The tricky achievements

What a save cannot prove, what the game keeps vague, and the routes hidden on purpose.

Import a save and the Progression page checks each of the game's 459 achievements against it. Most conditions are checkable: "unlock the Whip" is a list the save keeps, and so are lifetime kills, per-stage survival bests and opened coffins. This chapter is about the rest - the conditions no save can prove, the ones the game itself leaves vague, and the characters whose unlock routes were designed not to be found by accident.

What "Cannot tell" means

A save records what you have, not what happened inside any one run. It keeps no record of the highest level you ever reached, no per-run kill counts, and no snapshot of how many Collection entries you have filled - so an achievement asking you to reach a level, kill some number of enemies in a single run, or fill the Collection cannot be checked from outside the game. The Progression page marks those steps Cannot tell rather than guessing: "not done" would accuse you of work you may have finished years ago, and "done" would be flattery. The filter of the same name gathers them, and finishing one in game still marks the achievement itself as achieved - the uncertainty is about the steps, never the result.

The four the game keeps vague

A few steps read "Defeat one specific enemy" where every neighbour names its monster. The Sword Guardian in the Dairy Plant, the Trinacria in the Cappella Magna, Malphas in Ode to Castlevania: each of those achievements counts kills under an enemy key that appears in neither the game's enemy table nor its localisation table, so there is no name on record to print - the achievement's own sentence is the only place the game says who you are fighting. The Dragon Shrimp tally is the fourth case: two of the four keys it sums are "flag" halves no table defines. That vagueness is the game's own answer, and the page keeps it rather than dressing the steps in names nothing can verify.

Coffins

17 achievements are coffins: each hidden in one stage, each holding a character who joins the roster when you open it. Walk up and a ring of enemies closes around the coffin; clear it, step on, and the character inside thanks you and observes that the vampire is in another coffin. The Milky Way Map marks an unopened coffin with a question mark, and the stage itself points an arrow at it. A save does record which coffins you have opened, so these are achievements the Progression page can vouch for - and the roster's coffin characters are exactly the ones this unlocks.

Three routes hidden on purpose

Exdash Exiviiq. Type x-x1viiq on the main menu - that is the whole route. There is also a slow way, a small chance on every Little Clover you pick up, but the code is the intended joke. He costs 777 gold, his stats are deliberately dreadful, and his Luck is enormous.

Toastie. With Exdash unlocked, kill the Stalker, the Drowner or the Trickster with an instant-kill effect. Toastie then appears in the bottom-right corner of the screen for about half a second - press Down and Enter together inside that window, and only that window. The forgiving retry is the Inlaid Library on Inverse, where the Trickster near the pianos can be hit again within the same run.

missingN▯. Find the Yellow Sign first. Then take Green Acres with Hyper and Hurry both on and walk away from the play area until the stage stops pretending: the scenery breaks up, other stages bleed through, and glitched winged eyes spawn. Defeat 128 of them and the character is yours - a character whose stats re-randomise every time the select screen opens, which is the punchline.

All three also fall to a typed spell in the Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane, if you prefer spelling to timing. The spells are on each character's wiki page below.