. It never leaves your machine, there is nothing to upload or download, and you will never race anybody else's run.
7 Aug 2026 Improvement Driftwave Claude Opus 5
Driftwave gets real launch ramps, two new road hazards, and boost you pick up off the track.
  • Ramps are now real. Line up, hit the deck and the car genuinely leaves the road — hold it straight through the air and you land clean for a chain step and a slug of boost; land sideways and you will pay for it in speed.
  • Boost is now something you collect. Glowing boost cells sit on every circuit, just off the fastest line, and come back every lap. Grabbing one fills a whole charge.
  • The boost meter now counts charges instead of filling a bar, so you can see at a glance how many boosts you have left and when you are about to run dry. Drifting still charges it, and it still bleeds away if you hoard it.
  • Two new hazards to read: slick patches that make the tail step out (but charge your boost faster if you are brave enough to drift on them), and gusting cross-winds that push you off your line right when you need it most.
7 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
The Vault is now a real skill tree — 72 skills across four classes, and the knight finally has answers.
  • The old three-upgrade Vault is gone. Every class now has a proper skill tree: three branches, four tiers deep, each ending in a choice between two capstones you can only have one of. That is 18 skills per class and 72 in all.
  • Skills change how you fight, not just your numbers. The knight can throw a flying crescent of force with every swing, charge by pressing block while moving, and turn a boss's own missiles back at it with his shield. The ranger fires three arrows at once, cuts through everything he dashes past, and marks targets. The mage's nova can be made to pull enemies in instead of blowing them apart, and his
  • The knight in particular now has real answers to a boss that stays out of reach — reach, a gap-closer, a shield that reflects, and a once-per-floor refusal to die.
  • Reforging a class refunds every coin you spent on it, so trying the other capstone costs you nothing but the walk back down.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Harry Trainingspak Claude Opus 5
Chapter three folds back into the street: the perfect rooftop dawn now breaks on a bottle of milk, and the only thing standing between Harry and it is a cat.
  • The rooftop has a new final step. Blanket, coffee and fairy lights are no longer enough — she doesn't drink her coffee black, and there is no milk on a roof.
  • The milk is three rooms down, in the café's delivery, which has stood on the kerb since eight o'clock because nobody dared move the cat asleep on top of it.
  • Harry's charm offensive gets its first total, absolute failure. The cat does not even open one eye. What works instead is picking her up, taking eight claws in the sleeve, and carrying her across the pavement to somewhere warmer.
  • The barman finally has something useful to say, if you go and ask him.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Driftwave Claude Opus 5
Two new circuits, a fourth hovercar, and a fix for the disappearing canyon road.
  • Static Canyon no longer sinks into the ground — the road and your car stay visible for the whole lap.
  • The orange hazard blocks now sit flat on the tarmac instead of tilting nose-down like broken ramps. They wear warning chevrons and a glowing top rail so you can pick your lane early. They are obstacles to dodge, not ramps to jump.
  • Two new circuits join the campaign: Tidal Docks, the tightest, most technical road in the game, and Solar Spire, a long, fast finale that climbs above the clouds.
  • New hovercar, the Revenant, unlocked by clearing Orbital Ring. It plays by different rules: every clean drift chain pays out an instant slug of boost, and scraping a wall costs you speed but not your chain — though its meter drains twice as fast, so spend it.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Fable 5
No more first-use stutter, and enemies have to see you before they hunt you.
  • The frame hitch the first time each effect appeared is gone — everything is prepared while a floor loads instead.
  • Enemies now need line of sight to notice you. Once they have seen you they chase your last known position for about three seconds, then give up. The wraith still ignores walls, as it always has.
  • A new sword impact sound plays when you connect. A swing through empty air is still silent.
  • Taking a hit now shoves you back slightly.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Fable 5
Every enemy and all four bosses rebuilt, with a full combat effects pass.
  • All ten regular enemy types redrawn with their own colours and their own way of moving, so you can tell what is coming at you across a dark room.
  • The exploder and the guard telegraph what they are about to do far more clearly.
  • All four bosses rebuilt as articulated figures that visibly act out their attack patterns and escalate through phases.
  • Projectiles now look different depending on what fired them, explosions are layered, and breaking a spawner finally pays off on screen.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
Attack and block move to the controller triggers, and hits land with real weight.
  • On a controller, attack and block are now the right and left triggers, with the shoulder buttons as alternates.
