Review - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
“Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night” is a Metroidvania (or “Igavania”) released on the all major platforms in 2019. As a spiritual successor to Castlevania games produced by Koji Igarashi, Bloodstained originated as a Kickstarter project when IGA (as he prefers to be called) parted ways with Konami in 2014. The intellectual property of Castlevania stayed with Konami, but nothing was stopping IGA from creating a new IP in the same style of side-scrolling exploration platformer with gothic styling. Nothing, that is, except funding.
The Kickstarter was WILDLY successful, meeting 11x the original goal of $500,000 with over $5.5 million. I didn’t personally back it, but I was very tuned into it as a long-time Castlevania fan. I wanted the project to succeed, but I didn’t have any console to play it on and I previously didn’t have much faith in Kickstarter after the OUYA fiasco. Instead, I just watched from afar.
When “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” was released after meeting the stretch goal incentive, I was hype. I picked it up on Nintendo 3DS and played through it several times. IGA and his team absolutely nailed the experience of old school Castlevania games with some modern optimizations and quality of life changes. If they could do so well with an 8-bit reimagining, I was confident they could absolutely knock it out of the park with the modern release.
After Ritual of the Night finally came out, I picked it up from the library on Nintendo Switch. I played through it and really enjoyed it. Eventually, though, I got to the final boss and just put it down. The boss was too hard for me at the time (something I’ll get to later), and I got frustrated with it. Up until that point, I really enjoyed it, I just couldn’t handle the difficulty spike there at the end. I was content with my experience and mostly just wrote it off as something I didn’t have the chops to finish after a really fun pass through the story.
That could’ve been the end of it, but I revisited it several years later in March 2024. After getting the PS4 back up and running, I was blowing through a backlog of games I hadn’t been able to play for several years. I was talking with some friends about Bloodborne, and my mind naturally drifted to Bloodstained. It occurred to me that I never finished it on Switch. While I could’ve just checked it out from the library on Switch again, I wouldn’t have a clue what I was doing, and I didn’t mind playing through a game again when I hadn’t touched it since probably circa 2019. Instead, I would pick it up on PS4. Besides, the PS4 version supposedly runs better than Switch, and it has TROPHIES. I do love trophies.
As I was exploring Gebel’s castle, I was crutching very heavily on my weapons and opting to use “shards” (think magic) less frequently. I tend to have really bad resource anxiety, so something that I can use infinitely tends to get more use than anything that consumes a resource, even if that resource does passively regenerate over time. The problem is that weapons aren’t super powerful in Bloodstained. Sure, they do put out damage and you could probably beat the game almost entirely without using shards if you really wanted, but that isn’t what IGA intended.
I started making a point to use shards more, and switch between different ones regularly to at least try them out before I dismissed any specific shard entirely. What I learned is that some shards put in WORK. True Arrow, the directional shard that I gravitated to for most of the game, throws out up to 5 projectiles and each of them was doing more damage than a hit from my main weapon in most cases. My damage per second went through the roof when I actually started leveraging my shards properly.
After getting to the final boss again, I was ready for a struggle, but I was confident I would finish the game this time. Sure enough, I was able to beat the boss after only two or three attempts this time. Again, shards dish out MAJOR damage. With the game formally completed and already being so close to getting the platinum trophy, I couldn’t stop there. I immediately started cleaning up anything I had missed earlier in the game and working toward 100% completion.
Most of the content could be finished with a simple grind. All demons and shards were pretty simple to track down and kill repeatedly, and the game gives a fantastic interface to see what you have and what you’re missing. The longest part of the road to platinum was filling out the item list. Some of the gear and food takes a pretty substantial list of ingredients or chain crafting. Fortunately, crafting one item makes it available in the shop, so you can just throw gold at your problems eventually and farming gold is pretty easy with a specific setup.
I’m really glad I went back and finished Bloodstained. I forgot how much I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I didn’t have to leave such a good game unfinished. And with that, let’s get into the actual review!
Story - 7/10
As a brand new intellectual property, it’s difficult to get invested in a story that you have no previous history with. Bloodstained does a really good job of introducing shardbinders like Miriam and giving them a background that makes sense.
The plot is fairly cliche, but I feel like that’s expected of Metroidvania games. Give me a big bad and let me go build up my character into some super powerful demigod and wipe the floor with them. There are some twists that you may or may not see coming, and it was generally very entertaining. This isn’t some game-changing story telling, and a novelization of Bloodstained would probably be both short and uninteresting. That’s not why we’re here, though.
A cool concept that IGA brought with him from Castlevania is the ability to play through the game as other characters. I have only played through as Miriam, since she is the default option, but I would be curious to see how the story plays out through the eyes of other people you encounter in the campaign.
One weakness that I will point out is that a few points in the game leave the player without direction even if they have seemingly explored every available place. In particular, the process of getting onto the train in the Bridge of Evil area is particularly opaque. Two characters will vaguely hint at what the player must do, and they only mention it once. If you spam through the dialogue or skip it entirely, you don’t really have any way of knowing what you should be doing. I would like to see some sort of helpful hints or ways to know where you should be going. It could be a component of the menu or a character you have to visit in the game, but it can be frustrating to not have any idea where to go next.
General Gameplay - 8/10
World traversal is a critical part of any Metroidvania and Bloodstained does it really well. The Alucard signature backdash is available from the beginning of the game. Abilities like the double-jump come surprisingly late, instead using shard abilities to augment the ways in which Miriam gets around the castle.
