This is going to be a sub-series of the From the Steam Vault series that I started a couple weeks ago, dedicated only to the Metroidvania games in my steam library, of which there are twenty-four. The long nights this time of year are perfect for this type of game. You should play one and see for yourself.

For a series called From the Long Library, there can be no better place than to start with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, because it is a game by Koji Igarashi, who used to work for Konami and headed Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, maybe the best PS1 game ever. Ritual of the Night was a personal project by Koji, one that he crowdfunded and developed himself. It was released in 2019. I bought it a few years ago but had never played it before trying it out for this mini-review.

Before I get into it though, a word about the format of these reviews.

I am going to try and keep these Metroidvania mini-reviews a little more uniform than I usually write. So to that end I came up with the a template to use. It will focus on four key areas that I think are the most important to this type of game: gameplay and controls; atmosphere (graphics, art, mood, etc.); story (characters, events, writing, etc.); and intangibles. This way, hopefully, they will be a little more useful to the reader and will also be easier to compare and contrast between the various titles.

So, without further ado…

Story

Probably best to start with the story on all these games, so you know what they are about.

Bloodstained is reminiscent of Castlevania games of old in that it takes place in the past, this time the 19^th Century. It is a world where alchemy is real and part of the fabric of everyday life.

Or, at least, was. That’s where the conflict of the game begins. The alchemy guild, fearing its fading power in the face of technological advancement, summoned a bunch of demons about ten years prior to the opening of the game. They did this so that they could harness the demon’s powers using human vessels called Shardbinders who can trap demon essences in crystals and then absorb them, thereby gaining their power.

Things, of course, went terribly wrong, and the alchemy guild was destroyed, along with all of the Shardbinders, save two, a young woman and a young man. The woman fell into a mysterious coma before the ritual could take place.

Ten years have passed. A new hoard of demons has arrived and are flowing out of an otherworldly castle. The young woman, Miriam, wakes up. It is up to her to attack the castle and stop the demons from rampaging all over England. She has help from one of the remaining alchemists, Johannes, an agent of the Church (of course) named Dominique, and a ronin samurai named Zangetsu who is more like an antagonist (he hates demons so much that his hatred extends to shardbinders).

The reason I’m going into so much detail is that alchemy and shardbinding play a central role in every aspect of the game. You have to sort of understand it for me to talk about the other three aspects.

Or, at least, have an appreciation for it. I’m not sure, even having played it for just under five hours, how much I understand it. But more on that latter.

But from a story telling perspective, what happens is basically your alchemist friend Johannes sets up a laboratory in a ruined village on the outskirts of the castle, and the Church agent Dominique opens up a little store for you to buy things right next door.

You, as Miriam, venture out into the castle to fight bad guys and chase down the other remaining Shardbinder, named Gebel, who we learn is the one who summoned the demons again, using a book called the Liber Logaith. Another surviving alchemist, a one-time mentor of Miriam’s named Alfred, is also trying to get his hands on the Liber Logaith, although for inscrutable reasons of his own.

Frankly, the story is a little convoluted, but that doesn’t get in the way of the enjoyment. Really, the story unfolds mostly in a series of conversations you have with Johannes or Dominique, whenever you return to your home base, which you do quite often to restock supplies and engage in some alchemy to upgrade equipment or shards you have collected. These conversations are pretty detailed and really help explain what is going on. It’s nice that they are back at home base because you can really focus on them and therefore the story doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay.

You also get some of the story from reading notes left on various bookstands scattered throughout the rooms. It’s an epistolary way of telling a story that is a convention of all Metroidvania games.

The voice acting is very good. All of the story, except for the notes on the bookstands, are voice acted completely. It’s pretty impressive.

The characters are created well. I think it’s cool that you have a samurai running around in 19^th century England. Gebel is pretty much still a mystery, so is Alfred, but Johannes and Dominique are both believable characters and well thought out.

Miriam is interesting. I like her as a character in her own right, but I can’t help but think that she is a little too modern for the time period. For one, she’s covered in tattoos. She looks like someone you would find in a bar in Denver, Colorado, in the modern day. That doesn’t make her unlikable, and she isn’t, but it is a strange look from a woman who was basically supposed to be from Victorian England. Only the very fringes of society back then would look like her, but I don’t get the impression that’s what they were going for.

She is attractive though. I don’t mind the tattoos, it’s just a little bit of an off note when it comes to the character design.

Anyway, sign of the times maybe.

All in all, I like the story. I am a little bit concerned about how all this will end, but hopefully it’s satisfying.

And when I say convoluted, that also might just be a convention of the genre. Most of these Metroidvanias are baroque in their presentation, even the name is, and maybe that’s deliberate.

Gameplay and Controls

Classic Castlevania. It’s a side-scrolling platformer where you attack you enemies with various weapons and magic. If you’ve played one, you’ve played them all.

You have the normal melee weapons, but in this game your ranged attacks are actually firearms, which is pretty cool.

Your magic comes from the shards you bind, and they can be anything from summoning a demon to fight alongside you, to shooting jets of water from your hands.

