Ohh baby. If yesterday's post was complaining about a very good game (and it was, if we're being honest), this one is going to be nothing but gushing about an incredible game. Let's set the scene, just a bit. A Kickstarter got itself funded a while back, for a little game called Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. It's an upcoming retro revival of the "Metroidvania" style made popular by Koji Igarashi with his multiple entries in the series, and it's got the man himself behind it. So, you know, fans of that must be through the roof. Certainly I'd be interested in trying it when it comes out, but my loyalties lie with vintage 'Vania. That made what was to come all the more surprising. A stretch goal for the Bloodstained Kickstarter was an 8-bit styled prequel game, and that got met as well. The result was Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon. (From here on, we'll just call it Bloodstained, as I doubt we'll be referencing the upcoming Ritual Of The Night any more.) My god, this game. It's in the running as one of the best I've played this year, and giving it a quick replay and change today only cemented that. The folks behind this get vintage Castlevania, but they've managed to go beyond. Replicating the atmosphere, aesthetic, and gameplay of an old Castlevania game would have been a feat of prowess. Bloodstained manages to go even farther. It draws upon advances and conveniences of games that have come since Castlevania 3's release, and applies them to a game that pays homage to it. The result is utterly incredible.
I think what I adore most about Bloodstained is its variety of choices. If you'll recall, Castlevania 3 had some of those as well, but in practice they amounted to "do you want the game to be hard, or do you want it to be REALLY hard?". Bloodstained lets you tone things down, if you so choose. You've got a casual mode which gives you infinite lives and removes knockback, or a veteran mode which has lives and knockback. I went with Veteran, but it's nice that the option is there to not have your face rocked off. Lives are an interesting bugbear from the old days, but this game's real generous on that front too, if you let it. See, you can recruit characters in this one. Just like in Castlevania 3. Unlike that one, you get to take all of them with you. Also unlike that one, switching between them is instant as opposed to a five second teleport. It's the little things. Dying makes you lose the use of that character, but only losing all your characters takes a life away... and then they all come back. There's all sorts of shenanigans with the characters, though, as they draw from Castlevanias past. You have your whip user with a slide, and then you have characters which are Original Character Do Not Steal versions of Sypha and Alucard from 3. They're all good and useful, in their own way... but you could also kill them and gain super powers for your main hero! Or ignore them and try and beat the game with a basic jump and slash! The variety here is staggering, and I've not even gone into how it handles the stages. You don't choose which stage to go to this time, but the stages are massive with all sorts of branching paths and some hidden goodies. A lot of them you can only get with clever use of the other characters and their powers, so there's a reward for recruiting them. This works a lot better for me than choosing the stage because you never really get stuck on a hard path; it's either the intended path, or an easier shortcut. This game's just on point and I adore it.
Then you've got the extra modes, where you play as the other three characters in unison to beat the game again and earn a "better" ending, or a mode that unlocks the super powers for your main hero while also letting you use the others. I've played through this game a good five or six times and it's an absolute breeze. I keep putting down Castlevania 3 here, and I feel bad doing it... but my god. Here's a game which manages to take an absolute classic and improve on it in nearly every way. It's almost unfair to compare the two, given that Castlevania 3 doesn't have almost 30 years of game design and extra memory capacity to draw off of... but I can't help but do it anyway. I'll still go back to Castlevania 3, but Bloodstained has won me over. If I want to play a spooky platformer and get my ass kicked, I'll load up a Ghosts n Goblins game or Castlevania 3 or something. That's still my avenue of masochism, of course... but it's all about choice. If I want to play a spooky platformer and blast through it and have a relative challenge, choosing on the fly how tough I want to make it... I'll fire up Bloodstained. One wonders how the hell Ritual Of The Night will turn out now. Next year will tell, I suppose, and we could be writing it up if there's another one of these. In the meantime, I want to take on that Boss Rush... but first maybe I should check in on an old friend of the spooky marathons, hm? I bet you know this one. Big. Stompy. Yeah. That one.
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