[Played on a RetroArch emulator.]

If you play Rondo of Blood, sometime around the second stage, you may suddenly become very, very aware of this game’s rules.

I’m not talking about stuff like “whip the bad guys” and “don’t die”, or even “you start off with 3 lives and get an extra life every 40,000 points.” I mean the actual rules of this video game. Richter’s jump is X pixels high and can travel a select few amounts of pixels of horizontal distance depending on your input, and is of course irreversible once you have begun your jump. Richter’s whip is Y pixels long, can hurt enemies for precisely Z frames, and has a startup and end lag that you must account for at all times. If Richter jumps from a standstill, you can execute a sick-ass backflip by pressing the jump button again within a very tight window. And so on.

If this makes it sound like a fighting game, it kind of is. But not quite: this game is not interested in having its rules be enforced by some candy-ass human being against you. Rondo of Blood has an overwhelming vision of what its designers think a video game should be: A crystal-clear set of rules ruthlessly and automatically enforced by a perfect machine. (Don’t tell anyone I said this, but it sort of makes sense that Konami would eventually get into pachinko.) The ultimate idea animating this game, like Dracula’s own necromancy, is the video game as bloodless bureaucrat.

Except that it’s good.

It all starts with the controls. Each possible action is purposely chunky and perfectly formed, a Tetris block of kinetic energy that you combine with others to form shapes on demand. You shall know the jump, and you shall know the whip: both designed to be small and easy to pick up at a glance. Mana-consuming subweapons fill hyperspecific yet immediately obvious niches – all the better to start testing your proficiency with them pretty much immediately.

And your proficiency will be tested. Rondo of Blood’s levels and enemies feel like they were constructed by hand with a ruler and a compass, and while they are certainly challenging, there is typically enough wiggle room to separate them from the Kaizo realm, especially if you have to rely on being crafty instead of having fighting game-caliber execution and reads. (The moment I discovered I could use the axe to set up enemies who automatically dashed back from the whip was extremely satisfying.) Only in a few sequences in the latter half of the game do you start to see the long hallways filled with multiple copies of tanky enemies that would later cripple Symphony of the Night, and while it’s about as unwelcome here as it is there, at least there’s much less of it.

Even the art is both stellar and purpose-built. Almost everything, visually, is both top-flight eye candy and easily comprehensible at a single glance: hitboxes of attacks and enemies, platforms, and other level elements are exactly as large as they appear to be and exist precisely where they appear to exist. Only rarely will you be caught off guard, for better or worse, by a wonky hitbox. (And some of those rare occasions will be purposeful! A few little Joker’s tricks from the folks at Konami.) Visuals custom-built to serve the vision: a perfect machine.

And obviously the music fucks too. It’s available on Spotify, and it’s a big part of why this game feels like a metal-heavy challenge and not a huge pain in the ass.

More than any other video game I have ever played, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood knows precisely what it is about. From beginning to end, it is always about what it is about, and it is never not about what it is about. Its creators whipped it into form from a few simple rules, ruthlessly enforced, and gave it a coat of paint that highlights every perfect cut and flawless corner. It is there, lattice-like, laid out in front of you – gleamingly visible, supremely confident. Even if you are not a capital-G Gamer (and goodness knows I’m not,) this trip to Drac’s castle has so much to show you.