Platforming is solid. There are plenty of jumps that Miriam can just barely reach with a single jump, making sure the player gets their timing right early in the game. Different shards allow you to clear or bypass certain obstacles, and the inevitable return to previous areas to see what you can access after you get a new ability is standard for the genre. Teleport rooms make it easy to get in the general vicinity of where you want to go, and waystones as a resource-gated escape option are really nice. Got a nice drop and don’t want to risk getting back to a save room with a sliver of health? Pop a waystone in a safe place and you’re good.
Menus are done really well, and satisfy exactly what you need without being needlessly complex or nested. You can change gear in a hurry, and shortcut functions actually allow you to build out different gear and shards setups and quickly switch between them. This is great for traversal-heavy areas where you don’t use the same equipment for combat. There are explicit lists of exactly what items and shards you have, as well as demons you have added to your bestiary, and they all list percentages for how much you’ve obtained. I literally couldn’t ask for a better menu system.
Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between scenery elements and platforms that you can jump on. This isn’t a common problem, and it’s mostly prevalent in specific areas. It could be just a problem with me rather than the game itself, but I would like some more clear indication of what Miriam has collision detection with and what can be ignored.
Another gripe, there are a couple of times when it isn’t clear exactly how you can interact with. Specifically, there are iron maidens placed in a few different places. Most of them block a chest or some upgrade, but one in particular blocks the critical path to the next area. I tried scooting over and under them, teleporting past them, and even putting on a trap-immune piece of armor to just tank through it. Turns out you have to use the Craftwork shard to grab it and physically move it out of the way. It’s logical in hindsight, but I think they could do better with illustrating some of the things you can do with shards.
Combat - 9/10
The action facet of Bloodstained is exactly what you expect it to be, following in the footsteps of Castlevania. Plenty of trash mobs that you can cut through in just a few hits each. There are occasional larger enemies that pose a threat, but can be easily dispatched once you’ve learned their moves and how they telegraph actions. Bosses are punishing, but with practice you can really nail the timing and get that satisfying kill.
What I mentioned earlier about depending too heavily on weapons? Shards are the main way to deal big damage in this game. Your magic bar regenerates over time and you can boost how quickly it restores with some permanent buffs. Really lean into the magic. If you get a new shard, switch to it and try it out a couple of times. The shards I ended up using were not ones that I had originally cared to even investigate. Welcome Company and Void Ray are really good in the later game, and True Arrow can be picked up pretty early to dish out quick damage. You really can’t know from a description how you’ll feel about a particular shard.
Difficulty - 3/10
The difficulty of Bloodstained is really flexible, and you can set it to different levels or just make the game harder or easier on yourself by what you choose to do. I played on the standard difficulty, but there are harder modes available. Nightmare mode is apparently super punishing, and that’s just not the kind of negativity I wanted in my life.
When you die, you get sent back to the most recent save. That’s par for the course with Metroidvania, so I don’t think anybody will be surprised or frustrated with it. There are times when you’re traversing a new area and you accidentally pass right by a save room without even knowing. Again, pretty standard. One huge quality of life improvement is that boss rooms are indicated with clearly marked orange doors. You can’t just accidentally stumble into a boss fight with the exception of maybe the first one when you learn what that door means. I think some of the later Castlevania games also had distinct boss doors, but I think that’s a fantastic feature that allows you to make sure you look around for a save room before you run headlong into something that will definitely kill you.
Graphics - 7/10
Bloodstained looks great now, but it didn’t with some of the promotional material. They really had to polish it up, but I have mad respect for IGA and the team because they put in the work to make a quality product. The PS4 version looks better than the Switch version, but both are very detailed. Different areas have visual themes and they’re all very pretty. I think the backgrounds look better than the character and enemy models, though. And like I mentioned before, there are places where background and collision-enabled platforms aren’t exactly visibly distinguishable. Not a huge problem, but it is a quirk.
Music - 6/10
The music of Bloodstained is fine, but I don’t think it quite matches the quality of Castlevania. Maybe it’s just because traditional themes like Bloody Tears and Wicked Child don’t make an appearance, but how could they? Bloodstained is blazing its own trail, and even if there are some undeniable similarities in gameplay and visual themes, it can’t blatantly rip off material from Castlevania. Eventually, we might listen to reorchestrated versions of Voyage of Promise with the same nostalgic appreciation as Vampire Killer, but that takes time. It’s a solid enough initial offering, and I think the decision to include the soundtrack with several tiers of the Kickstarter were a fantastic move.
My Take
The Good
Combat and traversal are solid, and the game is very pretty to look at. It is faithful to its spiritual predecessor, and playing Bloodstained very much feels like playing Castlevania.
The Bad
In hindsight, it’s easy to ignore the early woes of marketing and development. Bloodstained took a very long time to come out, and the Kickstarter process left fans with a lot of uncertainty. Fortunately, the finished product was worth the wait.
The Ugly
Some growing pains with shifting to a new studio and new intellectual property were cumbersome to work through. Plus, some critical bugs in early versions of the game made players lose potentially a lot of progress. That’s never something you want to see.
Overall - 7/10
If you like Castlevania, you will almost definitely enjoy Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. With IGA’s departure from Konami and the trend of the Castlevania series with Lords of Shadow, I was really concerned that Castlevania was pretty much dead. Even if the IP is basically finished, Bloodstained has shown that a spiritual successor can carry the torch high.
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