Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon actually surprised me a lot more than I expected.
Looking at it, you kind of know what your getting yourself into- an 8-Bit, NES style,
action, horror platformer, complete with whips, bats and castles.
But with a few really clever ideas and mechanics, the game is elevated to become something special.
First off, lets get the basics out the way.
The game looks and sounds great and it nails that 80's look.
I even noticed nice little touches like when you're in the water, your sprite and any items
you drop flicker, as though the console's struggling with all that's going on on the
screen.
The only thing that does feel a lot more modern though are the boss fights.
These are a lot bigger and a lot flashier than your typical NES boss.
I love how for the enemy types, they didn't just recycle the old horror cliches like a
Frankenstein monster, mummies and Dracula, but instead have created much more nightmarish,
demonic looking creatures.
They really used their imaginations for some of these things and came up with something
new.
The levels, on the other hand, aren't quite as interesting, at least in the way that they're
laid out.
Sure you've got you'r parts with a spiked roof that moves up and down, and your windy
level where the wind gets in the way of your jumps.
But its nothing that we haven't really seen before.
No section of a level really stands out to me as something unique and a lot of the early
stages have a lot of walking along, in a straight line, killing the odd enemy that spawns, until
you reach a door.
However, in saying that, the game does do something very clever.
Even though it's linear, with you going from one level to the next, that doesn't mean that
there isn't an opportunity for you to have some choice in where you want to go.
After beating each of the first three bosses, you unlock a friend, who's willing to join
you and fight alongside you for the rest of your quest.
These characters all have different moves, like the ability to jump higher,
or to even turn into a bat.
The bat's great, as it lets you access all of these new areas and is basically a cheap
way of getting round some of the tougher sections, just so long as you have enough magic power
to use it.
These different abilities really give you the chance to explore every nook and cranny
of a level, and can be used to access shortcuts that skip out sections.
If you see a little skeleton, lying in a heap on the floor, then whichever way he's pointing,
is the fastest route to the boss.
But, you may not have the moves to go this way, or you may want to take the long route,
in the hope of finding a secret item.
Either way, it does a great job of really fleshing a level out, making it feel much
deeper and making you want to go back and explore it a second, third, or even fourth
time to see what you may have missed.
Each character also comes with there own health bar, so if one is low, you have to switch
around, because if that one dies, then you go back to the nearest checkpoint and have
to try again, only this time without that character, at least until the end of the level.
This means a few things.
One- when someone dies, suddenly you won't have access to a bunch of the shortcuts or
secrets for the rest of the level.
Two- you've now got one less health bar to switch to, and so things are going to be harder.
And three- if you relied on a certain character's moves to get past a certain section, then
you're going to have to figure out some other way, or some other tactic, using whichever
characters you have left.
It almost feels like a Mega Man game, with you having to play around and find out what
moves work best at a particular time, but also find a plan B in case you can't use plan
A for whatever reason.
So say you've figured out a way to safely beat a boss, using one or two different characters,
then what if one of those characters dies?
You need to find a new tactic, using one of the others.
This means that you maybe switching between the characters a lot, really adding variety
to gameplay.
Each come with their own secondary moves to collect as well as their own strengths and
weaknesses.
The alchemist, for example, while low in health does have some powerful magic moves to take
out even the toughest bad guys.
And the lady, despite having the highest jump, I find sometimes is the hardest to use on
the platforming sections- it's almost as if she jumps too high, so it's harder to control.
In fact the jumping in general is another one of my criticisms.
In say, Super Mario, you can adjust your jump at any time, even after you've left the ground,
which gives you this feeling of always being in control.
But here, there's no adjusting your jump mid-air, so once you jump, you may as well let go of
your controller, because you no longer can do anything to change where your going to
land.
Now, I appreciate that this mechanic is faithful to a lot of NES classics, but still, it's
a criticism of THEM and a criticism of this game.
Shovel Knight is another retro style, modern platformer that also has a very clever mechanic
of letting you set your own difficulty as you play, by having the destructible checkpoint
system.
And Curse Of The Moon has something kind of similar.
So remember I said that on beating the early bosses, you free new allies to recruit and
help you out?
Well, instead of taking their help you can take their lives, which grants you a new ability.
Or, you can just ignore them altogether and go at it alone.
But the consequences of doing this to all three friends means that you'll only have
one health bar, you won't be able to take all the shortcuts, that only your friends
can reach.
Basically, it raises the game's difficulty.
You do get to chose when you first start playing whether you want to do it in veteran or casual
mode- casual mode has infinite lives and you don't get knocked back when you're hit, which
always makes a big difference.
But other than this choice, you pick your difficulty by deciding what to do with your
allies.
Plus this eventually decides which ending you're going to get.
And on completing it a first time, a new mode is unlocked, which goes through the levels
again, only harder and you need to do this if you want to see the ultimate ending.
Basically, there's a lot of replayability here.
But the most exciting thing about this game, is that this is just a bonus!
In the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, if $4,500,000 was achieved,
then we'd get a retro style spin off game.
So if the spin off has turned out this great, then hopes must be pretty high for the main
game.
Thanks for watching.
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