Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

My first hour with Curse of the Moon felt like finding an old cartridge I'd somehow never played as a kid. That's the core trick Inti Creates pulls off here: an 8-bit linear action-platformer that doesn't just wear the aesthetic as a costume but actually commits to the tempo, the committed jump arcs, the knock-back physics, and the stage-by-stage structure that defined early Castlevania. Built as a stretch-goal companion to the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Kickstarter campaign, this is the kind of side project that outpunches its brief. You start as Zangetsu, a cursed swordsman armed with the Zangetsuto blade, and the basic loop is instantly readable: move right, dodge gothic horrors, spend weapon points on sub-weapons like the ball-and-chain or demon essence, fight a boss, repeat across eight stages. What breaks the formula open is the ally system. Scattered through the stages are three recruitable characters: Miriam, a whip-wielding Shardbinder who can slide through tight gaps and hit farther than Zangetsu; Alfred, an alchemist with ranged tools; and Gebel, a fellow Shardbinder. You can recruit them, ignore them, or outright kill them and absorb their powers instead. Killing Miriam gives Zangetsu a Crescent Moon jump-attack; killing Alfred unlocks a double-jump; killing Gebel adds a dash sprint. Recruit all three and you get branching stage routes locked behind each character's abilities. Kill them all and you get a stronger solo Zangetsu and an entirely different ending. Six endings in total, gated by those moral-ish choices, give the whole thing genuine replay teeth. The difficulty settings are one of the smarter design calls in the genre. Veteran mode restores the punishing NES-style knockback and a limited lives counter. Casual strips both out and adds infinite retries, making the game genuinely accessible without gutting the atmosphere. Finishing the game unlocks Nightmare mode, which recasts the three companions as the playable heroes going after a corrupted Zangetsu as the final enemy. Past that sits Ultimate mode and a Boss Rush, both requiring specific endings to unlock. For a game where a first playthrough clocks in around an hour, that's a lot of structured content stacked inside a tight package. The criticisms are fair but mild. Enemy placement is sometimes predictable, and a handful of level segments tip from challenging into cheap, particularly one late-game section that relies on fast-moving, hard-to-read attacks. The game's brevity means it never quite builds to the complexity it gestures at, and anyone looking for the sprawling map of a traditional Metroidvania will be disappointed. This is a linear corridor run, deliberately so. The chiptune soundtrack is atmospheric and memorable without being the all-timer the Castlevania NES library is, which is a high bar to clear. It lands somewhere just below it. For retro-platformer fans or anyone who bounced off later Castlevania games and wants the pure 8-bit version of that fantasy, Curse of the Moon earns its place without apology. It's a slim game that knows exactly what it is, plays it confidently, and delivers more structural variety than it has any right to at its runtime.

Alex · Scout Team

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