I enjoyed this game a lot!
I never played any modern Castlevania game, I only know the NES games. So this was sort of the first modern Castlevania game I played haha!

In the game, you play as Miriam, a Shardbinder who has the ability to absorb the power of demons. You goal is reach the top of a mysterious castle from which hords of demons are being summoned and stop the one responsible for this. In order to do so, you will have to explore and unlock powers allowing you to progress to places you coudn't go before. All in all, it's a Castlevania game!

The first thing that stroke me when I started playing is the music. It is very catchy and energetic, pushing you to move forward, while also being extremely fitting for the area it plays in! And this not for only the start of the game, the whole adventure is filled with bangers haha!

Bloodstained is a very simple game to take in hand: you can run, jump and attack. The character is pretty agile too, so it feels great to control!
If these options feel a bit limited, do not worry because there are a ton of different weapons, each with their paterns and secret abilities. You can spend the game trying out new weapons and it is awesome!
Your character can also use abilities. You get these abilities randomely during the game by killing enemies. Every enemy can give you one ability. Most of the time it's an ability this monster uses, but you can also sometimes obtain the power to summon the same enemy to fight by your side. There are as many abilities as there are monsters in the game, meaning there are A LOT of abilities haha! It follows the same principle as the weapons, you will be testing new abilities very often.

But this is also where lies a weakness of this title: menus. Everytime you get something new, you will have to go in the menu to equip it. Weapons are not equiped in the same menu as the abilities, abilities have multiple sub-menus depending on their type... there are menus and sub-menus everywhere and it gets a bit tiring to change your loadout.
The game knows about this issue, because it offers a shortcut feature, allowing you to create presets and change your loadout without opening the menu. But, because you are always getting something new to test out, it solves nothing. It only transfers the problem from the Equipement and Ability menus to the Shortcuts menu.

The story was interesting, I had fun uncovering the mysteries behind the birth of the Shardbinders. I was also very happy each time the game said to me "You though it was over did't you? Well it actually isn't!" :')
I must mention there are some really nice staging throughout the game, both in the gameplay and in the cutscenes! There are some neat ideas using the 3D camera in a 2D gameplay!

Difficulty is nicely balanced I felt! I always found save rooms right at the moment I was starting to get very low on health, and had no more healing item left haha!
Some bosses can maybe feel a bit brutal at first, but except for 1 or 2, I beat them all under 2 or 3 tries. And if you really struggle on a particular boss, the game lets you craft food that can heal you and give you permanent passive boosts on your stats. The more you cook, the easier the game gets!

However, the difficulties of exploration and advice on where to go or what to do next are not really well handled... I had to open a guide multiple times because I was stucked, and most of the time it was because of something very dumb... (e.g. I had to speak to a NPC twice in a row for him to spontaneously find an item in my inventory and converting it into a key, even though he had never talked about before)

I played the game on the Switch and I got to say, they used pretty cleverly the HD Vibrations feature of the controller. Everything you do in the game (jumping, moving in a menu...) gives you a very light vibration feedback and it feels great! I love how you can feel the character's heartbeat in your hands when she is low on health, it is such a nice touch!

But the Switch port has also a downside: it runs pretty poorly. The game never has a stable fps, there are constant drops everywhere. Plus, if you play on portable mode, the resolution can drop very low. Fortunately, those problems are the most present in the hub area, where you don't have to be has precise and reactive as in the rest of the game, and I got used to the unstable FPS after some time spent on the game. Just remember to save as often as you can because the game crashed once for me.

I felt this game was made with a lot of love and care, even if it is a bit rough at times. For me, the quality of the gameplay and presentation overcomes its performance issues.
Also, when you finish the game you unlock a ton of bonuses! You can replay the game with 2 new characters (without story tho), in new difficulty settings, try the time attack mode or even the classic mode (a game mode that plays like the NES Castlevania).

With all of that, I think it's time to wrap up this review. To sum up, it's a great game! It has some issues but in my sense its qualities largely compensate for that and I had a really good time on it!