The game currently has some issue/bug that prevents hard mode to work as intended and also prevents this achievement from being completed.

Once you beat normal mode for the first time, hard mode should be unlocked. Each time you beat hard mode, one of the 6 hazards will increase (the order is predetermined), so you will have to deal with toxic fumes, thunder volts, increased enemy attacks, increased enemy HP, Force fields that will protect enemies from a hit and increased elite/boss health.

Its a fun mode to play to challenge yourself for a bit longer in this game.

Here is how hard mode looks when working properly:




And here is the increase after beating it once, it will increase up to lvl18 (so yeah depending on what level it puts you when you change game version you might need to do 18 successful runs to get the achievement):

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My suggestion is to complete most of the game achievements up until you get the "Grand Master" achievement before changing over, the main reason is because in this older version, "Winbell" won't be able to give you an EXP bonus for 10 Soul Orbs, so it will take longer to level up all characters to "Master I" rank.

Achievements which take the longest to get (Which are most of the 'unlock x' achievements like "Weapon Master", "Food Fighter", "Professional Collector") you can just continue trying to collect all the ones you are still missing in this rolled back version.

As far as I can tell, current version saves are compatible with this older version and won't be affected, but for the sake of safety, do a copy of your current save files and put them in a zip folder.

You save files should be located at "C:\Users\local-username\AppData\Local\Critadel"

There should be 10 files named something like "data_m7*.dat" save all of them in a zip so you can restore your current save if anything goes wrong



One note I got to say is that even in this version the achievement for obtaining the Incisor weapon (Devilsaurus) does not work, although once I got it I was able to complete the "Weapon Master" achievement.

So I believe at least this one achievement will remain bugged unless the developers do an update to the game.

I experimented a bit to see if there was a way for me to roll back the game using steam to a version where hard mode worked correctly by using other guides on the internet on how to do it using a Manifest ID of a previous version of the game.

If you are curious you can google it yourself and you will see most of steps I follow here from guides on Reddit or other wikis.


I will just mention that the manifest ID I am using to roll back is from back in January 29th 2022.


Steps:

1) Using the Windows key + R open the windows console and type "steam://open/console"



2) This will cause an additional menu to appear in your steam app like so:



3) Now you need to copy this command and type it to the console.
"download_depot 808010 808011 383719468670305347"

This command will download a specific version of the game, the command includes the ID of the game (Critadel, first number) the Depot ID (second number) and Manifest ID (third number)

I obtained these IDs from checking the manifest version available for the game in the SteamDB page.

Once you enter it steam will start downloading the game.
Once its done it will tell you where to obtain the files from, like this:



4) Once its downloaded go to the location steam gave you, should be something like:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\content\app_808010\depot_808011"
You want to copy all the folder files in a folder on your desktop or somewhere easily accessible and then you need to navigate to the location where your current game installation is located.




For this you can right click on the game on your library and click on the "installed files" section and then on the "Browse" button



5) Now just replace all the files in the game folder for the ones you downloaded with the steam console (it will ask you if you want to replace the files, click yes)

6) Now you can just start the game from your library as before but you will notice the game has a few things working differently, specially hard mode now working.

7) If you ever want to go back to the latest version of the game, you can simply uninstall the game and do an install again from steam and it will download the latest version.