Mechanics

Regenerating Health
When you get hit, by dealing damage, you can regenerate health. The amount of health lost turns orange and slowly drains. By hitting enemies you can gain that health back. However, if you get hit again, all orange health you had before disappears, preventing you from gaining that health back.

Ground Pound
When falling from any distance, by pressing the jump and down button at the same time, a ground pound can be performed. This pound negates the stun from falling down long distances and deals damage to enemies. The damage depends on the distance fallen, increasing as the height fallen increases.

Invincibility Frames
For a brief while, when you've been hit, a shield appears around you, preventing you from taking damage for a brief amount of time.

Accelerated Movement
By killing multiple enemies in a set amount of time, your movement speed increases. This effect wears off if no enemies are killed for a while.

Falling
Unless you fall off of a building in The Ramparts, there is no fall damage in Dead Cells. However, if you fall from a long enough distance, you will be temporarily stunned. The stun lasts longer if you have fallen more. Enemies, however, can get hurt and killed from a fall. This distance is much shorter than the distance that will cause the player to be stunned, so using something that causes knockback such as the Assault Shield or the Spartan Sandals to take advantage of this is a good idea.

Parry
Parry is a mechanic that applies to blocking with shields. It protects/reduces damage from attacks and deflects projectiles. Depending on how many survivability runes you have collected, parry also grants a temporary damage boost.