Hills finally pay out. Running downhill now builds speed past your normal top speed and keeps building. Until now the drain that pulls you back down to top speed cancelled out everything the slope was giving you, so on any hill shallower than about 34 degrees a descent was genuinely slower than flat ground.
Rolling is still the fastest way down a hill. It is no longer the only way down that works at all.
Flat ground and climbs are untouched: extra speed still drains away once the terrain levels out, and you still cannot run uphill any faster than before.
Blaze Roll
The airborne press is now a double jump. Pressing blaze roll in mid-air launches you upward in the ball, worth a little more than a full jump's height, instead of slamming you straight down.
You keep full air control through the hop. The old dive cancelled your horizontal momentum outright and dropped you where you stood.
Taking the hop early in a jump adds to the climb rather than cutting it short.
Claw Strike
Rebuilt. The claw no longer shoves you forward on press, no longer arrests your fall with an air dash, no longer lunges at a target, and no longer locks your facing for the whole button hold.
In the air the swing is now just a swing. Your jump arc and your steering are untouched by it.
On the ground each swing eases you forward smoothly. It used to snap you seven pixels every fifth of a second with a dead stop in between, which is what made a flurry feel jerky.
The forward step is dropped when a swing is already connecting, so a flurry can no longer shove you through whatever you are hitting.
Every swing re-aims, so a flurry turns around as fast as you do. It never pushes you past your run speed and never wipes the momentum you arrived with.
Spiders
Baby spiders spit web. A cocoon shot lobbed on an arc, alternating with their pounce.
They will not web a player who is already cocooned, and they will not fire point-blank. Get inside their close range and every attack is the leap instead.
Hanging and wall-climbing spiders never shoot.
Cocoons are escapable. Three separate pushes of a movement direction tear one open, counted by a white struggle bar over your head. A direction you were already holding when the web landed does not count. Let go and push again.
Damage taken while webbed costs health but no knockback. A killing blow inside the cocoon skips the death animation entirely: the sprite freezes and the screen goes black with the silk still wrapped.
Death and Respawn
Dying is now a reload of your checkpoint, not a trip through the crystal beam. You are simply already standing there when the screen lifts.
The fades are considerably shorter, and your controls stay locked until the fade has fully cleared. A held direction used to walk you off the respawn point while the screen was still dark.
Boss deaths are a retry, not a story beat: roughly 0.9 seconds from death to back on your feet, down from 5.3.
Saves
New Game actually starts a new game. A fresh run launched from the main menu used to inherit the previous run's story flags, form, aspects, defeated bosses, seen tutorials and last respawn point.
The opening saves now. Waking the Dragon's Vein during the intro writes to disk, so quitting after the opening no longer puts you back at the start of the tutorial cave.
Phoenix
Lord Cinderwing's stun bar takes more punishment before it breaks, now that a mid-air roll can reach him.
Fixes
Choosing Main Menu from inside the game no longer bounces straight back into the world and leaves the menu unusable for the rest of the session.
Fixed a rare loss of footing while standing on a one-way platform.
The roll tutorial now teaches the button rather than the hill it happened to be sited on.
Boot goes straight to a black splash. The engine logo is gone.