Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

The Castlevania gameplay with a original history and environment. For me is impossible not recommend to other players. o/

Short action platform much like the NES Castlevania games. A lot of fun to just run through, with multiple endings and ways to play.

Eski Castlevania oyunlarını anımsatan, retro hissettiren kısa bir oyun. Retro oyun sevenlere tavsiye ediyorum.

I'm having 2 Slices of the Moon.

jogaço , recomendo

Jogaço demais, principalmente pra quem gosta dos Castlevanias antigos, metroidvania ou simplesmente tem paixão em ficar calvo em 2 dias de raiva pela dificuldade. Gameplay maravilhosa, estilo 8 bits, vários finais e chefes bem caracteristicos, recomendo!

This is just Castlevania 3 without the constant & relentless hostility towards the player that CV3 likes lol. First of all it looks and sounds staggeringly close to a real 8-bit game. It has some minimal modern visual touches and it runs expectedly smooth compared to NESvanias and their sprite flickering and occasional slowdown, but other than those I think you could go back 40 years in the past and give this game to someone from back then and they wouldn't even notice anything strange. On top of that it has a "casual" mode where there's infinite continues and no knockbacks for being hit for people that want something more modern and then there's "veteran" mode where the game has the same structure as Classicvanias (lives exist, score can get extra lives, there's life pickups in the stages, enemy knockback is in full force). I adore the use of colors, the stage designs, the monster and especially boss designs, the music and sound effects, everything about the game's presentation is flawless, and it's topped off with such a good ending screen for those that adore Classicvanias. It's an homage done flawlessly through and through. Second of all the movement and general feeling of controling the characters is smooth, requires moderate precision and, again, is literally just classic Castlevania, with maybe a touch of polish/speed I noticed - it doesn't feel quite as sluggishly methodical as CV1/CV3. Boss and enemy design is very fun and filled with some more modern sensibilities than you'd find sometimes in those old 8-bit Castlevanias. Bosses are on average better telegraphed, there's no DPS racing to kill them before unavoidable damage kills you (which tended to happen with the old games a bit), enemies are also well telegraphed but the player also has much more tools to deal with different situations, so everything feels very nice and clear. It's all about execution, no guesswork and trial and error required more or less. Stage design can be a miss sometimes, but it's never really bad (worst I can say about a stage in this game is that it's mildly annoying and averagely interesting). Alongside stage design the game has branching world design which all converges into the same goals/ends, so there's a lot of forks in stages where utilizing the correct character and managing resources accordingly will get you shortcuts through the stages. There's some nice signs/pointers of where to try and locate shortcuts, while others are left to the player to discover. And finally the length of the game is quite short, which makes sense since all 8-bit games were short, the only problem being they were artificially difficulty at points to prolong gameplay. I'd say this is very much a "short and sweet" type of deal, but there's also unlockable extra difficulties (which I will get to playing when I get the itch to replay the game) which can boost replay value and give the game some of that Classicvania brutality back. I have to praise the final boss checkpoint as well - it's a very modern and momentum-keeping checkpoint with a free extra life every time a life is lost, meaning that once you're there it's only that final duel that's left. Castlevania 1 had a similar checkpoint (although lives did nothing on it since it had infinite continues and the only checkpoint was Dracula himself there), while Castlevania 3 was brutal with it requiring a replay of the whole final level if lives were lost on the 3-phase Dracula showdown. All in all it's a pretty flawless game imho, but not in the sense that it's the best game ever, rather in the sense that it just doesn't have any visible flaws - it's presented great, it controls nicely, it has good system design and it's very focused on what it wants to achieve with some added replayability with the stage-forks and unlockable difficulties. It's a very good modern take on a classic Castlevania game and it's a joy to play, but it also focuses so much on being like Classicvania that it doesn't really do anything too special (yeah the character switching system is different and more robust than CV3's, but it's still the same idea at the end of the day). It's really just a love letter to Classicvania, and I'm glad Iga did a classic title instead of a metroidvania, because that signature gameplay style that the older ones have isn't something we see often, but metroidvanias are literally everywhere atp.

a amazing classicvania styled game with a great style and fun combat 10/10

Um jogo muito bom! Traz a formula de Castlevania antigo e é muito bem feito, gosto muito como o jogo não tem medo de te deixar extremamente forte, tem itens e coisas que você pode fazer que são bem roubados e o jogo foi feito com tudo isso em mente mesmo, muito bom!

