As much as most of us hate to admit it—money talks. It's this reason alone that, when Konami denied Koji Igarashi and the rest of the world the green light to make a new gothic, search-action epic against Dracula's forces, the Castlevania veteran left the Japanese mines for greener pastures on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter . Once launched, Igrashi successfully raised the budget for a new game that would deliver the same kind of experience under his vision, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, reaching its projected target of US$500,000 in just under four hours.
In observance of this, and a few other factors like public demand and the changing tastes in the current market of games, the big K has steadily given in to the idea that maybe pachinko machines aren't their SOLE means of revenue, and has gradually worked with other studios to help rehabilitate some of their stagnant properties, like Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, and arguably their most iconic of the big three, Castlevania .
Ironically enough, in the same way that Iga sought another benefactor for funding, Konami sought another party for the development side of things for their precious IP, and phoned up a pair of studios that they have already contracted for their spooky monster-killer, Evil Empire and Motion Twin; only this time around, the moderate success of Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania has influenced the publisher into giving the teams THE key to the proverbial castle, where development houses have cooked up the newest Metroidvania entry to the Castlevania line, Castlevania : Belmont's Curse.
In addition to this being the first Vampire-Killer title to star a female protagonist since 2008's Castlevania : Order of Ecclesia, Belmont's Curse offers a lot of experimental twists that surprisingly invigorate what has arguably been a stagnant formula for the property, even if it does take a little too long to hit its stride.
As the introduction plays out, players will be taken to the flaming streets of Paris roughly twenty years after the events of Castlevania: Curse of Darkness , where a much older Trevor Belmont is surveying the damage done by creatures of the night who are shedding blood once more in their dark lord's name, and realizes that he won't be able to repel the macabre armies of evil alone, reluctantly entrusting his only daughter, Rose Belmont, to tag-team with him for the endless night ahead. Although she's a brooding martyr-case racked with survivor's guilt over her mother's death, Sypha Belnades, the introduction of Rose and her tenderfoot role at the very start makes an interesting character arc that does diegetically play into the title's somewhat glacial pacing. Where the usual hallmark of a Metroidvania, Castleroid (or whatever the hell you want to call it at this point, really; Jeremy Parish truly does not care), is that the very first slice of gameplay has players somewhat proficient with their combat ability and movement ability before getting nerfed into fine-paste that's on par with a one-hit amoeba, giving players an incentive of the potential they can not only work their way back towards, but the skyline of heights they can continue to reach within the game's dense maze of a world.
Belmont's Curse is different, though: you don't get the “from hero to zero” starting point—you're already a zero who has to learn to hero it up on the fly! In the same vein that originated with Castlevania : Symphony of the Night, Rose will be equipped with nothing but a dinky sword, a diving slide for dodging or squeezing through tiny nooks and crannies, and an evasive back-dash-to-back flip somersault for enemies that require a more tactical approach. Aside from the acrobatic maneuvers, Rose does exactly walk with a lot of speed in her step, and Drac's monster squad will hit players pretty hard before Rose can earn enough experience points to bridge the gap, requiring some precision gameplay during the early hours. Despite some of these deceptively steep inclines in the game's difficulty curve, there are some balancing tweaks that veer away from the typical action elements seen in a 2D side-scrolling Castlevania game that help even the odds. The biggest change at work is that, unlike other members of the Belmont clan, Rose does not take direct contact damage from enemies in her direct proximity, meaning that Rose has a little more maneuverability in close-quarters combat when it comes to engaging the assorted nasties she'll contend with in her holy war. This, of course, doesn't apply to EVERY enemy in her rogue's gallery, as there will be the occasional spectral skull or razor-winged bats who will steadily swarm and dive at you like flies on honey, but never within the moment you encounter them, working within the same conventions of balance that are fairly paced against Rose's rate of growth through the adventure. That's not to say there aren't some curveballs thrown in, especially when it comes to some of the more familiar faces among Drac's baddies. The Flea men, for instance, are far more deadly than they are annoying, as they don't just hop up and about while juking you with a flying tackle—the gangly little dudes in this adventure are far more dangerous, and send Rose packing right back to her last save room thanks to their split-second spears across the floor to snag you in and slice you up for crazy stupid damage.
In addition to Lady Belmont's core arsenal of abilities, the huntress will have access to a series of different weapons to use, various relics that will augment a variety of skills or character stats, and a secondary weapon that's accessible in the form of Card Captors-ass Tarot Cards that will ensnare the arms and abilities of the assorted bosses you'll need to track down, the latter of which being the crucial McGuffin needed to progress through whatever gated obstacle had impeded your advancement to the next area—ya know—the usual Metroidvania nonsense. The difference in navigating the grand maze-like world of Paris to the previous biomes seen from the Iga titles is that navigation is also steadily paced out the way the character development is through a bottleneck introductory phase that's similar to that of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , in which the critical path is far more beaten than usual. This approach essentially leaves players little option to veer off the main course, as it were, up to that critical “Agahnim” point, where Rose arrives at a juncture that significantly expands the map into a much larger playing field.
