🧪 Update 1.3.9 — Side Effects May Include Being On Fire
The kitchen fights back. This update adds five new status effects, a meatball that shows every bite you take, and a bell that ends the hunt for the last few enemies in each wave. It also carries an apology to everyone whose co-op night ended at the first boss.
🚑 First, The Co-op Crash
- 💥 1.3.8 crashed every co-op game the moment a boss or mini-boss spawned. It took down the host and every guest, every time. Single-player was never affected, which is exactly how it got past us.
- 🔧 Fixed. The boss was counting heads at the table a split second before it had actually sat down. Sorry to everyone whose co-op night ended at the first boss. Go again, it works now.
🧪 Side Effects May Include…
Five new status effects, and each one goes after something different that you rely on. Enemies pass them on by touch, and their shots carry them too.
- 🛢️ GREASED: your stick steers your momentum instead of your meatball, so you wind up, overshoot and skid. The upside is that dashes go 35% further. Given by Ovens and Cheese Wheels.
- 🥶 CHILLED → FROZEN: every stack slows you 12% and makes reloads 15% longer. At three stacks you're frozen solid and can't move, shoot or dash. Mash move, dash or fire to crack the ice early, and you get a short grace period after you thaw. Given by Frozen Frank, Frost Wraiths, Glacier Golems and Frost Lancers, and by standing around in a Walk-in Fridge's cold.
- 💧 SOGGY: damp powder. Reloads take 60% longer and one shot in five fizzles at the barrel. Given by Acid Slimes, Acid Spitters and Dishwashers.
- 🫘 BLOATED: every 1.25 seconds you let out a puff you didn't ask for. It shoves nearby enemies off you and shakes clingers loose, but it also kicks you backwards, away from where you're aiming. Given by Toxic Bloaters. And Beans. Obviously.
- 🔥 ABLAZE: you burn for 2% of your max HP every second, and armour doesn't help. In exchange you move 25% faster, and anything clinging to you catches fire too. Dash to roll it out. Given by Ember Hounds and Magma Brutes.
- 🏓 Parry a shot and it's scrubbed clean. A reflected bullet never carries its status back to you.
💫 Don't Cross The Beam
- 🩷 The pink Twinball Sync pairs have always been joined by a bond line. That line is now a hazard. Touch it and you get confused, and it stacks three deep:
- 😵 DIZZY makes your movement wobble. WOOZY adds sudden quarter-turn veers. SCRAMBLED inverts your controls.
- 🎯 It only affects movement, never your aim, and the stacks wear off one at a time. The flanker drags the line across the arena as it circles, so standing still and shooting the anchor is a losing plan. Cross the line on purpose, and don't let it cross you.
🏷️ Know What's On You
- 🕒 There's a new status tray under your health. Every timed effect in the game shows up there as a chip, new or old, good or bad, with a draining clock, the seconds left and a stack count. Debuffs are red and buffs are gold.
- 📖 The pause menu has a new STATUS EFFECTS card that lists what's on you, what each one does and how long it has left.
- 🛡️ Some meatballs are immune, and the game tells you which. Spicy, Inferno and Smoky can't catch fire because they're already burning. Frozen can't be chilled, Toxic can't bloat, Mozzarella can't be greased and Leftover can't get any soggier. Mystery can't be confused, since it never knew what was going on anyway. If you cook a meatball in The Kitchen with the matching spice, it gets the same immunity.
🍖 Bite Marks
- 😬 Your meatball now shows the damage it's taken. A bite comes out of it when you drop below 75% health, and more at 50%, 30% and 15%. Every hit knocks crumbs off, and each bite lands on the side the hit came from.
- 💚 Heal up and the bites fill back in. Your co-op teammates can see how chewed-up you are too.
- 🔢 While we were looking at health: the readout could show 0/100 on a meatball that was still alive, because 0.4 HP was being rounded down. It rounds up now while you're alive, so any health you have left reads as at least 1.
🔔 Last Call
- 🧹 No more chasing the last three enemies around the corners of the map. When a wave has nothing left to spawn and six or fewer enemies are still standing, with no boss up, a 10-second bell starts ringing.
- 🔦 Every straggler gets a spotlight: a halo, a big arrow on the edge of your screen and a mark on the minimap.
- ✅ Anything still standing when the bell stops gets swept, and it counts exactly as if you'd shot it. You still get the loot, the kill count, the streak and the ticket progress. It works in co-op too.
