🛡️ Guard Up — Update 1.2.16
You can block now. And if your timing is good, you can throw the hit straight back.
1.2.16 gives every meatball an active defence, opens a Hall of Deaths that tallies what's killing you — and everyone else on Steam — rebuilds the front door from the ground up, and ships every fix from the first Kitchen playtest. Grab your lid.
🛡️ NEW — Block & Parry
Hold Right Mouse / Left Trigger to guard.
- Blocking always leaks — you take less damage, never none. 5% base reduction, items push it toward a 50% cap.
- Guarding costs you: 65% move speed and a guard stamina bar (about 3 seconds, refills after a short pause). You can't tape the button down.
- PERFECT PARRY — tap guard just as a hit lands from something in front of you: the hit is negated, the attacker eats a riposte, and a shockwave shoves the crowd back.
- Parried bullets turn around — and go seeking whatever fired them.
- 3 parry charges, recharged one at a time. Spent on a success, never on a whiff.
- Hazards (lava, scorched ground, the Butcher's grinder lane) can be blocked but not parried — there's nothing to send it back to.
- New HUD readout bottom-left: 🛡 guard bar + parry pips. New GUARD UP step in the tutorial.
- Rebindable in Settings → Controls (Block / Parry); Steam Input gets a Block action.
🧤 Six new items to build around it
- Oven Mitt (Common) — +5% block power
- Cast-Iron Lid (Uncommon) — +8% block power, +3 armour
- Parry Pan (Rare) — +1 parry charge, +5% block power
- Quick Hands (Rare) — a wider parry window, +1s guard stamina
- Riposte Ring (Epic) — +12% block power, parries return double damage
- Pastry Shield (Legendary) — +20% block power, +2s guard, +1 charge. Laminated. Two hundred layers of butter between you and the world.
- New synergy: Line Cook's Guard (Cast-Iron Lid + Parry Pan) — +8% block power and +1 parry charge
Block Power now shows in your stats panel next to armour and dodge.
☠️ NEW — The Hall of Deaths
The game now remembers what killed you — every enemy, mini-boss and boss, plus lava, void rifts, scorched ground, integrity failure, your own mortar and (in PvP) another player.
- Hall of Deaths — YOURS vs WORLDWIDE side by side, with ALL / ENEMIES / MINI-BOSSES / BOSSES / HAZARDS tabs. Is it just you, or is everyone dying to Beans?
- Worldwide numbers are summed by Steam across every player. They start counting from this update and fill in over the coming days — launch through Steam to see them.
- Run History now shows your top-3 Nemeses, with a door through to the full Hall.
- The game-over recap adds one line of perspective — e.g. "Rye Bread accounts for 14% of all player deaths worldwide" — or names your #N nemesis when offline.
- The Bestiary now says "has killed you 7×" on each entry. The most honest threat rating there is.
- Four attribution holes fixed on the way: integrity rot, mortar friendly fire, PvP hits and hazards used to blame whatever last touched you.
🏛️ NEW — A New Front Door
The main menu has been rebuilt from the ground up.
- A Tuscan village backdrop — hillside terraces, a bending cobbled lane, shopfronts, cypresses, a dry-stone wall — that leans with your mouse.
- A live meatball food fight on the street. Sauce shots, dodges, splats on the cobbles. Purely decorative. Deeply important.
- Drifting kitchen air: steam, spice motes, the occasional marinara drip.
- A menu mascot that reacts to what you're pointing at — nervous over PLAY, reading over RECORDS, heartbroken over QUIT.
- The MEATBALLS sign now hangs from ropes and sways. Icons on every button, a springy hover, and a wet splat when you press one.
- LOAD and CONTINUE sit as icon plaques beside PLAY. Achievements, Bestiary, Leaderboards, Run History and the Hall of Deaths now live behind one RECORDS door.
- The Daily card shows date + seed on one line, the version stamp moved down beside your high score, and controller navigation was rewired for the new layout.
🍳 The Kitchen — playtest fixes
Everything the first cooking playtest turned up:
- Fixed the soft-lock: LEAVE and Escape now actually work mid-cook (it asks first).
- Plating is F / Y — and the prompt says so. E was tossing in another spice instead.
- The pan has real physics now: meatballs slide when you flick it and settle — raw mince grips the steel, then loosens as the crust sears.
- Scrub the spice rack with the mouse wheel, 1–9, or L1 / R1.
- Prompts match your device — "HOLD SPACE" on keyboard, "HOLD (A)" on a pad. No more "hold A" while A is also strafe-left.
- An empty pantry says "No meatballs yet" instead of looking broken.
- The intro is icons and animation instead of paragraphs.
- New rule — one run per meatball. A cooked meatball gets ONE run: win and it comes home, die and it's eaten. It's stated on the intro card, the shelf and character select, and the game-over screen tells you what you lost. In co-op you only ever risk your own.
🛒 Shop fixes
- Fixed: lock an item, buy it, reroll — the slot stayed SOLD forever. Sold slots always reroll now, and buying clears the lock.
- The in-map shop sheet is restyled — price-list rows with a rarity spine, aligned columns, wrapping text — and clamped to the screen, so BUY can never fall off the right edge at a big UI scale or in a small window.
- Between-wave shop cards wrap long names and translations instead of spilling over the headers.
⚙️ Under the hood
- Third swarm performance pass: enemies only repaint when their picture actually changes, skip the physics server when nothing is in reach, and share collision shapes and sprite frames. At 520 enemies the whole swarm now costs about 4% of a 60 FPS frame. Hazards, craters and coin showers repaint on a throttle, and the HUD stopped rebuilding its labels every frame.
- The stuck-enemy counter clears the moment it should; dead-centre boss AoE hits no longer knock you off in a random direction.
- Every new screen, item and prompt localised in 7 languages.
- Xbox controller glyphs and the Linux build both confirmed on real hardware.
Tell us what keeps killing you. Now we can check.
Buon appetito.