Dead Cells’ Enter The Panchaku update turns you into a pan-wielding ninja

The Disney animated classic Tangled proved that humankind’s deadliest and most readily accessible weapon is the frying pan. Now, Dead Cells has taken that to the logical conclusion with its newly released Enter The Panchaku update: nunchuk pans. Channel your inner qi and behold the fury of panchaku in the trailer below.

The nunchuk pans crit enemies facing you, can combo to hit behind and around, and reflect bombs and projectiles during aforesaid combo. Crikey Moses. Beyond just adding the titular spinning pans of doom, and rebalancing 29 other weapons and skills, Enter The Panchaku also plonks down a new ‘Bobby’ outfit. It has a glowing pink head modelled on trailers for the game produced by animation studio Bobby Pills.

Custodians of Dead Cells, Evil Empire, started the patch notes with an announcement that they’d release 30 NFTs to mark this 30th update to the game. That was promptly quashed with a simple “Gotcha.” They continued, “The release date for these is never because we're not touching that stuff.” We definitely know where they stand on crypto now. Instead of wasting time on NFTs, they’ve given the option to pet the various companion creatures as you move between the game’s biomes.

Evil Empire and publisher Motion Twin laid out their roadmap for the roguelite last month with Enter The Panchaku being the first stop. It’ll be followed up sometime in autumn by a boss rush update, which adds an area entirely populated by bosses you’ve already taken out. There’s also a mysterious update pencilled in for the winter, but no details have been forthcoming on that one so far. The devs say 2023 will be "the most exciting year in Dead Cells’ history".

Ed forward-rolled back into Dead Cells to kick off his 2022 and found the game still very much alive. “Now I see why everyone lauded this game back in 2017, and why it's still popular,” he said. “As a lapsed player, all this new "stuff" has proven a reawakening of sorts. My eyes have been opened to how moreish this game remains four years on.”

Dead Cells is on Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store for £22/$25/€25. You can also try it out on PC Game Pass. You can read the full patch notes on the Dead Cells site here.