Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night
Stain, transitive verb: to bring discredit on
We’ve been anticipating Koji Igarashi’s spiritual successor to his
Castlevania games for some time now – the original projected release date was March 2017, if you can believe it. Despite the repeated delays, the good news is that Bloodstained is one of those Kickstarter projects that displays perfect understanding of what the audience wanted from the game. The way that Castlevania: Symphony
Of The Night fused RPG elements with the nonlinear exploratory platforming of games like Metroid and Wonder Boy III:
The Dragon’s Trap has always been compelling, and the audience wanted that, complete with the horror trappings that other games don’t always deliver.
The triumph of Bloodstained is that it manages to deliver all of that, and does so in great quantity. The map is enormous, and is interesting to explore with its various regions each having distinct styles of visual design and layout – spiral towers with clockwork platforms give way to a library full of moving platforms, and later a cavernous underground waterway. There are plenty of weapons to try, from the regular swords and whips to more unusual additions such as combat shoes and firearms, and there are many hidden techniques that are revealed as you read from the various bookcases around the castle. Shards, which are primarily collected from defeated enemies, give you plenty of magical powers to explore too. The inclusion of side-quests and crafting mean that you’ll have plenty to distract you from the main objective if you want something a little different to do.
Bloodstained is also a refreshingly challenging game. Even the first boss managed to trip us up and kill us a couple of times, and while bosses typically provide the sternest challenges in the game, they’re not obnoxious difficulty spikes – you’re equally likely to be brought down in combat during regular exploration. Navigating the game is also challenging, and thankfully this is for the right reasons. The map is clear and useful so you’ll be able to find your way to your destination, but there’s no hand-holding – when you gain new abilities that open up new areas, it’s up to you to find out where
those areas might be. Fast travel points are appropriately limited, and not necessarily positioned right next to save points.
Plenty of people were worried about the game’s visuals following the demo for Kickstarter backers, and thankfully the developers have taken the time to address this. The result is an attractive game – Miriam looks excellent and the environments she traverses are always good looking, with certain featured rooms such as the cathedral even being excellent. Unfortunately, the Switch version isn’t quite as close a match for the other versions as some recent ports. While the lower resolution and 30fps target were concessions that should have been expected, the texture downgrade is harsher than we would have expected and the image is a little muddy. It looks like this version has been built for portable mode, with little thought given to how well the game holds up on a TV.
The audio is also of a high quality – or rather, the music and sound effects are, as the soundtrack includes contributions from Michiru Yamane and Ippo Yamada and is excellent. Sadly, the voice actors all seem to have studied at the Dick
Van Dyke school of British accents. Having said that, some utterances do cross the line into the same sort of hammy appeal that Symphony Of The
Night achieved with iconic lines such as “miserable little pile of secrets”.
Unfortunately the game has been beset by technical problems on all platforms, the worst being crash bugs, which are infrequent but enormously frustrating in a game without autosaves. Other issues include framerate instability and problems with items becoming stuck and inaccessible. But the Switch version suffers particularly badly here, with plenty of unique problems on display. Loading delays between rooms are somewhat onerous in some places, and become downright painful if you miss your jump to an upper room, while some conversation scenes are affected by glitched backgrounds. But the bigger problem is the high input lag, which conspires with the lower framerate to make the game feel noticeably less responsive on Nintendo’s hardware.
Make no mistake, this is no Mighty
No 9-style debacle. When the game is flowing properly and you’re having fun battling through the castle, it’s great – but then you’ll hit a crash or an obvious bug, or the game won’t respond quite as you want it to, or the performance drops. With proper technical execution
Bloodstained would be in contention for a Sizzler award, and on other platforms it’s much closer to that ideal. But while online claims that the Switch release is ‘unplayable’ are clearly hyperbolic, we’d be excusing an inexcusable level of technical problems if we rated this particular version any higher. Honestly, the game would have benefited from another delay, as first impressions aren’t great. If you’re confident that you can tolerate the issues on Switch, you’ll probably have great fun with
Bloodstained – but if you’re not, wait for the patches or consider purchasing a different version.
in a nutshell
Bloodstained feels like the work of a master returning to his craft in most respects, but technical problems drag the Switch version down. Owners of other platforms should add 10% to this score.