Ace platformer Rogue Legacy gets its first update in four years

Rogue Legacy is a 2D platformer in which your characters and the levels you explore are procedurally generated every run. Death is permanent, but all your characters are connected genetically like one big unlucky family. It came out in June 2013 and it was quite good, even before the update it received the following December which added a bunch of bosses and room types. 

Today, over four years since that last update, developer Cellar Door Games rolled out another update for Rogue Legacy to celebrate its five-year anniversary. It seems the devs had more free time after shipping the delightful beat-'em-up Full Metal Furies this March. 

A big part of Rogue Legacy is choosing new characters from a range of possible heirs with different traits, which can be anything from baldness to alektorophobia (the fear of chickens). The five-year update adds two new traits. The first is prosopagnosia (the inability to remember familiar faces), which, according to Rogue Legacy's wiki, prevents you from seeing anything about your heirs when choosing a new one. The other is clonus (a type of muscle spasm), which, if you're playing with a controller, causes it to vibrate every few seconds. 

I always preferred playing Rogue Legacy with a controller, but that may change since the new update also adds mouse rebinding. "2207 comments later and we finally got the message," Cellar Door said. "I hope you degenerates are grateful!" There are some other technical improvements in the patch too, like cloud saving and upgrades to the Mac and Linux versions. 

'Donation boxes' have also been added. These are used to upgrade the unique characters you use when fighting 'remix' bosses, which are optional, amped-up versions of the regular bosses. By dumping a bunch of gold into a donation box, you can "power up your heroes from the past and give yourself that extra edge." 

Finally, Rogue Legacy veterans got a new achievement to chase: Thanatophobia, unlocked by completing the game in 15 lives or less. Players who previously had 100 percent achievement completion can instantly unlock Thanatophobia by holding Left Alt, Caps Lock and then T from the title screen. 

You can read the full patch notes here.