Dead Cells – Challenge Rifts Guide

Guide to Challenge Rifts

Challenge Rifts are platforming trials that can be found during biomes. You have to interact with a hidden unique Wall Rune Marking to open a Rift. Upon interacting with the rune, a portal will spawn which the player can enter. Once entered, the player is greeted by a chest. Loot will appear when that chest is opened, but the portal to the outside will close and the only way to exit the Challenge Rift is by going through the obstacle course and leaving by interacting with another portal.

General

• Loot: One Amulet, money, many cells & one Scroll of Power.
  • In your first Rift, you’ll receive the Crow’s Foot mutation.
  • Rifts that appear later into the run will contain more cells, up to 100+ cells on the highest difficulty.
• The spawn chance per biome is 20% and there is no limit to how many Rifts can spawn during a run. You could technically get a Rift in every biome, though that’s very unlikely. We don’t have a seed for such a run yet.

When to enter and ignore Rifts

• Beware of your killstreak. Once you have achieved the 30/60 killstreak you can enter Rifts as you won’t risk losing your killstreak.
  • Similarly, you should enter Rifts if you got damaged very recently and lost your killstreak.
• Don’t enter Rifts while cursed. Duh
• If you’re very low on HP and can’t heal, delay the Rift until you find food or just skip the Rift altogether.

Before entering a Rift

• Pick up an amulet with 1-2 extra jumps, even if it doesn’t scale with your main stat! You can swap it out after completing the Challenge Rift.
  • Don’t instantly sell amulets while clearing a biome! If you find an amulet that has more jumps than your current amulet, leave it in case you find a Rift.
  • Amulets that increase your health work too, but that doesn’t make as big of a difference as extra jumps (trap damage is capped at 30% of your max HP). You can check which amulet gives you more HP by swapping your amulet and comparing the numbers.
• You can pick up the dropped amulet inside of a Rift and then switch back outside. The items left inside the Rift will follow you to the outside upon completing it.

Inside a Rift

• You can move your in-game camera when navigating through Rifts. This lets you understand how to clear the next platforming section.
• If you fall into spikes, keep moving forward. You’ll have a few I-frames after getting hit, so just abuse them!
• You can parry traps!
  • You can parry the blade projectiles and even the rotating spiky balls!
• Climb more quickly:
  • Climb walls instead of ropes! While climbing walls, use the Fast-Climbing trick.
  • If you have to climb ropes, spam your jump.
    • You can roll while you’re hanging on a rope. This helps to dodge spiky balls while climbing.
    • You can also jump before rolling, which will change your trajectory.

• You can use movement items during Rifts! Some items that can help are:
  • Assault Shield, Meat Skewer, Bladed Tonfas^TQatS, Telluric Shock, Lightspeed, Wings of the Crow, etc.
    • Video example for Bladed Tonfas & Telluric Shock

Learn advanced mechanics if you really don’t like getting hit in Rifts:

Coyote-Time

• This is a wide-spread mechanic that’s used in many platforming games. It makes jumps that otherwise would have been too late still count.
• To make use of this, delay your jump until you’re over the edge of a platform. You would usually fall down, but because of this mechanic your jump will still occur as if you were standing on the platform.
• This is very handy for the double jump section with the long spike pits. If you don’t find an amulet with extra jumps and you can’t use the Coyote-Jump, you’ll most likely fall into the spikes.
• This can be exaggerated into the more complex Coyote-Boost, which improves the jump height greatly.

Samus-Roll

• A Samus-Roll is a mid-air roll that lets you travel horizontally. You won’t lose height while rolling.
• This is done by using any fast weapon in mid-air and then instantly rolling to cancel the attack.
• Short clip of the Samus-Roll:

How to find more Rifts

• Keep your eyes open! The runes for Rifts can only appear on the ground and not in walls, so watch your step.
  • Try to walk over every full tile (not platforms or breakable ground), even if you have to go out of your way to check!
• You could use the “secrets outline” setting to get a bit of help with spotting Rifts. This setting changes the outline colour of the rune marking to your desired colour. You can choose a very bright or dark colour depending on how much help you want.
  • Settings → Accessibility Options → scroll to the middle → “Secrets outline”
  • I myself use this setting with a dark purple colour as I’m not keen on scanning the whole biome for a *potentially* missed Rift (it’s only a 20% chance per biome). Though spotting Rifts becomes easier as you keep playing the game so you don’t necessarily need this setting.