🏆 Three New Achievements (57 → 60)
- 📚 Know Your Enemy: discover every campaign enemy.
- 🔪 Armed to the Teeth: wield every base weapon.
- ⚡ Power Trip: grab every kind of power-up.
- 🎁 If you've already seen every enemy or held every weapon, those two will unlock the next time you launch. Power-ups only count from this update on, because the game never kept track of them before.
🎨 Fresh Paint
- 🖌️ Seven meatballs have been redrawn by hand: Classic, Cosmic, Electric, Frozen, Golden, Inferno and Kyle. They sit on a new layered face, and yes, they blink now. The rest of the roster is next.
🎮 Controller: Every Menu, Checked
- 🎩 You can reach L'Atelier by pushing RIGHT from Nonna's door now, the way the street is laid out.
- 🪟 Six windows used to let the d-pad wander onto the menu behind them: Run History, the Hall of Deaths, Leaderboards, the co-op lobby, the game-over screen and the very first welcome box. All six keep hold of your cursor now.
- 🍝 Meatball select: pushing UP from the options could drift back into the grid and quietly change your pick. Focus could also land on a greyed-out arrow, which looked like it had vanished. The whole screen is wired up by hand now.
- 🍳 The Kitchen pan: holding A to lift the pan didn't work, because every flick of the stick threw focus onto the tab bar. The pan keeps focus now.
- 🧭 You could see the Trials screen and the Custom Run additives column on a pad but couldn't reach them. Both are reachable now, and PLAY DAILY no longer parks your cursor on a button you haven't unlocked yet.
- ✅ Buttons that switch on while a window is open can now actually be selected: lobby START once everyone's ready, TAKE THE TRIAL, and a price tag in Nonna's cart once you can afford it.
- 🤖 Every menu now has an automated controller test (129 checks across 14 screens), so these fixes stay fixed.
🐛 Fixes
- 🥶 The frozen screen after Nonna's cart: the picture stuck while the music kept playing, and pressing Escape fixed it. If a weapon-upgrade or level-up card opened while Nonna had the game paused, it remembered that pause and put it back after she'd left. Cards now check whether the game should still be paused instead of going by memory. This was also the freeze people hit after upgrading to The Obliterator.
- 🎮 Co-op lobby stuck until you pressed Escape: if the host quit from the pause menu and hosted again, guests arrived in the new lobby still thinking the game was paused. Fixed.
- 💀 Revives and respawns now clear your debuffs. A Phoenix Feather revive at 1 HP could burn straight back to death on the next ABLAZE tick, and a co-op respawn could get up still frozen.
- 💾 Loading a save slot no longer drags in leftovers from your previous run, like Kyle's verdict, Il Critico's stars, shop locks and flash sales. It also applies your game-speed setting now.
- 🧲 Shaking off clingers now actually shakes them off. A parry, the Sanctuary shrine and the BLOATED puff all knocked clingers loose for exactly one frame, and then they grabbed straight back on.
- 🔥 The Perfect Sear ticket (land 10 crits in one wave) could never be completed. You can complete it now.
- 🏅 Trials that ask you to clear levels were counting every level twice. Bare Hands ("three levels") passed after two, and Cash Only ("five") passed after three. Each level counts once now. The same bug scored some end-of-level Order Up! tickets twice and dropped two Steam timeline markers per level.
- ⭐ When you pass a trial, the game now tells you the shift carries on: your star is banked, and you can head home from the pause menu whenever you like. The First Hundred also says plainly that it counts kills across the whole shift, with Nonna's cart between waves.
- 🎩 L'Atelier: pieces you've earned still show what you did to earn them, counter included, and hovering any piece shows its requirement.
- 🍡 The Polpettina unlock hint now shows your best attempt, e.g. "Clear a level taking less than 20 damage (best so far: 34)", so you can see how close you've come.
- 🧪 Test Kitchen: items no longer cost integrity in the sandbox.
Most of the fixes at the bottom of that list started as reports on Discord. Grazie, keep them coming.
Still on the stove: the long freeze when a wave loads after you've stacked bullet streams. We still haven't reproduced it and we're still hunting. If it happens to you, tell us what you were holding. 🍲
Which status effect do you hate the most? Tell us on the Community hub or Discord.
Buon appetito! ❤️
— Vexa Media