Really, the reason I made this an area of the template, is because the devil is in the details. All of these Metroidvanias are very similar in their gameplay, or else they wouldn’t be Metroidvanias. It’s the little details that separate them and that give each game their unique identity. That’s what I want to talk about.

Here, what’s cool about this game is that the various weapons you have, such as daggers and battle axes, behave completely differently from each other. You might not even be able to fight certain enemies with certain weapons because of the way a weapon behaves. So the battle axe, for example, is powerful but unwieldy and slow, especially when you try a jump attack. So if you’re trying to use one against a flying enemy, you might not even be able to hit it. Conversely, if you’re fighting creatures that are slimy things crawling on the ground, the battle axe with its arced descending attack angle is the perfect weapon, better than a sword even. And if you are trying to fight a fast moving enemy like a demon dog, you’re not going to even be able to get the axe up before the dog is on top of you, you literally can’t fight it with that weapon if it’s on top of you-you need to pause to equip the speedy sword so you can button mash attack the thing away.

And you have to use magic sometimes. The game doesn’t let you get away with only using weapons, just like it doesn’t let you get away with only using one type of weapon. Especially with the bosses, you have to be adept at using your spells to fight. Which means you have to practice out in the castle rooms.

I actually really liked this aspect of the game. It does get a little confusing though, because you do have a ton of different weapons to choose from and a ton of different shards to keep track of.

What’s more, is that you need to perform alchemy, or have Johannes do it for you, on these weapons and shards in order to upgrade them. You can’t avoid this. But it is frankly pretty in depth and intimidating. After four and half hours, I feel like I’m just beginning to understand how it all works. The way I got this far was just by upgrading the fireball and water jet shards as much as possible, but I don’t think that’s going to work the whole way through.

I really appreciate how complete and well developed this alchemy aspect of the magic system and equipment system is. Not only does it deepen the gameplay mechanics, but it also reinforces the world-building of the story. This is a world where alchemy actually exists and it’s believable when you see how they do it. I’m just saying there is a pretty steep learning curve. Maybe that’s the price you pay for verisimilitude.

I’m sure I’ll wrap my head around it eventually.

There are genre conventions at work here. You have to have some sort of teleportation mechanism to get around the castle. Here, they are portal rooms where you jump into a stained-glass portrait of a pied-piper. Rather jauntily, I might add. Really like that expression of the convention. You can tell they were having fun with it. There was the aforementioned epistolary diary entries which among other things, teach you new techniques that work sort of like fighting game combos. So, for example, once you’ve found the requisite journal entry, you can perform a motion sort of like throwing a fireball in Street Fighter II and you will do a special attack. This only works with some kinds of weapons. There are a lot of special attacks to learn through these journal entries.

You also have save rooms, which you need to make liberal use of. Another genre convention.

Atmosphere

Definitely more Castlevania than Metroid.

It’s a period drama. The Industrial Revolution setting gives it an air of excitement and energy. And possibility. It’s far enough in the past for the magical aspects to work.

Like a lot of Castlevania titles, there’s something aristocratic about the atmosphere. Probably has to do with the fact that you are in a castle the whole time.

Even though it’s the 19^th Century, it has that baroque quality to it mentioned above. This comes through most obviously with the soundtrack, which, like Symphony of the Night, occasionally features that most baroque of instruments, the harpsichord.

It’s creepy as Metroidvania’s are supposed to be. You have the full moon, subterranean caverns, abandoned pianos on terraces. It’s not as much a feeling of isolation as you get with games that are more on the Metroid side of things, you are in a castle of all places, but it can be spooky at times.

The graphics are incredible. Both on my main TV and my Steam Deck, the level design and the detail that went into the rooms and enemies is evident at all times. They didn’t phone anything in. Miriam’s movements are animated perfectly. Even little things she does are rendered with care.

Intangibles

Well, I think it counts that this plays like the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night. That was one of my all-time favorite games.

And like Symphony, I actually like that the Church is involved. It would be, and I think it gives the story a little more maturity that it can handle spiritual themes.

I think it’s cool that some things actually change the appearance of Miriam. So if you equip her with a pirate hat on the inventory screen, she will wear a pirate hat in the game. Same if you give her a haircut, which you can do from Todd the barber. If you want Miriam with a short hair cut, you can have it. And then when you play the game her hair will be short. That’s the type of thing that you could only dream about when I was a kid. Cool they pulled it off here.

And I think the female protagonist actually works in the game, they did a good enough job of creating the character of Miriam that she can stand on her own. That might sound strange coming from a genre which gave us Samus Aran, one of the all-time best heroes in video games, but I think that for any story set a couple centuries ago and not in a sci-fi setting you have to work to make the female protagonist believable. She is basically going into a Dracula’s Castle type of scenario to do battle on her own. Not exactly the purview of a 19^th Century Englishwoman. Other Castlevania games have had female protagonists, but the ones I’ve played have all been a part of the Belmont family of vampire slayers. Miriam is just a normal woman who can shardbind.

Anyway, that’s my review of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

I’m going to give it a provisional five Pellegrinos, because I haven’t finished it.

Take care!