  • Connecting a hit now briefly freezes the frame and slows time, and knocks the enemy back — heavier enemies shrug it off more than light ones.
  • Enough hits in a row stagger an enemy out of what it was doing.
  • The swing effect is now a crescent that travels with the blade, and sparks only when you actually connect.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Opus 5
Twin-stick controls: aim where you want while you move where you want.
  • Aim is now separate from movement on every device — the mouse cursor on desktop, the right stick on a controller, and a second thumb stick on touch that auto-fires once you push it far enough.
  • You can back away from something while still shooting at it, or circle it sideways without turning your back.
  • Keyboard-only play is unchanged: you still face the way you are walking.
  • The existing light aim assist is untouched and still helps on top.
6 Aug 2026 Improvement Delvers Claude Fable 5
All four delvers get a second detail pass, and a full set of new animations.
  • Every class rebuilt with layered armour and cloth that catches the torchlight — the ranger's cape now moves, the mage carries a spinning orb halo, the cleric a floating one.
  • New idle breathing, a lean into the walk, a flinch when you take a hit, a victory pose, and a proper fall under the death cinematic.
  • Class select shows each delver in their own hero pose.
6 Aug 2026 Housekeeping Delvers Claude Fable 5
The sword swing now appears where you are actually swinging.
  • Fixed the melee swing effect drawing at 90 degrees to the side of your delver instead of out in front. Where the blow actually landed was always correct — only the picture of it was wrong.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Poker Tiles Claude Sonnet 5
Poker Tiles' boss ladder and shop rack both grew — three new casino bosses and three new run-long charms to build around.
  • Three new boss powers can now show up on any boss blind: Card Counter bans a single rank instead of a suit, Pit Rules locks an entire row of the board, and The Vig skims a flat cut off every hand you score.
  • Three new accessoires join the shop rack: Black Cat and Shamrock round out suit-loyalty builds (spades and clubs, joining the existing hearts and diamonds charms), and Wild Wonder rewards leaning into Joker Card wildcards.
  • Each new boss and accessoire has its own hand-painted casino-noir portrait or icon, matching the game's existing art style.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Race Evolutions Claude Sonnet 5
Added hazard tuning and per-circuit target times so every round of the Championship — and every Time Attack circuit — now has a real bar to beat, not just a clock.
  • Alpine Rush's mountain straight now has a tire wall to dodge, giving that circuit its first near-miss scoring chance.
  • Every circuit shows a target time in Time Attack and on the Championship standings — beat it and your time lights up green with a star.
  • The in-race HUD now shows your target time right alongside your lap clock.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Mafioso Claude 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.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Ghost Catchers Claude Sonnet 5
Two of the legendary gods just became four — a whole new way to hunt them down.
  • Loki, Artemis, Freya and Hades now fight completely differently from the other eleven legendary gods: instead of chasing a drifting target through magical wards, they vanish into hiding and only show themselves in short bursts.
  • Throwing while one of these four is hidden always misses — and never costs you a trap. Wait for it to surface, then throw fast.
  • Land a hit and you cut off that hiding spot for good. Corner every spot but one and the god is pinned in the open — that's your moment to catch it.
  • Artemis, the Goddess of the Hunt, is the toughest of the four, with an extra hiding spot to track.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Harry Trainingspak Claude Opus 5
Chapter two no longer ends where it starts — the night sends Harry back down through the cafe, the street and the chemist's, and the shop's forgotten regular turns out to be the puzzle.
  • The candle, the bubbly and the record are no longer enough. With the room finally right, the lady mentions — as kindly as it can be put — that Harry has spent the evening hanging in a bin and carrying sixteen crates of beer, and that up here, with a candle lit, it rather shows.
  • There is a new mirror in the boudoir, and it will tell you the truth if you lean close enough.
  • The fix is three rooms downstairs, back out into the street and into the chemist's you bought her perfume in — now ten minutes from closing, with half its lights already off.
  • Harry is broke, so the chemist names a different price: get the shabby regular who has shuffled around that shop all game out of the door before closing time.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Run Shinobi Run Claude Sonnet 5
Act 2 gets its boss fight — the Tide Priest, guarding the Sunken Shrine.
  • The Sunken Shrine's empty final courtyard is now a real boss arena: face the Tide Priest before the road to Storm Keep opens.
  • Phase one floods the ground beneath your feet — jump to the platforms or go under.
  • Phase two sends a wave of water sweeping the whole courtyard — duck to let it pass over you.
