New Features
Heroes are here. Pick a hero on the Difficulty-select screen via a new browsable carousel — 7 heroes (Ivy, Olaf, Jonas, Link, Turner, Zoro, Sabrina), each with a unique animated avatar and a real, gameplay-changing passive ability. Only Ivy starts unlocked; winning a run with your currently-highest-unlocked hero unlocks the next one in the chain — but any hero can be freely browsed and previewed even while locked.
Ivy: whenever your board has a real Tetris well open, your next piece is guaranteed to be a long piece, and Quad clears deal +50% bonus damage.
Olaf: fusing 4 pieces into a perfect 4x4 square deals bonus damage — a x4 gold bonus if all 4 pieces matched, x2 silver if mixed.
Jonas — Hotlines: 2 rows are marked as targets at the start of battle; clearing a Hotline row deals +75% bonus damage and immediately marks 2 new rows elsewhere.
Link: consecutive line clears build a damage-multiplying streak, shown live as a growing "×N" speech bubble on his avatar, capped at x10.
Turner: Spins (T-Spins and All-Spins) deal +50% bonus damage.
Zoro — Rage/Berserk: every clear fills a Rage meter, shown as his own body filling with a "boiling" liquid; at full Rage he goes berserk for 9 seconds — time slows across the whole battle and his clears deal triple damage.
Sabrina — Magic Crystals: pieces can spawn carrying a magic crystal; clearing crystal tiles casts a spell scaled by how many were cleared together — Shield, Frost Nova (freezes an enemy), Fireball, or a multi-target Meteor Strike.
New Freeze status effect for enemies: a frozen enemy fully halts, including its own idle animation — distinct from Chrono/Bullet Time's 50% slow.
4 relics retired now that their effects live on as hero passives above — There When You Need Me, Perfect Square, Quite a Combo, Expert Technique. A save that already owned one simply loses it on next load.
Balance
Regular slime HP doubled (10 → 20 base) — Tutorial/Easy/Normal difficulties now see a Stage-1 regular slime at 10/15/20 HP instead of 5/5/10. All 3 bosses and the Executioner's summon got a matching ×1.5 HP increase. Battles are intended to run a bit longer as a result.
Quality of Life
Difficulty-select screen: added a dedicated "switch section" control (Q/E on keyboard, LB/RB on controller) to jump between the hero/difficulty carousel, descriptions, and the Custom Difficulty/Challenge Run/Starting Relic checkboxes — previously that last column was mouse-only.
Held pieces in the Hold box no longer render dimmed after you use them.
Demo
All 7 heroes are now shown off as playable in the demo build, without touching your real unlock progress in the full game.
The demo's Stage 1 now spawns every slime type instead of a limited subset, since it's the only combat a demo playthrough sees.
Fixes
Fixed the Difficulty-select screen's Custom Difficulty/Challenge Run/Starting Relic checkboxes being completely unreachable by keyboard or controller.
Fixed the in-battle tutorial popup mislabeling the default drop key as an instant Hard Drop — it's actually Sonic Drop (drops instantly but doesn't lock); Hard Drop has no default binding.
Fixed the Demon Slime boss's Fire Breath attack not showing any fire or burn visual on the tiles it hits.
Fixed the post-run shareable card's Demon Slime (Stage 2 boss) icon rendering small and pushed toward the bottom of its box.