What is a Castlevania game? Nothing but a miserable little melting pot of horror tropes drawn from famous literary archetypes – Carpathian Gothic populated by universal monsters and their lesser minions – with inspirations that run the gamut from Scandinavian folklore to Greek myth. Schematically, it’s a series of platforming sequences interspersed with combat, leveling, magic, and weapon forging on a Metroid-inspired map.
Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is all of these and is therefore acceptable as part of the series’ evolution. Its basic principle is: live, die, repeat: gradually becoming stronger until everything collapses before your power. The problem, so to speak, is that it’s so similar to a thousand other games that it needs to shout to be heard.
Some reviewers have called it a generic work with a Castlevania skin, but I disagree: the format started by Symphony of the Night remains a definitive guideline here. It’s got weapons and magic, its narrative is canon, there are plenty of familiar faces, and its core is an assemblage of platforming, whipping, and card exploring.
You play as Rose, the daughter of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades (both from Castlevania III) as she sets out to rid Paris of a demonic siege.
Once off the boat and into the alleys, you find lanterns and candles that release bonus RNG icons when hit. Most drops are mana meter refills for your secondary weapon, but life and health potions also appear from time to time. When you die, you return to the last save room you passed through, and these are intentionally, infuriatingly, placed far apart from each other, forcing you to travel considerable distances without respite.
You start by doing what almost every Metroidvania has done over the past three decades: travel through a map, filling it in via exploration, and noting dead ends that require a specific skill to access.
The bar for challenge is set from the start: Belmont’s Curse is a professional-grade Metroidvania aimed at Metroidvania experts. Leveling up and chasing attack and defense increases is essential and will make a noticeable difference when fighting popcorn enemies. For bosses, however, the advantage is much less pronounced; leveling alone won’t save you from having to learn evasive maneuvers.
Belmont’s Curse is probably the hardest Castlevania since Circle of the Moon, with a steep learning curve, required grinding, and an absolutely huge map to cover. And no spoilers, but you’re never really done when you think you are.
From the start, simple archers carve chunks out of your health, and even when employing a nimble array of evasive jumps, backflips, counterattacks, slides, and combos, you still end up beaten. Enemies don’t have hit stuns, meaning you can take hits and they can just stand your ground and strike. This will annoy you at first, but again, it’s an intentional and acceptable design decision that will make sense later.
Until the first boss fight, everything is a hidden tutorial. Respawning is a normal part of things, and you better get used to it. It takes around two to three hours (depending on skill level) before your respawn times start to lengthen significantly and your gains start to tip the scales in your favor. The first boss rodeo will see you torn to shreds in 20 seconds, but it’s essential to make you understand the game’s demands.
As a side note, be sure to avoid the difficulty slider in the game. Why it’s there remains a mystery, and it comes with a warning that using it can ruin the game: an outcome that is a mathematical certainty.
Belmont’s Revenge, you see, is a “good” challenge: a carefully constructed adventure that proves both rewarding and alluring once you get over the initial hump. It’s thrilling and varied, putting you to the test with surprise Kumite battles in ethereal arenas, or fiendishly designed gauntlets teeming with giant saws, swinging hooks, and decaying platforms.
A word of advice: avoid having to go boss hunting. Even if the desire to defeat Joan of Arc is strong, the map is enormous, and it is best to burn its far reaches first and increase your strength in the process.
The game’s new systems are fortunately simple to understand. Your magic meter allows you to use Arcana – or ranged secondary weapons – and the recharges are generous enough to encourage liberal use. With each boss you defeat, a new arcana is granted, along with additional abilities that expand both map and combat options.
There are families of weapons to unlock: shields, fists, two-handed blades, etc., each of which can increase in usefulness through four levels. Relics are your buffs, and you can apply a limited combination to Rose at any time, increasing attack power on a timer, defense, or even restoring health under certain conditions. Exploration is key to these acquisitions, and if necessary, you can annotate the map with reminder icons.
It should be noted that the designers did painstaking work on the layout of Paris. It is a vast pit of fire and stone that rises and falls, a dizzying machinery of trapdoors, doors and bridges. It’s wonderful to unravel, before it unravels further.
The fight is a real highlight, pushing the limits of the series. A blend of beat ’em-up scrolling controls wrapped in ninja-like agility, the pace of Rose’s movements and breadth of her attack options is the most addictive aspect of the game. All weapons have a unique feel and learning curve and, dare I say it, Belmont’s Curse has perhaps the most integrated and enjoyable use of the whip in any Castlevania game. You use it constantly, swinging, sliding, and dashing from platform to parapet with a fluidity that resembles parkour.
The whip can also be used to latch onto enemies to cross chasms, or to rush towards them and deal devastating aerial uppercuts and aerial raves. At first you’ll take such a beating that little is achievable, but give it time and you’ll wipe the floor with much of the opposition, and you’ll look good doing it.
Boss fights are dramatic, then spectacular, and come with real patterns to learn. That said, they seem frantic and a bit raw. Any transmission of attacks is unclear and you tend to rely on brute force as a tipping point, which often doesn’t work reliably.
Although the flow and pace of the game’s combat is quite enjoyable, there are a few irritants. Loading times, at least on the Switch 1, are intrusive and will make you cringe when an enemy pushes you back through a door, or you accidentally backtrack and have to wait through two loading screens just to get back to where you were. It’s not a problem, but it would have been nice if it was a little faster and a little less frequent. There are a few frame skips here and there too, and even if you quickly stop noticing it, you shouldn’t expect it to maintain an uninterrupted 30fps frame rate on Switch (or 60fps on Switch 2).
The main argument that could be made against Belmont’s Revenge is that it doesn’t do much. Really original. Graphically it’s well done, like a layered parallax painting, and there’s an atmospheric foreboding about its catacombs, damp quarters and cemetery gardens – but it never quite takes the breath away. The pixel art would have done the game a favor, and the sprite models, while usable, seem a bit underdeveloped.
Musically, there are some beautiful harmonies and moving motifs, but the classic grandeur of Castlevania IV, Symphony of the Night, and Rondo of Blood overshadow the game’s rather uneventful score. Additionally, I found the English voice acting off-putting, with Rose calling out for it. Switching to Japanese audio helps considerably and is delivered with the right level of energy.
Gn tech
