It seems like only last week that we were picking Tom Janson’s brutal new platformer Death Hall ($2.99) as our Game of the Week, and that’s because it WAS just last week. And despite it just releasing, Mr. Janson has released a new update for Death Hall adding in a bunch of welcome fixes as well as one major player request: Landscape support. You may recall in last week’s Game of the Week post that I loved almost everything about Death Hall and gave it my heartiest recommendation, but with one caveat: You have to be ok with playing a platforming game with virtual buttons in portrait orientation. This is something of an homage to Downwell that plays in a similar fashion, and honestly the portrait orientation works just fine, it’s just not for everyone. Now the game will automatically adjust between portrait and landscape on the fly, and I do have to admit it feels a whole lot more natural in landscape mode.
In addition to landscape support, this update also smooths over the difficulty of level 2, which seemed to be something of a wall for many players previously. It also seemed to go on longer than the level 1 areas, so the ones in level 2 have been shortened a bit as well. Also, if you have fast-travel unlocked for a particular level, then that’s the one you’ll start off on when hitting restart after dying, rather than kicking all the way back to the beginning of the game. It’s really impressive that Death Hall has barely been out for a week and yet has already seen several minor updates with fixes and adjustments, as well as today’s pretty major update adding in a feature as big as landscape support. If the portrait nature of Death Hall was the one thing holding you back before, now is definitely the time to pick up this fantastic platformer.