Howdy!

This time we have a slightly smaller update, which fixes some of the balancing issues in-game. A large portion of our community was telling us that the game is too difficult, which lead to frustration and many players dropping out after a few levels in the story campaign.

We have finally addressed these issues, and done important tweaks to the game difficulty. The different difficulty levels still add more monsters, and adjust the monster speeds, but now the basic enemies take far less damage. Looking at the stats on Steam, we observed that only 4.1% of players on Normal difficulty in single-player have been able to finish the game from start to finish. This would mean 41 people out of a thousand players. That number feels incredibly low, not to mention that the other playthrough achievements (co-op, Hardcore, Hell) have even lower completion rates.

Simply put, the new update means that the standard Mole Mutant enemies will go down with one pistol shot, and the Manglers and Thinkers will take 2-3 pistol shots to defeat. We observed many playthroughs made after the 1.0 release, and noticed that even the first Raven Rock level was too challenging for lots of players. The first Mangler monster players encountered would drive players down, forcing them to backtrack through the level.

Mangler's demonic shield was also updated to only activate once. The boss characters still have the old design, where the shield comes on after a cooldown time. We've also adjusted the "health" of the obstacles in game, such as tentacle blobs and Thinker nests, and balanced them to have similar strength to the enemies.

In addition to the changes above, monsters can also charge through the weaker environmental obstacles, like wooden fences and crates. This makes the game feel more dynamic and alive.

• Enemy health reduced significantly.
  
  
• Pistol firing speed made slightly faster.
  
  
• Mangler shield only activates once, instead of looping.
  
  
• Enemies can now charge through obstacles.
  
  
• Fix for the enemy death sounds sometimes being non-audible.
  
  
• Sound fixes for the obstacle debris.
  
  
• Cutscene skipping fix.

Overall, we hope you enjoy these latest changes! Enjoy!


- Harri J.