Feel and Flow: boss kills that land, a Back button that works, and three new answers

The First Hour update was about taking things away. This one is about the moments that remain: what a boss kill feels like, what happens when you press Back, how many taps it takes to get where the game is pointing you. We recorded the battlefield frame by frame, walked every menu with a script that counts clicks, and fixed what we found.

Boss kills land

A boss death used to borrow the Hive's breach alarm and pop like any other enemy. Now it lands: a short freeze-frame, a gold shockwave at the body, its own sound and a fall card that brings its title back. A Mega's collapse is the biggest card of all, and it clears everything beneath it.

All of these centre-screen moments (WAVE N, boss and Mega arrivals, weak-point callouts, the assimilation tier) now share one stage and take turns by priority, so they never print on top of each other. Damage numbers are bolder and readable over anything. Picking a gene card has a real moment: the chosen card flares in its rarity colour and the others dissolve.

New Motion settings let you set screen shake, damage numbers and flashes, and they follow your device's reduced-motion setting. With motion off you get the same information, held still.

A game you can walk back through

• Back (browser or Android) steps back through menus, closes the top pop-up first, and pauses a live run instead of quitting it. Escape does the same on desktop.
• Advice that names a screen, like "Farm Infinite", now carries a Go ▸ that takes you there in one tap.
• Hub badges count the screens that need a decision instead of piling up to "9+", and the Continue Campaign button is always on screen.
• Screens open without a loading flash, and if one ever fails to load you can retry it instead of losing the game.
• Every screen has one name everywhere (the Specimen Vault is now the Specimen Cabinet), long screens get jump chips and folding sections, and a loadout strip sits beside every launch button.

After the run

Win a Campaign stage and Results offers the next one directly. Claiming is one Claim all on the Quest Board, Season Pass and Milestones, and the Season Pass now clears even a hundred-level backlog in one press. On a phone held upright, Results and the Boss Rush roulette now show up instead of a "turn your device" prompt.

Three new answers, six new questions

The roster grows by three towers, each built as the answer to a problem: the Gristle Warren raises thralls that body-block the lane, the Tick Battery seeds Infection into three hosts from long range, and the Keening Quill cracks armour for your whole board. The Myceliarch, a fungal gatekeeper who rots every leak at the Core, joins the heroes at 8,000 lifetime kills.

The questions arrive from Stage 4: the plated Chitin Scuttler, the airborne Blight Moth, the burrowing Marrow Borer, the shielded Shellback Bombard, the Veil Moth that shields its flock, and the Wisp Mother that births fliers. Each one asks for a specific answer, and the first three stages are unchanged.

An honest look at the economy

Our balance simulator plays eleven kinds of player for 400 hours each. In July it raised seventeen warnings. Most of them turned out to be the simulator misreading its own data, mainly the Power drop after every Molt. With those fixed, three remain, and two real problems are now solved. Every Gene Card level visibly raises your Power, even small economy upgrades. And deep into the game, Strain Samples a tower can never spend turn into Gene Essence instead of piling up.

The simulator also showed us the one thing that did hurt: the Molt. Every Molt bought your whole Genome engine back from zero, and the deeper you went the harder that landed. By a few hundred hours a Molt dropped your Power thirty-fold, and you spent most of each cycle unable to play your own frontier. Now a Molt leaves an Imprint. From your second Molt on, every Genome upgrade keeps a growing share of its levels (1.25% more per Molt, up to 70%). Those are the cheap bottom rungs of each ladder, so the climb back still costs. Power now dips about threefold instead of crashing, and a late Molt costs roughly half the hours to recover. The first Molt works exactly as before, and the Molt Chamber now shows what you keep and your Power after the Molt before you confirm.

Fixes worth naming

• Watching a replay no longer adds its kills to your own Bestiary, Mega records or nemesis revenge.
• Replay links recorded before an update play again, and the replay theater shows boss falls.
• A Mitotic Horror falls once; its split pieces no longer each announce a kill.
• The Bio-Dex counts only real Brood Tyrants.
• Upgrades that promise an effect "around the victim" (Acid Lancet, Basilisk, Chrysalis, Siphon, Coil, Spire and Spitfang upgrades) now land on the struck enemy. They used to fire around the tower.
• Miasma Lung's infection-spread upgrades work: an infection now spreads by the reach of the tower that laid it.
• When the next stage offers a boon, "Stage N+1 ▸" on Results lets you pick it instead of taking the default.

Next up are four signature moments: the last kill of a wave, victory carrying into Results, cutscenes that move, and a battlefield that continues past its edges. Each one ships only after we've reviewed it frame by frame.

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