A few weeks ago, my quest to beat all the games in my backlog hit a rather large snag – my computer went and broke, but fortunately I was still able to hack away at my Switch library.
This also made posting here on TAY quite challenging, but I’m pleased to announce that I have sourced a new and improved gaming rig and am back on track, hopefully I can still finish this before Aikage.
I had chosen Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon and Mario + Rabbids as my Switch titles of choice, with Resident Evil: Revelations 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance as my PC titles.
Naturally, the first to fall was Bloodstained, by far the shortest of all these games.
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is a retro-style metroidvania, more ‘vania than Metroid at that, a game by former Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi.
Curse of the Moon looks and plays like an NES Castlevania game, and I found that to be both a good and a bad thing.
It’s a very pretty game with well-designed levels, enemies and bosses, but I found the retro style controls to be annoying and frustrating, and ended up finishing the game on “dad mode” which largely circumvents the annoyances.
My biggest gripe with the gameplay is knockback – when your character takes a hit, he or she hops backwards several pixels in a damage animation which more often than not will get you killed on some of the more platforming-heavy sequences. I realize this was characteristic of old Castlevania games, and most people probably won’t mind it as much as I did in 2020.
The only other complaint I have is jumping has a fixed trajectory for each character – once you hit the jump button, you better hope you lined everything up properly because you are unable to make microadjustments mid-air. I found myself overshooting jumps quite often, and this combined with the knockback effect got me really frustrated at some points.
Other than that, I had a lot of fun with this game. The weapons and spells were all quite fun, and having different characters to use in different situations was a neat twist on the old Castlevania formula.
The levels were fun to explore, with secrets to be found in each. The bosses were all unique and challenging in their own way.
I would recommend this game to people who are looking for a retro-style challenge, especially those of us who enjoyed the old-school Castlevania games and have forgotten how annoying knockback is. Fortunately there is an option to disable knockback, and give you infinite lives so you don’t have to start at the beginning of the level after dying a few times.
Have you played Curse of the Moon? What did you think about it? Do you think knockback is ok or nah? Hit me up in the comments below!
Next up, I think, will be either RE: Revelations 2 or Mario + Rabbids, not too sure yet.
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