  • In his final phase he keeps both attacks coming and calls in reinforcements.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Circvs Maximvs Claude Sonnet 5
The championship season no longer sends you back to a circuit you already raced at the exact same distance — the last two races of the season now visit genuinely different sand.
  • Race 4 of the season (Ludi Ceriales) now runs the wide Circus Maximus instead of repeating Circus Flaminius from race 2.
  • The season finale (Ludi Magni) now closes at Circus Maxentius — the grandest, fastest circuit in the empire — instead of just re-running the very first race's venue.
  • Circus Flaminius, the tight technical circuit, now appears exactly once, at the distance it was actually tuned for.
  • No changes to controls, handling, or any other race content.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement AI Fighter Claude Sonnet 5
The ladder finally has eight rivals, and the arena stops being the same room every fight.
  • New rival MIZUKI, a patient sumo counter-fighter, slots in between OKAMI and KAGE — the ladder is a full eight rungs now.
  • Two new stage themes, Ashen Harbor and Void Temple, so not every fight happens in the same arena.
  • Re-recorded three voice lines that still said there were seven rivals.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Abyss Diver Claude Sonnet 5
The trench just got three new things that can catch you — a fleeing shoal, an ambush predator hiding on the walls, and something in the deepest dark that isn't always there.
  • A schooling shoal of krill now drifts through the shallow and twilight waters — mostly harmless, but it scatters (and pays out) if you put a torpedo through it.
  • A new trench crab lurks camouflaged against the cave walls from Midnight depth down — stay clear of the walls or it will lunge out at you.
  • A new predator only appears in the Void, the deepest zone reached through New Game+: it's nearly invisible until it decloaks and charges — hunting one down pays the richest bounty in the game.
  • Two new underwater sound effects accompany the crab's claw-snap and the Void predator's decloak.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Star Putt Claude Sonnet 5
Course III opens on the Rim's tour — ten holes where every trick you've learned has to work together.
  • Added Course III, "The Derelict Circuit" — ten new holes set in a wrecked-fleet graveyard, bringing the full tour to 29 holes across three courses.
  • Every hazard you've met now teams up: gates that fling you straight into a pulsar's shove, a black hole so wide only a gate gets you past it, and a finale that throws every trick at you at once.
  • New arrival cinematic and a new amber-nebula backdrop for the course.
  • Fixed the end-of-tour scorecard so all three courses' hole lists display cleanly.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Scarecrow Claude Sonnet 5
A third boss and two new foe types join the campaign — the field now holds nine Nights instead of eight.
  • A new mid-boss, the Harrow — a colossal iron farm-machine — now stands between Thornfall and the Blight King, summoning fragile bombers and burning a scar across the field with its charge.
  • Two new enemies debut alongside it: the Strawjack, a fragile straw bomb that roots and detonates if you let it get close, and the Gravewisp, a ghost that blinks straight toward you instead of just walking.
  • The campaign is now nine Nights long, with three real bosses to fell along the way.
  • The How to Play screen and the victory summary now reflect the longer campaign and the new boss.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Foxblade Claude Sonnet 5
Four new enemies stalk the Crow Road, and every one of them is a different problem to solve.
  • Shield wardens block everything they face — go around the side or behind them, or parry and kill them on the counter.
  • Diving hawks perch above the path, telegraph, then dive at you and climb back to their perch.
  • Ember braziers lob fire on a fixed rhythm that never tracks you — learn the beat and walk straight through it.
  • Chargers patrol, wind up, commit to a straight charge, then need a moment to recover.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Scrap Colossus Claude Opus 5
Every champion now defends their own corner of the yard — five distinct rings, two of them actively trying to kill you.
  • Each rung of the ladder is fought somewhere new: the open Scrap Yard, a canyon of stacked wrecks, a smelter floor, a cramped press bay, and Colossus Rex’s floodlit night ring.
  • The ring decides what a good machine looks like. Some cover is chest-high, some is six metres tall, some is barely a kerb — so where you bolt a gun matters differently in every fight. In the Stacks, only a head-mounted gun sees over the car stacks; a shoulder gun will not.
  • The Furnace Floor has pools of molten slag that flood your heat gauge and eat hull straight through your armour — a little under eight seconds in one will cook a standard machine. Jumping clears a pool.
  • The Crusher Pit has three live hydraulic presses on a timer, and Colossus Rex fights under a magnet crane that drops crushed cars. Both flash a warning ring on the floor and sound a klaxon about a second and a quarter before they land.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Antibody Claude Sonnet 5
Antibody now lets you choose your weapon — three brand-new firing patterns join the original auto-cannon.
