Assist Mode and Accessibility

Dead Cells has various accessibility settings that can affect visuals, gameplay, inputs, sound and difficulty. Altough some have been added over the games development cycle, the 2.9 Breaking Barriers update brought a wide array of accessibilty options and an assist mode that Evil Empire created based on feedback by the community and testing by a panel of players with various disabilities at AbleGamers.

Assist Mode is a new mode to customize the games difficulty. Enabling this mode does not disable Achievements, the acquiring of Boss Stem Cells or perfect kill rewards. It does, however, hide your score from being on the Daily Challenge leaderboard.

Assist mode lets you customize certain game settings to make it more accessible. Dead Cells is a difficult and demanding but easy to play game. We therefore recommend using these options to fit the difficulty to your needs while keeping the game challenging for you.

However, our goal with this mode is to make the game accessible to the broadest audience possible without forcing you to play with arbitrary difficulty settings. Feel free to use whatever option you want! What really matters is that you have fun playing Dead Cells!

Assist Mode

Continue Mode

Each time you die, you can choose to resurrect from your last save instead of restarting a run.

Saves happen when going trough doors like Biomes entrances and exits or boss cells doors, lore rooms and sub-biomes. Saves also occur when the “quit” button is pressed. Players can choose limited or infinite continues. For limited the choices are 0, 1, 3 or 7.

Auto-Hit Mode

You automatically attack nearby enemies with your primary melee weapon.

Destroy doors in Auto-Hit Mode

Autimatically attack doors in Auto-Hit Mode.

Easier Parry

You have more time to trigger a parry.

Slower traps

Mobile traps are slower.

Reveal the map

Completely reveal the map of the current level.

Trap damage

Option to limit damage done by traps in increments of 20% to a minimum of 20%.

Enemies Health

Option to lower health of enemies in increments of 2.5% to a minimum of 20%.

Enemies damage

Option to lower the damage done by enemies in increments of 2.5% to a minimum of 20%.

Accessibility Settings

Visual settings

These settings add a number of options to customize the look of the game to a players specific need. Various options allow the addition of basic colors to certain elements of which the Hue, Saturation and Value can be adjusted freely.

Color sliders used to adjust various options.

Enable bright flashes

Turns off bright flashes that affect the game sreen (explosions, wounds, etc.). Use this option if these flashes bother you or pose a health risk.

Activate screen shake

Deactivate any screen shakes that may pose a risk (explosions, cutscenes, etc...)

Particle limit

Limits the amount of particles on screen. Can be adjusted in increments of 10% to a minimum of 10%

No Blood mode

Remove all blood splashes and bloodied assets.

This option removes all visuals of blood, including blood spatter when the player or enemies take damage or are killed, weapon effects and even the images in loading screens. Can only be toggled from the main menu.

Secret zone visibility

Reduce the concealment of secret zone entrances.

Background filter

Adjust Color, saturation and opacity of the background.

Add a coloured filter to the background so that foreground and interactable objects are clearer.

No background filter applied.
Green background filter applied at 50%.
Pink background filter applied at 50%.
Orange background filter applied at 100%

Outline options

Add colored outlines to various elements in the game.

Hero Outline

Add an outline to the hero

Purple outline around the beheaded.
Outline on beheaded with a filtered background.

Enemies outline

Add an outline to the enemies

NPCs outline

Add an outline to the NPCs

Active skill outline

Add an outline to the player's active skils (Pets and deployables)

Projectiles outline

Add an outline to projectiles

Secrets outline

Add an outline to secrets

Stats display settings

Display stats icons in addition to their color

Add icons to each stat in the HUD and items. There is no option to adjust the size of icons seperately but the icon size can be adjusted by using the HUD size setting in the HUD layout settings part of the video settings.

Stats
Stats with their Icons
Stat Icon on an item

Customize Brutality color

Change the color of the Brutality stat.

Customize Tactic color

Change the color of the Tactic stat.

Customize Survival color

Change the color of the Survival stat.

Item with standard brutality color
Item with brutality color customized to blue.
Stats with brutality color customized to blue.

Text settings

Various text sizes can be changed.

Object names size

Can be changed up to 150%

Object description size

Can be changed up to 200%

Dialog size

Can be changed up to 200%

Additional Settings

There are more settings for accessibilty found in various menus.

Gameplay

Hold to attack

Hold attack button to perform combos with the weapon

Shield toggle

Press a shield's key to toggle holding it on or off.

Using this option, when the shield button is pressed the shield will be help up in blocking mode until it pressed again.

Hold to roll

Hold the button to chain rolls.

Hold to jump

Jump as long as the jump key is held.

Enemy attack sign size

Change the size of the exclamation mark used to warn of incoming attacks. Can be adjusted in increments of 10% to a maximum of 200%.

Video

Enable synergy icons

Enables icons that show icons next to affixes that afflict status effects which glow when they synergies with other equipment the player has picked up.

Customize game font

a Dyslexia-friendly font is available.

Customize HUD size

Change the size of the HUD showing equiped items, resources and the map. Can be adjusted in increments of 10% to a minimum of 50% and a maximum of 150%.

Input

Secondary Interaction

Customize secondary interaction behavior

This option changes how the player can use secondary interaction with objects or pick-up, like recycling food or gear. Can be set to Long press (Default) or custom. When enabling custom, the option to set this key appears in the Rebind keyboard/controller bindings section.

Dive Attack

Customize dive attack inpout behavior

this option changes how the player can use the dive attack. Can be set to Jump + Down (Default), Hold Down while airborne, Double tap Down while airborne or Custom. When enabling custom, the option to set this key appears in the Rebind keyboard/controller bindings section.

Sound

Sound effects volumes

Set the volumes for different sound effect seperately.

Active skills
Enemies
Environment
Hero
Interactables
Non-playable characters
Weapons

Sound effect reduction

Reduces the amount of sound effects played at the same time during gameplay.

Sound effect prioritization has to be enabled to take effect. This option will reduce sounds with a low priority when different sound effects are happening at the same time.

The options are:

None (Normal behavior)
Light sound reduction
Medium sound reduction
Heavy sound reduction

Sound effect prioritization

Effects with a higher priority will be less likely to be cut off by the sound effects reduction option above.