Pretty good remix of a lot of ideas from earlier Castlevanias: the character switching, the branching paths, the NES style of the original. OK levels, but some of the characters trivialize certain segments: The Alucard rip off’s special ability lets you fly over any obstacles, the wizard lets you make yourself invincible to enemies etc. There’s some weirdness to the difficulty. It never feels quite right, always either trivial or annoyingly hard. The normal difficulty settings give you 3 continues and enable knockback when you get hit; the casual difficulty gives infinite continues, while disabling knockback. I would have liked more specific settings, or a third option of infinite continues and knockback.

I don’t love the bosses. They aren’t all very fun to learn, and their design really sticks out. They have a more detailed, anime quality to them which I don’t mind on it’s own, but they’re jarring against the more NES looking characters, enemies, and backgrounds.

It gave me with enough good feelings to check out the sequel; hopefully there are a few improvements. There’s some fun to be had here, but you’d have more fun playing Castlevania: Bloodlines.

Really solid Souls-like--in fact, probably my favorite of these not made by FromSoftware. Its strength is its level design and enemy placement--the world is essentially four or five Dark Souls style levels where you unlock shortcuts from a single "bonfire," but they're all somewhat large. You rarely feel the danger of "am I going to find the next shortcut/bonfire" that Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne is really good at evoking; each piece along the way is manageable, and you can challenge yourself not to reset the level as you unlock the shortcut paths. Finding out how the levels fit together (and the various ways you can travel between the different levels) is always satisfying. There is some light Metroid elements as well--you unlock abilities as the game goes on that you can use to unlock more of the level. Besides the required segments of this stuff, going back to explore wasn't always rewarding: some techno-souls points, maybe a weapon or two, or an audio log. I blazed through the main quest without paying too much attention to the side stuff.

The health system sets it apart from other Souls-likes. You choose when to refill your own "flask" by burning "energy" which is a kind of mana bar that refills as you land hits on enemies, which means you can comfortably enter an encounter with zero flasks and come out of it with your flask charges topped off, so long as you're aggressive.

I played this game heavily relying on the directional parries, as opposed to dodging. The parry system can almost be spammed on certain enemy types, but it feels good to feel out the exact timing. The bosses are all pretty easy, especially when using parries, but they're all a lot of fun to fight. I ended up using a codename staff weapon and an angel set build, which essentially increases attack speed, energy gain, and stagger damage when using a "codename" weapon (weapons that begin with the word "codename"). There's some lore reason for that, but I didn't care about the story or world here whatsoever. It's all cool looking enough and can be very goofy. I'm not completely sure if I'm going to do the NG+ yet--if I do, it will purely be for the mechanical pleasure of it since I was never grabbed by the world or story. I'm more inclined to check out the first one.