Paris lies dead around Rose Belmont. Behind her the skyline glows red and orange, and heaps of rotting corpses are piled against the backdrop. Dracula has returned, as he always does. Then, somewhere in the chaos, the opening notes of “Bloody Tears” start up.
If that scene gets your pulse going, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is aimed squarely at you. This is the first mainline Castlevania in more than ten years, and it proves the franchise still has a lot left in the tank.
The Belmonts were gone long enough for everyone else to move in
Symphony of the Night and the handheld games that followed it helped create an entire subgenre of 2D action-adventure. Konami then shelved the series just as its spiritual successors began to thrive. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night made no secret of its Castlevania roots. Stranger “MetroidBrainias” like Animal Well arrived too. You could reasonably argue that the Belmonts should have slipped quietly into the night rather than outstay their welcome.
Belmont’s Curse puts a stake through that idea. Developer Evil Empire used the foundation of Dead Cells, added nostalgic appeal and a new card-driven Arcana system, and ended up with a game worthy of the name. The spiritual successors have been good, and a few have been great. Still, confronting the Lord of Darkness beneath a full moon with that soundtrack playing feels different when it’s the genuine article. It plays like a reunion that was bound to happen eventually.
Meet the new Belmont
The plot is set after Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse, the game that Netflix’s animated series loosely adapted. Nearly twenty years earlier, Trevor Belmont and his companions slew Dracula. Players take control of Rose Belmont, the daughter of Trevor and Sypha Belnades. She’s a fairly green vampire hunter out to prove she belongs on the family tree.
After her father receives a letter warning of sinister events, father and daughter travel to Paris to look into it. Rose gets split off from him and must take on hell’s forces alone while trying to keep Dracula from overrunning humanity. She also has an internal battle to fight: a curse linked to her emotions is slowly consuming her future.
Castlevania has never been about its dialogue, and this entry doesn’t buck that trend. The series succeeds on atmosphere, in particular the theatrical mood of a Universal Pictures monster film. Belmont’s Curse transforms Paris into a ghost town, drawn in a hyperstylized 2.5D style that resembles a comic artist’s take on The Triumph of Death. It looks superb, and the vivid color makes the gothic darkness stand out.
Getting lost (the good kind)
Those backdrops make each region memorable, and the open world beneath them nails the basics. The opening hours are a little too linear. That doesn’t last, and before long you’re choosing among branching routes as you search for a way to defeat Dracula. (Word of advice: charging at him without the right preparation won’t go well.)
There’s a lot to uncover, from meaningful secrets to tucked-away puzzles that are a pleasure to solve. Meanwhile, the critical path remains easy to track. You probably won’t run into that dreaded dead end where you’ve used up every route and are left hitting random walls in hopes of finding a hidden passage.
The map doesn’t match the scale or ambition of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Metroid Dread makes for a better comparison, since it’s another tightly built sequel that knows when to end. Where Belmont’s Curse outdoes Samus’ most recent 2D outing is in the things you discover along the way.
Rose’s mom left her a deck of tarot cards
This is the Arcana system. Sypha passed the cards down, and you complete the deck by defeating powerful bosses or assisting the odd hidden characters spread across the map. Each card frees (and/or traps) a soul corrupted by Dracula, turning former foes into allies (and/or frenemies).
The cards grant magic abilities that consume mana. Rose can hurl fireballs or bend time as if she’d stepped out of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Not every power is equally handy, but many of them alter the game’s rhythm: you can freeze weaker enemies for a burst of speed or recover health through vampiric bloodletting.
What’s unexpected is how these Mega Man-style abilities tie into the narrative. As Rose gathers up the miserable creatures Dracula warped WARPED $0.00007791 ▼ -5.3%, she confronts how far redemption and forgiveness can really go. The game handles that theme with a light touch until an optional route lands it with surprising force, and Dracula’s real weakness proves more interesting than garlic or wooden stakes. It also helps that the game functions as a pseudo-sequel to the Netflix show. Viewers will arrive more emotionally invested in characters like Sypha.
Hunting down the cards ranks among the game’s greatest joys. Clues are hidden throughout the world, leading to puzzles and mysteries that reward you for cracking them. Chests contain worthwhile loot as well, such as unique weapons and equippable trinkets with handy passive effects.
It plays like Dead Cells wearing a cape
There’s an even more basic reason that roaming Dracula’s Castle is so enjoyable: Evil Empire has built a 2D action platformer that feels wonderful in your hands. The razor-sharp responsiveness of Dead Cells is carried over and filtered through a Castlevania sensibility. There’s no i-frame roll to slip through attacks. Instead, you must read enemy movements and decide when to slide, backstep or jump, jockeying for position and making use of open space.
Without an invincible dodge, you have to be cautious when you’re under pressure. The game compensates with deadly tools. A magic whip yanks you directly to a foe so you can begin an air juggle (Rose has obviously picked up a few tricks from Devil May Cry’s Dante). A satisfying parry keeps you aggressive, calling up a holy orb that knocks away arrows from the skeletal archer at your back while you pummel a haunted suit of armor. Both combat and platforming improve as upgrades let you dash across the map using cancels and movement techniques.
A few things that bug
The most significant issue is the lack of quick-swapping for weapons or magic skills. Each Arcana Card shines in different scenarios, so you’ll want to switch them frequently, and the only option is to pause and scroll through a menu. You’re also limited to three equipment slots, which means optimizing for a tough boss involves even more time with the game paused. The menus are quick, at least.
Weapons are the other weak point. Belmont’s Curse pares down some of the more fiddly RPG systems from earlier games, although leveling remains. Each of the seven unique armaments has four versions, and the first three tiers differ only by incremental damage increases. That comes across as a regression from the unique drops in the RPG-leaning “Igavania” titles, named after designer Koji Igarashi, who led Symphony of the Night and most of the franchise’s exploration-driven games. Much of the streamlining here is sensible. Sometimes, though, you just want to stumble on a strange purple sword that deals 20% more damage to skeletons.
None of this hurts much. Every weapon type is satisfying enough to use that the complaints hardly matter.
Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse launches Oct. 15 on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X. We played on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease code supplied by Konami.
Rose spends the entire adventure coming to terms with her heritage, and her game does exactly the same. It wields the classic iconography as deftly as any Belmont cracks the family whip.