Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Review

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was one of the earlier Kickstarter successes. Like others at the time (I’m looking at you Mighty Number 9) it had every possibility of falling apart and not delivering. It is a game that promised a successor to Castlevania games, most notably Symphony of the Night. It was even being made by the producer from Symphony and several other games in the series. With a resume like Koji Igarashi’s there is a lot to live up to. Bloodstained has fortunately made it to release, now how does it live up to Castlevania’s legacy?

In Bloodstained, the world was almost plunged into darkness by the guild of alchemists. Miriam is a Shardbinder, a woman altered by the order of alchemists through experiments with demonically-powered crystals. After surviving an event that should have killed her, Miriam awakens ten years later just as a castle appears spewing out demons. With the help of her friend Johannes, Miriam not only has to stop an old friend and corrupted Shardbinder before he can unleash hell upon the world, but also try to retain her humanity as the crystal shards will consume her.

If you’ve played any of the 2D Castlevania games since Symphony of the Night, you’ll know exactly what to expect. Bloodstained is a 2.5D platformer with a big focus on combat and exploration. Throughout the large castle Hellhold, progress is gated by requiring certain shards that give you abilities to clear obstacles. This forces you to explore every room you can reach until you find the boss that will give you that shard, so you can keep moving through the castle. Killing enemies also has the chance of containing a shard, which after rather dramatically being absorbed into Miriam can give her all kinds of powers. Some powers can be used as projectiles or used for defence, these use up magic and act in place of the secondary items from Castlevania. The further along you get and the more shards you absorb you’ll also get passive abilities, such as faster attacks or improved stats. Eventually you can even have a familiar tag along to help out, or even the ability to transform yourself into one of the enemies. Shard collecting makes combat still relevant when backtracking through the castle. Unused shards can be sold to help keep you cashed up and fully stocked up on consumables.

It’s not all about the shard powers though, Miriam has access to an extensive range of weapons including swords, maces, whips and guns. Throughout the game you’ll pick up better weapons, and you can craft or purchase them. Honestly throughout the majority of the game I was able to stick with a few swords. There was never a need to use other weapons over a sword. In the end it’s going to be a personal choice, if you’re after some truly vintage Castlevania there’s a variety of whips to use. Weapons aren’t the only equippable item, you can also change clothing and accessories to help raise your stats. There’s enough variety to tailor your Miriam, to be a heavy hitter or better equipped for using the shard attacks.

Jumping and moving around the world is sluggish initially, and it’s not helped by input lag in the Switch version. The initial hours feel more dragged out while you’re stuck with just a single jump, the game would benefit from the added mobility from the start. Having Miriam unable to sprint at a decent pace is a weird misstep especially with so much backtracking involved.

While there have been some issues across all versions, the Switch version has the lion's share. After release issues were acknowledged, and it’s to be believed they’re patching up the Switch version as soon as possible. For the meanwhile, all of the problems at release currently stand.

Loading times are a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s smooth transitioning between rooms, other times it takes 10 or more seconds to load a screen. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t happen so often when you’re jumping up into a new room. If you don’t get it just right, you’ll wind up falling back down into the room you just came from and restart all the loading. Moving from one room to another can take about a minute if you’re unlucky with the jumps not landing and double jump not working.

I can’t say the framerate ever felt like it was hitting the full 30 FPS. Throughout the game it wasn’t uncommon for the framerate to drop to single digits. At some points the game dropped to zero and was practically frozen. Slowdown wasn’t just relegated to busy action packed areas, areas with almost nothing in them were also impacted too.

Visuals have also taken a hit. You don’t need to look further than the washed-out looking character portraits during conversations. Anyone talking to Miriam looks like they are set on the lowest resolution and it really stands out. The 2.5D style also doesn’t do the game any favours on the Switch, most outdoor areas looks empty and some environments look like they’re from the PlayStation 2 era.

While I understand it’s part of the charm and nostalgia to core Castlevania fans, it’s a shame the only way to save in Bloodstained is by an antiquated system. You need to find rooms around the world to save and restore health. If you get cocky and don’t save regularly enough you could lose half an hour or more of progress. Without buying or crafting healing items back in the town, you have no other way of healing without lucking upon a potion in a chest, or finding a Save room. Venture too far away from a room as you explore, you risk losing a lot of progress as you brave the unknown. Worse, and more likely, is when the game crashes after an hour of exploration. Would it have really hurt to have auto save on when moving between areas?

Despite all these issues Bloodstained is not a bad game, if you enjoyed the era of Castlevania that this game is heavily influenced by, you’ll have a lot to appreciate here. The exploration is fun and only gets better when you gain new powers that give access to all the out of reach areas before. When the game comes together as a whole it is genuinely good, so it’s unfortunate that it’s currently brought undone by multiple issues. At the moment of review it is a hard sell on the Switch until they patch the more glaring issues.

If you have a choice of consoles or PC to play Bloodstained on I would recommend you purchase one of those. With the Switch’s portability it should be the best version, for now it’s hindered by performance issues. I would rather be writing about how fun this game is, and it is fun. Once the issues are ironed out Bloodstained would be a 8.5-9 out of 10 game. They could’ve made another Symphony of the Night and satisfied a lot of people. Instead Bloodstained developer ArtPlay has built on it and made a (mostly) more enjoyable game for it.