Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon Reviews

game is good

short and sweet :)

This is a must buy for anyone who is a can of Castlevania.

Peak NES gameplay like, it's good.

It's good. Not great but good. It's basic-ass, mayo-ass Castlevania 3 with a cool twist ending if you finish the game a 2nd time.

Great game, I didn't get one specific ending, but I did play through the game four times and its a great time. I only needed to switch to Casual once. The game is difficult but mostly fair, its only when only using one character and on specific levels that I found it too much

Inticreates does it again! Great revival of the classic Castlevania difficulty with some accesibility for newcomers Gameplay, visuals, music, story: it has it all. 100% recommended, go for the alternate endings even, you won't regret it. The branching paths are an excellent choice for the level design. PD: I haven't played Bloodstained so I had little to no context for the characters, and enjoyed my time regardless

Curse of the Moon (both games) is peak NES Hard. This genre of game is usually attributed to Classicvania, but was also prevalent in series like Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and probably many other one-offs. The gameplay is tight and snappy, the characters and weapons are varied and all situationally viable, the pixel art is sublime, and the music is crunchy in all the right ways - setting a foreboding mood in a faux 8-bit aesthetic. It's also the most accessible Classicvania-style game you will find: - The base character's base weapon has less delay than the classic Belmont whip. This means, even at your least equipped, the combat is more forgiving. - You can freely switch between up to 4 characters, each with their own health bar. There's a generous amount of freeze during this switch that gives you just the right amount of breathing time to quickly process a situation and land on the character you need to overcome the hazard. You can cycle through this as long as you need. - Extra lives are generously given (every 20k points, which you'll get on average 1-2 times each stage) and are only consumed when all your characters have died. This provides a scaling difficulty where all 4 chars together (and their unique tools) can trivialize most hazards, but running with only 1 or 2 will require you to adapt your playstyle and make those lives feel more scarce. - There's a casual mode that eliminates the knockback on hit (and maybe other stuff, I never played this way). I know some players are really hostile to knockback, but I genuinely think you get the most satisfaction by keeping it on. The game [u]wants[/u] to challenge you. It wants you to hit walls and stop and think on how to proceed. The level design & difficulty curve is pretty transparent about this. Some people look at these games like twitch precision platformers, which is a little bit true, but rooms are more like condensed puzzles. You have to figure out the right sequence of moves in the right timing to make progress. And you only achieve this by spending time, feeling the weight of the mechanics, and learning what does and doesn't work. You can't just cheese it and avoid encounters, or sponge damage and walk through hazards. Enemies are real obstructions that have real consequences, but they have fixed and predictable spawns and telegraphed behavior. There's no RNG that will make you feel like you were cheated. There's a balanced spread of tight, single screen rooms and long endurance corridors - which challenge you to put those individual skills together. You [u]will[/u] hit a fail state and have to start over, sometimes a lot (very bottom of Stage 4 Zangetsu-only springs to mind). But you'll feel when you get better and it's really satisfying when you reach the end of those long screens and can finally tell those frogs to fuck off. You got through not because you turned down the difficulty but because you outsmarted the fucking frogs. One more thing is that you'll get the most enjoyment out of these games if you are open to multiple playthroughs. This does recycle a lot of content, but there are modes where the story beats change, the final stage & boss are completely different, or you'll have characters in earlier stages that open up routes that were previously inaccessible (CotM2 doubles down on this extra content). There's lots of forks that will make levels feel different enough, especially when you limit your number of characters. And even running through the same rooms has an inherent payoff, because you'll notice how you start to sprint through them quicker. Things that used to grind you to a halt will become mere nuisances. You'll start doing full rooms, bosses, or stages without getting hit. You usurp the demons as the unstoppable hazard that barrels through everything in its path. Or, the flow of the level will find you in new predicaments, where Alfred is your only remaining character and you have to solo the blood witch with him. You'll get really close, die anyway, but feel impressed with how well you were able to make do. Most situations are solvable with any kit; there's very few spots where you will feel like it's impossible to proceed without getting hit unless you have a specific character or weapon (fire sword demon is the only standout - I'm still not sure what the intended evasion is outside of Zangetsu doublejump, or killing it before it can attack). It might be harder and require a different strategy, but it's not impossible. Zangetsu only (no soul arts) is my favorite - its like Classicvania zen. Things start familiar enough, but gradually you feel the absence of those crutches as you face all those incrementally difficult rooms, or are forced down entirely new ones that you ignored before, and have to survive with little more than your sword. Powerups are unreachable, and you are forced to grapple with hazards you used to trivialize with a high jump, freeze spell, or bat form. Despite how daunting it feels, it's doable - you [u]know[/u] it is because there is no other way forward, and there's a unique ending hidden behind it. The only thing required to reach it is your determination to persevere.