Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

Patience first, payoff later: that is the bargain this kind of Castlevania makes, and after enough hours in enough cursed castles I have stopped pretending otherwise. Belmont's Curse is going to ask for time before it gives you anything back. You will map corridors you cannot open, stare at ledges just out of reach, and lose to a boss twice before the third attempt turns into a clean read of its tells. Action-exploration design lives or dies on that stretch, the awkward middle where you have the map but not the tools. If a locked door in hour two reads as busywork rather than a promise, this genre is a bad fit and this will not be the game that converts you. The setup: Konami places it 23 years after Dracula's Curse, and the lead is Rose Belmont rather than another slab-jawed heir standing in Trevor's shadow. That gap matters for anyone who tracks this family tree, because 23 years is exactly long enough for a generation to inherit a war it did not start, which is the most interesting thing a Belmont story can be about. The build is a co-production: Konami working with Evil Empire and Motion Twin, the people responsible for Dead Cells and its Castlevania crossover. I care less about the logo on the box than about what that team is demonstrably good at, which is hit-stop, invincibility frames, and a moveset that feels correct in your hands inside ten minutes. Those studios do not ship floaty combat, and this is a series where floaty combat is fatal. Konami filing this under Action and RPG rather than pure action is the detail I keep circling. In a 2D Castlevania, RPG usually means stat growth, gear you swap between rooms, and subweapon or spell loadouts that let two players clear the same castle in completely different ways. That is the good version. It is also the axis where these games earn their replays, because build variety is the only thing that makes hour 40 feel different from hour 12. If Rose has genuine branching in how she is built, if a heavy holy-damage setup plays nothing like a fast crit-and-dodge one, the map becomes a playground instead of a checklist. Sign me up for that. It is single-player only, so whatever depth exists has to hold on its own, with no co-op partner to carry a sloppy run. Here is where I hold back the applause. That same RPG label is how a lot of otherwise sharp action games smuggle in padding: enemy respawn loops, currency gates, a merchant who wants a number you do not have yet, and suddenly you are farming one corridor instead of exploring a castle. Grinding is not difficulty. It is the absence of design, and I will not grade it on a curve. The other open question is narrative weight. Castlevania writing has ranged from gloriously overwrought to merely functional, and a new protagonist inheriting a decades-old curse only pays off if the script gives her something to want beyond killing the obvious. Konami has the lore shelf. Whether anyone was allowed to write it with teeth is a different question, and October is when we find out. So: if you want gothic architecture, tight pattern-reading combat, and a map that slowly unfolds into a shape you can hold in your head, this is aimed squarely at you, and the development pedigree is the strongest reason for optimism this series has had in a long while. Play it on a gamepad, which is the obvious right call for a game built around precise spacing. Come in expecting an exploration game with RPG texture rather than a numbers-heavy RPG holding a whip, and set aside a couple of weekends. Curses take a while to unpick.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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