The fact that we’re getting a new Castlevania game at all is pretty hard to believe. With various notable figures having left Konami, and going on to create Bloodstained as a spiritual successor, it felt like Castlvania might languish in its coffin. Konami instead looked for an outside partner, teaming up with Evil Empire, the creators of a lot of Dead Cells DLCs and the excellent The Rogue Prince Of Persia. It was easy to be excited about the prospect. The good news is that that excitement is very warranted.
Belmont’s Curse is to Castlevania games what Streets of Rage 4 was to side scrolling brawlers. It’s a modernization that brings the series into 2026, and does so by masterfully, blending how the games used to be, and how they can be now. It doesn’t always nail things, and it misses out some key oddities from the originals, but for the most part, Belmont’s Curse is a joy to play.
You take control of Rose Belmont, the daughter of Trevor and Sypha – you might know them from the first few seasons of the Castlevania Netflix show. She’s had a bit of a rough time of it, as is always the case, but her and the old man have gone to Paris to try and stop more monster showing up. It turns out that it’s yet another ploy to get Dracula back in action, and that’s all of the story needs to get you on your way.
The gameplay is largely what you’d expect. You run around exploring to unlock new abilities to do more exploring, all the while killing things that really want to kill you. Combat is quite different here, though. You can choose from different weapons you unlock as you go, swapping between weapons like paired swords, a whip, or a spear, and each of these has different attacks and effects. You then get more combat abilities in the prologue as well.
These abilities like using the whip to pull yourself towards an enemy to stun them and hit them, or using the power of light to parry attacks. You also get spells from Arcana as well, and you get one from the bosses you kill. Each Arcana uncovers more information about the boss as you move forwards too, like their location or why they’re looking to square off against you. The combat feels very slick. Flitting between enemies using the whip to take them out is amazing, and being able to do all of it without touching the ground or getting hit makes you feel exceptionally cool.
The whip and light both come in handy when exploring too. You’ll need to use the whip to move through mazes of thorns and spikes, and time the use of the light to make platforms solid or not. You get new gimmicks in each part of the map, like paintings you can slip into. There are some horrifyingly difficulty platforming challenges, but most of them are for optional unlocks, so you can skip and return to any that provide too taxing.
All of this is wrapped in stunning visage. The game just looks incredible. There are so many great uses of block colors and themes throughout, and some really clever light tricks as well. It’s a genuine delight to just look at the game, even if it is constantly trying to kill you. It will kill you too, this is probably the hardest Castlevania game I’ve played, and I’ve played nearly all of them. If that puts you off though, you can muck around with settings to make it easier, like reducing enemy damage and whatnot.
All of this has been pretty glowing, though there are some slight complaints. My biggest is that the fast travel system is just a bit clunky. This genre tends to have fast travel points near save points, to smooth out the hassle of backtracking through the world, but that’s not the case here. This deficiency only makes for a couple of minutes different, but those minutes add up a lot over the course of a game and feel tiresome.
The other thing is that some basic enemies just take a little too long to kill. Castlevania is largely about one or two-shotting things in your path, with the odd big lad stopping the flow outside of that. Here, a lot of enemies can take a few hits, and with how many the game constantly throws at you, it makes things feel like they take forever. Also, you don’t get the little name pop up when you kill things, and I don’t know why that would be removed. I did also encounter a few weird crashes, but I’m assuming those will be patched out.
