The following update - though technically minor in scale - focuses on improving the Card Castle hallway gauntlet in a variety of different ways, making it a little more significant than your usual bug fix patch.

As I've heard (and seen) more people get frustrated with this sequence than I honestly expected to over the recent times, I thought I shouldn't disregard this any longer. Though I'd like to hope the difficulty still remains intentionally challenging, as the changes in question are less about nerfing the difficulty, and more about making things more convenient and readable instead. Here's the sum-up:

• Scissor dancers have been replaced with heart bullets, which should have much easier hitboxes to identify. To compensate for the better readability, some bullet patterns were made slightly more challenging.

• Dual shield intro animation has been revamped, in order to bring back a concept I didn't have time to make during the 2021 development of Ribbit. The idea was that the walls surrounding you were supposed to shrink into the dual shields, then position themselves next to you. This concept has been now properly realized.

  

• Adjusted dual shield positioning so they're evenly facing each other.

• Dual shield hitbox is a little more lenient, so now even if you let a bullet past the shield, the backside of the shield may still be able to deflect it if you're quick enough. The afterimage effect on the shield has been readjusted to indicate the ability to destroy bullets using the back of the shield.

• Lightly adjusted the final bullet pattern in the dual shield sequence (the one with the spades rotating around the entire screen) so it's easier to center the shields to block the bullets, alongside with having it deal a more worthwhile amount of damage (7 instead of 1)

• Draw Minigame has been adjusted on DELTA difficulty to only require pressing [Z], instead of having to react to either pressing [Z] or [X]. On DEFAULT, the amount of waiting before you have to press the prompt is now more heavily randomized, so it has a chance of happening more quickly.

• Failing the Draw Minigame no longer sends you to a game over. Losing the minigame triggers an alternate cutscene, which then allows you to advance forward.

• Fixed potential Draw Minigame bug, where entering the minigame while leaning to the very right or left side of the hallway could de-center the HUD elements.

• Once again, slightly rewrote the "Difficulty Select" descriptions to encourage less experienced players not to throw themselves into the more brutal difficulty.

• Somewhat rewrote the "Brother" save point for the NEW writing style, in order to make the implications less obvious.