As fresh as this may have been when I picked it up, I'd be lying if I didn't feel this pseudo-tutorial phase of the game was a bit too meandering for my liking, and a lot of that has to do with the chumming behind the hook. Whether you're a veteran or new to the genre, the Metroidvania conceit is a fairly established formula of trademark conventions that define its gameplay foundation. When the nuances of said conventions get subverted for the sake of experimentation, there needs to be something more to keep player engagement going. The spirit of a good Metroidvania is that the experience should be engineered more around the journey than the destination; however, the sluggish momentum of Belmont's Curse's tedious, bottlenecked introduction to the overworld will have players quickly pining for the destination over the journey—a feeling that reduces the core gameplay to a chore rather than a fun time.
Thankfully, there's one exception that really saved the playthrough for me during the initial hours that completely turned the vibe around; just like a Chevrolet Corvette warming up during a winter morning in Minnesota, this new skill helped massage the tiresome trek through the streets of Paris, to where once players eventually DO reach that pivotal end to the initial phase of the game, the scope of Rose's crusade drastically expands into an entirely new sort of game where the intensity continuously ratchets higher and higher in all of the right ways.
Whether they're 2D or a fully-realized 3D space, the key to making any long-form adventure in a dense world a jam is to offer flexible traversal skills that equitably contribute to a player's movement abilities and their combat abilities, which leads me to Rose's ethereal whip that she learns with the first few hours of the campaign. This thing was a total game-changer. The first new skill, in the same way her descendant got around on the Super NES, is the ability to latch onto specific grapple points with her ghostly whip, allowing the heroine to swing around and about through the level like a certain web-thwipping vigilante, and allowing players access to areas that aren't normally reachable from a standard jump. The real cherry on top, though, is the ability to home in on enemies by grappling them with your whip and launching yourself at them like some sort of “reverse Scorpion” à la Mortal Kombat. Even better—if the attack button is timed just right during these whip-driven thrusts, players will launch a strong assault against their wrangled foes with a protect strike that grants Rose i-Frames during the attack, adding a tactical edge to players' strategy with the bonus of some handy movement tech to help compensate for Rose's otherwise slow movement speed.
It didn't take very long for things to pick up after the swingy-swang thang was acquired, with many of the vertical-based courses in the immediate area beginning to expand the number of routes available to me rapidly, and what steadily led me to the next breakthrough the new Castlevania title had in store for me within its “search action” core—exhaustive environmental puzzles that would make Eiji Aonuma and his water temple blush…
It's a little difficult to describe just how ingenious this approach is without getting too specific and risking spoiler territory, so I will do my best to give the most thorough account of the in-depth environmental puzzles that lie in wait in Belmont's Curse, and say that many of them aren't as simple as “Oh, that ledge is a little too high, I guess that's where I'll use a double jump later…” See, while there are core bosses to track down for your Tarot Card deck of spells and abilities objectively needed to confront Dracula at the heart of his castle, many of them aren't as linear to acquire, and will be steadily revealed to the player in the form of clues or hints to decipher throughout your time in Castlevania : Belmont's Curse. One area, for example, will have a series of platforms to jump across in an arrangement that subtly hints at another route you can take, with the secret lying in the exact way you choose to interact with those platforms to trigger the mechanism that opens new paths to explore. Sometimes it's as simple as the background scenery of the area itself, and the cryptic meanings behind some of the objects that garnish these backdrops that hint at a much more elaborate trail to take, like some sort of pseudo-treasure map stuff that geocachers dream of stumbling upon.
The added levels of scrutiny needed to uncover the mysteries of the overworld through these puzzles organically foster a much more intimate relationship between the player and the map that goes far deeper than simply reading landmarks that are gated behind a double-jump or mega-crush. I can't truly tell you how much of a relief it was to suddenly find myself wearing a red-and-white Patriots jersey, and tell y'all just how much this game disappointed me in the first half of the run, only to come back strong as hell with some truly thought-provoking platform challenges and brain teasers to work to salvage my impression of the game and then some. Despite how much more enjoyable the level design gets deeper into Belmont's Curse, it's not without its faults, and the biggest issue is its clumsy approach to fast travel. This grievance again comes at the expense of trying not to delve too deep into the fun derived from solving the riddle that walls off the option to warp around the world through certain junctures; needless to say that even when you did get access to it, it's not as direct as other contemporaries that would allow you to zoom from point A to point B, and instead limit the distance between where you're currently traveling from and the nearest junctures you teleport to—which feels an awful lot like traveling by public bus transit, complete with “transfer” stops and everything.
On the presentation side, using similar art styles to that of Dead Cells, with a look that juxtaposes the cel-shaded stylings of warm, effervescent color with a sharp anime aesthetic that's not too dissimilar from the trademark stylings of Ayami Kojima and the work seen in Castlevania : Symphony of the Night and Castlevania : Aria of Sorrow. While there are some locales in the game where this approach can have some awkward clashes of hotter tones that are too alike to effectively stand out from one another (especially during a certain boss fight against a famous French martyr), the graphics are otherwise an incredible visual to behold in motion, and definitely stand apart from anything else seen in the series thus far. As silly as this may sound, I don't have a lot to say about the music because, from what I can gather, many of the scores I did hear were rearranged versions of classic 'Vania tunes, and like, as amazing as those tracks are—we've already heard them. I will say that some of the composition choices within the arrangements were more of a bop than I thought they would be, like the more subdued take on “Bloody Tears” that drags out the song a little more than its original iteration and makes it come off like a more formal interpretation of what are otherwise starkly sharp, melancholic tunes.