Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2

I stopped thinking of the switch button as a menu about twenty minutes into my first run. Cycling your party mid-stage here is not a convenience feature, it is the actual puzzle. A ledge that looks impossible for Zangetsu's stubby sword reach is trivial for Dominique's spear. A spike pit that eats lives turns into a hallway once Hachi hovers across it in his little mech suit. You are not picking a favorite and sticking with them, you are reading each screen and asking which of the four bodies you brought through the door solves it with the least damage taken. That one loop is what separates this from a straight nostalgia exercise, and it is why I kept playing after the novelty of the pixel art wore off. The roster earns that structure. Zangetsu hits hardest and has the worst reach in the game, so he lives and dies on spacing. Dominique pokes from a safe distance and can heal, which quietly makes her the most valuable body to keep breathing through a long stage. Robert fires at angles and drops prone to crawl under obstacles, turning a few encounters into a patient shooting gallery. Hachi, a corgi piloting a suit of armor, floats and shrugs off contact damage during his spin attack, which is exactly as ridiculous and as useful as it sounds. Everyone carries sub-weapons that drain a limited point gauge, so holding a heavy attack in reserve for a boss's second phase becomes its own small economy. The boss fights are pure NES pattern recognition, telegraphed and fair once you have eaten the moveset twice. Structurally this is stage-based and linear, much closer to old-school Castlevania than to the sprawling map of Ritual of the Night, and a single run takes roughly a couple of hours. That run is not the whole game, though. Episodes chain together, faces from the first Curse of the Moon show up in the later ones with their own movement quirks, and your route choices plus who you recruit or abandon steer you toward different endings. Veteran mode restores knockback and limited lives for people who want their retro pain unfiltered, while Casual removes both and lets almost anyone reach the credits. Two players can split the party on one screen, and Remote Play Together covers you if your co-op partner is not on your couch. The chiptune soundtrack is genuinely good, not 8-bit worn as a costume. Where it wobbles is repetition. Seeing everything means replaying a lot of the same ground with a shifted cast, and by the third pass through familiar corridors the swap system is doing heavy lifting that the level design does not always support. Later episodes lean on difficulty spikes and boss patterns that reward memorization over improvisation, and when you bounce off one specific fight there is no build to grind or gear to farm, only your own reflexes and a willingness to restart. Co-op adds friction as well, because both players draw from the same small party, so a partner who throws away characters costs you the run rather than just their own progress. And if you arrived expecting the metroidvania Bloodstained, this is a different animal entirely and never pretends otherwise. Play it if you want a sharp action platformer you can finish in an evening and then take apart on the next pass. Skip it if replaying stages for alternate endings reads as homework instead of a hook. Inti Creates knows precisely what it is building, and the switching mechanic is good enough that I was still restarting long after the credits rolled.

Alex · Scout Team

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