Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

The prospect of playing such a lovingly crafted tribute to the vintage heyday of Konami's seemingly abandoned Castlevania series more than makes up for a few out-of-place boss fights and a slightly too punitive death penalty. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon delivers a brief but effective burst of nostalgia, and thanks to its many creative modifiers it contains enough replay value to engage (and challenge) anyone who pines for gaming's bygone days. And this isn't even the "real" Bloodstained! As appetizers go, it's substantial — nearly satisfying enough to be its own main course.

A Castlevania-inspired throwback that's 8-bit of alright.

When Koji Igarashi created the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, one of the stretch goals was a an 8-bit mini-game that would serve as the prequel to Ritual of the Night. The campaign blew past all of its stretch goals, so much so that Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is currently the second most funded Kickstarter video game campaign in history. Obviously, the mini-game stretch goal was unlocked and highly anticipated. Somewhere and somehow, though, the mini-game switched from a prequel to a spin-off, but that doesn’t really matter because Bloodstained: Curse of the...

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon keeps the lifeblood of the Castlevania series pumping with a condensed, and appropriately retro homage. It might not blaze the trail on anything new like a few other recent Inti Creates projects have, but it does exactly what it needs to do, and helps bolster the new legacy of Bloodstained proper before it’s even out.

Ritual of the Night is on its way so in the meantime, here's a retro prequel to whet fans' appetites. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon feels like an authentic NES Castlevania game so give your cartridge a blow and let's slay some monsters.

Back in 2015, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night director Koji Igarashi convinced more than 60,000 Kickstarter backers to fund Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – a spiritual successor to his beloved classic. That project is still in development. In the meantime, Igarashi teamed up with Inti Creates to develop Curse of the Moon, a game that teases Bloodstained’s world and acts as a different sort of spiritual successor, following the tradition of Castlevania’s earlier adventures. Curse of the Moon is an impressive ode to the NES era, but as a tease for what’s to come, it elicits more indiffere...