Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is Koji Igarashi doing the thing he's best at without anyone from Konami telling him to stop. You play Miriam, cursed to slowly crystallize into a demon, exploring a demon-infested castle that owes its entire skeleton to Symphony of the Night and doesn't pretend otherwise. If you grew up on that game, this one hands you back nearly everything you wanted.

The sheer amount of stuff is the draw. Weapons and shards stolen from demons pile up fast, backed by summonable familiars and a full crafting and cooking system. All of it stacks on top of an exploration loop that helped invent the genre in the first place. IGN called it worth the wait, and I get why. Boss fights land hardest once you've learned their patterns, and there's a rhythm to alternating between careful exploration and full-on combat that the good metroidvanias always nail.

Igarashi's blind spots are the parts he didn't bother updating. There's no attack that hits straight up or straight down, a basic move plenty of games in this genre figured out decades ago. Enemy variety doesn't match the depth of your own toolkit, so you end up with dozens of weapon options and only a handful of fights that ask you to use them. Normal difficulty barely pushes back if you've played a metroidvania before. PC Gamer put it bluntly: it's the definition of been-there-done-that if you know the genre at all.

Play it on Switch and you'll notice more. That port launched dimmer and lower-resolution, capped at 30fps with drops the developers spent months patching after release. The Switch problems don't touch the PC or PlayStation versions, but if the Switch is your only option, know what you're buying into.

Play it. This is comfort food for anyone who's missed Castlevania, made by the person who made the one you're missing. Don't expect it to reinvent anything, and grab it on PC if you have the choice.