A pretty competent go at a Classicvania style game, but it's got a few things that bug me enough to not like nearly as much as most of its inspirations. It's got a great artstyle and spritework and a solid soundtrack, though definitely isn't beating 1, 3, or Rondo of Blood's any day. One issue I have with the game is its lessened difficulty, though there's always a chicken or the egg question to tackle here. Is the game actually easier or am I just really used to what Classicvania demands from me? I've pondered this a bit and I feel confident that it's both. Now, I think people tend to just say "Castlevania is difficult" and end the discussion there without actually analyzing what that difficulty is trying to get out of you. Something I love so much about the first Castlevania is that it offers these tough levels, but none of them overstay their welcome and they're decently generous on checkpoints. Even when you're sent back to the beginning of a stage because of a game over, it doesn't take that long to get back to the farthest point you got. Short and sweet, that's how you do it and what this means is you end up getting really good at each screen of a level. You learn the ins and out of the enemy behavior and exploit it to minimize your damage and deaths and finally finish the level. I don't like that CotM gives the option to outright remove lives because I think that removes a significant part of what makes Classicvania game design engaging. That being said, you're likely to not see the Game Over screen much if at all for a variety of reasons, so this could be a moot point. The overall level design I think is consistently decent, though I think the first few stages are a little too easy, I easily cleared Stages 1-4 with next to no deaths and as a result I don't really remember them all that well. Stage 5 is where the game starts baring its fangs a bit more and overall for the better, Stage 7 probably being my favorite for how it utilizes its enemies alongside a conveyor belt gimmick. For what it's worth, I don't think there's any outright bad level and the only low points I'd say are the latter half of Stage 5 whose rain gimmick gets pretty annoying especially during the boss fight and the latter half of Stage 8 which I think gets a bit overzealous on do or die moments with stingy checkpoints. You get sent back a number of screens, and again with the aforementioned abundance of do or die moments in Stage 8. It honestly began to remind me of the lategame of Super Castlevania 4 and for context I think that game completely ♥♥♥♥♥ the bed by its last few stages. I know this might seem contradictory to my critique on the game's relative lack of difficulty, but I think my issue with Stage 8 could've been alleviated with just one more checkpoint afforded in the last section before the boss. You don't want the distinction between lives and continues to be meaningless. My biggest issue, albeit not a damning one, is the game's partner system. Specifically, I don't like that each character has their own health bar and that their death leaves them absent until either the end of the stage or everyone else kicks the bucket. It's funny, this is actually something I had in the back of my mind when playing Castlevania 3 for that game's partner system, but seeing it in action here has completely soured me to the idea. Be careful for what you wish for, I guess. Anyway, what I appreciate more about how 3 handled its partner system in hindsight was that the partners were treated more as a utility, though you could play a whole stage with them if so wanted. If I ever encountered a section that seemed too difficult for the given partner, then I at least knew I could rely on Trevor and swap to him. I even went out of my way to learn certain screens and bosses with Trevor instead of cheesing them so that I had a backup for when I played the game again and didn't have a specific partner. With Curse of the Moon, that just doesn't apply and it also doesn't help that Miriam easily feels the best to play as. Losing her always stung. This game feels like it was designed around her more than anyone else, fitting I suppose. That's not to say I didn't enjoy playing as the other characters, and one could argue this set up encourages getting good with everyone and fair enough, but doing some sections just felt awful when left with a specific character. Getting left with just Alfred for some of these bosses is just a miserable experience once you run out of weapon ammo, especially in Nightmare mode. I earnestly wish everyone just shared a health bar and you lost a life when it emptied like in 3. I ended up enjoying my Solo Zangetsu run, where you kill all the allies, the most for this reason. The boss design was very reminiscent of Rondo of Blood, having very clear patterns, rarely being erratic, and also not overstaying their welcome, aside from the second phase of Gremory due to how you aren't given many opportunities to attack her. I didn't mind having to play the game again for the true ending, it's effectively incorporating the harder second run a lot of Classicvania's had into a more fleshed out mode, though I didn't notice much of a difficulty increase in the stages aside from bosses being a bit tougher. I do think it's neat that each level offers different pathways which helps keep the stages decently fresh for revisits. I actually played the game three times and not once did I get exhausted, even when irked at some moments. That being said, the true ending caught me by surprise, I earnestly thought there were still two phases left to go for the true final boss, each focusing on Alfred and Gebel, but that just never happened, it rather anticlimactically ended with you only playing as Miriam. Though given my prior grievances, maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Hmm... Curse of the Moon is a decent game that I think is worth checking out if you're into Classicvania. If you're just starting out, I honestly think you should start with Castlevania 1, getting punched in the ♥♥♥♥ and learning from each death is kind of the point.