  • Added three new weapons: the Pulse Lance (a piercing bolt that punches through a whole line of enemies), the Homing Swarm (drones that curve onto whatever's nearest), and the Scatter Blast (a close-range shotgun burst).
  • New "Select Weapon" screen when you start a new run — pick your loadout before diving in.
  • Your weapon choice is remembered if you quit and continue later.
  • Each weapon now has its own sound and its own look on screen.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Whiteout Claude Sonnet 5
Two new missions, two new enemies and a second boss now stand between you and the Frostmaw.
  • New missions 'Old Ice' and 'The Warlord's Stand' come before the finale.
  • Rime Vents never move, but sweep their entire row and column every single turn.
  • Rime Golems cannot be shoved, hooked or displaced by anything you have.
  • New boss: the Ironclad, a heavy ranged raider whose shots punch through to the tile behind their target.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Hyperdrift Claude Opus 5
Hyperdrift gets a hangar — eight new skiffs to earn, each one flying differently.
  • New HANGAR screen: nine ships, from the standard Drift-7 to eight you unlock by playing. Locked bays show exactly what you have to do and how far along you are.
  • Every skiff flies differently, not just better. The Vector-9 turns twice as sharp, the Needle is a pixel thinner, the Revenant survives its first crash of every stage, and the Kestrel has a drift brake that drags the whole rift down to two-thirds speed.
  • Skiffs are side-grades, not upgrades: the forgiving ones score less and the Lance — no shields, one life fewer — scores 60% more. Pick your poison.
  • Unlocks are earned from everything you already do: clearing stages, collecting cells, chasing endless distance, escaping the rift, even crashing (we insist).
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Blacklight Claude Sonnet 5
The Deep Star's escape trunk gained a new deck, and it's the campaign's first real set-piece encounter.
  • New deck: Deck A — Moon Pool, a wide flooded chamber where the Siren circles on a fixed path instead of hunting you directly.
  • Light three dead beacons with your dive lamp to open the way through — but the longer you take, the more dangerous the water gets.
  • After the second beacon, the Siren starts cutting straight through the middle of the chamber in fast, telegraphed charges — stay out of the open water when you hear it coming.
  • New warning roar cue and beacon-lit voice line.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Golden Boot Claude Sonnet 5
Sixteen clubs finally play different football — five tactical identities now shape how each side presses, defends, spreads out, and attacks.
  • Every club in the cup now has its own tactical identity — high press, counter-attack, low block, wide play, or direct long-ball football — instead of all sixteen playing the same generic game.
  • Pressing sides hunt the ball in numbers and defend high up the pitch; low-block sides drop deep and rarely chase the game.
  • Wide-play clubs push their full-backs and wingers out to the touchline instead of staying narrow.
  • Counter-attacking and direct clubs will go long and skip the short passing game when the chance is there.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Mole Mayhem Claude Sonnet 5
Mole Mayhem's campaign doubled to 10 battles, with three new enemy types, two new arenas, and a new trap weapon.
  • The campaign now runs 10 battles instead of 5, ending in a new final boss: General Gnaw, King Mole's ruthless second-in-command.
  • Three new enemy types join the fight: snipers who keep their distance and pick you off from range, brutes who charge straight at you with fists and dynamite, and tricksters who dig and teleport constantly to keep you guessing.
  • Two new battlegrounds: a frostbitten arena with falling snow, and a toxic swamp with rising bubbles.
  • A new weapon, the Land Mine — bury it and wait for an enemy to wander too close.
5 Aug 2026 Improvement Motherlode Claude Sonnet 5
Motherlode's Motherlode finally has a guardian — a three-phase boss fight now stands between you and the gold, plus two new underground threats to watch for on the way down.
  • The Motherlode is no longer a free grab — a rock-and-ore guardian called the Tommyknocker now blocks the chamber, and you'll need to beat it down with your pick before you can claim the gold.
  • The Tommyknocker fights in three stages: it charges you directly at first, then starts bringing the ceiling down as it weakens, and finally starts venting gas pockets when it's nearly beaten — each stage telegraphs before it hits.
  • Two new hazards join the mine: a burrowing mole that ambushes from underfoot in the Quartz Caves, and a cave spider that drops from the ceiling when you walk beneath it.
  • Beating the guardian rewards you with a burst of rich gold and diamond ore on top of whatever's already in your bag.

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