Sometimes it takes a chunk of time for the right decision to be made – and credit to Konami, it made the right one for Castlevania. After years out in the cold, this beloved franchise finally got a new game this month, in the form of Belmont’s Curse, and rather than bashing its head against the wall trying to reinvent the series, Konami took a smarter path.
It looked at the phenomenal success of Dead Cells, from a French team (Evil Empire) that openly professed its adoration of Castlevania, and asked why that same team couldn’t just make the next mainline game. Fast-forward a few years, and we have Belmont’s Curse, from that same developer, showing that you really can manifest your own destiny sometimes.
I spent pivotal parts of my childhood and teenage years playing Castlevania games on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, so I’ve basically been waiting for a new 2D game in the series for years and years. Now it’s finally here, and that heritage of portable play meant that I was only ever interested in playing it on one console – my Switch 2.
As it happens, there’s one small wrinkle there. While Belmont’s Curse launched with a Nintendo Switch version on day one, it doesn’t yet have a native Switch 2 port. While the game does run better on Switch 2, with a frame rate cap raised from 30fps to 60fps, it’s still not the sharpest, and it’s a bit disappointing that we’ll have to wait for an upgraded version at some point down the line.
That foible aside, though, I’ve been having a brilliant time sinking into the game’s vision of a ruined Paris, complete with a haunted castle to explore and a carefully laid-out map to discover. It’s classic Metroidvania stuff, right down to its surprisingly brutal difficulty curve.
Belmont’s Curse sees you take up the mantle of Rose Belmont, at the time of the game, the youngest of her famous family’s line, as she and her father, Trevor, journey to Paris to investigate an uprising of demons and monsters. On arrival, they discover the city in disarray and split up.
Taking control of Rose, you’ll find her a capable warrior, but a newly acquired Tarot deck is her secret weapon. It’s basically a roster of weapons and skills that she can expand over time (much of that expansion happening through mastery challenges). These skills don’t just change how you fight, but also double in many cases as traversal methods, giving you the classic step-by-step upgrades to how much of the map you can explore at a given time.
While Evil Empire is best known for its roguelike work, this is a traditional game in the genre, so while there are moments that let you choose where to explore next, much of the progression is slightly more linear than it might appear. Still, the map’s proving really fun to explore, and it’s more challenging than I expected, with even the most common enemies demanding some care when you fight them.
Bosses, meanwhile, are entirely another question, and I haven’t blitzed any of them in one attempt so far. For me, the ideal boss in this genre takes me about five or six tries – enough to make me pay attention and learn its attacks, but not so many that I get really frustrated. That metric has roughly applied to Belmont’s Curse so far, which has been really fun.
In a period of absolutely non-stop releases (with more games coming every week and a behemoth called GTA VI just around the corner), I’ve been sneaking an hour here and there on my Switch 2 with Belmont’s Curse, and it might just have its hooks in deep enough to make me finish it before I move on.
