Bloodstained is the Castlevania game you've been waiting for
Sometimes it's comforting to get just what you want
At the risk of being reductive, there's very little to say about Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night other than this: it is good. From the day this game hit Kickstarter more than four years ago, it's always been clear what it was intended to achieve. If it managed that, it would be good. If not, it would be a failure.
So yes, Ritual of the Night is good, and that's because its developers pulled off their one job: revive the "Igavania," a specific style of Castlevania game that producer Koji Igarashi worked on at Konami for a little over a decade. Beginning with 1997's Symphony of the Night, Igarashi transformed the action-focused Castlevania series into a mixture of Metroid-style exploration with heavy role-playing elements. Two trilogies on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS followed, generally to much acclaim.
Ritual of the Night is Igarashi's first game since leaving Konami, and as the name suggests, it's unashamedly in thrall to Symphony of the Night and its successors. The game is now rendered with polygons, not pixels, but that's about the only meaningful change. Thematically, stylistically, and mechanically, Ritual of the Night is a Castlevania game in all but name.
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I'd maybe advise waiting to see how those fixes turn out if you're thinking about playing on the Switch, but otherwise, I've been having a blast with Ritual of the Night. It delivers on exactly what it needed to: it feels like a legitimate Igavania that stands right alongside the best of the Castlevania games.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is good. Now that you know that, it will rarely surprise you. But sometimes it's comforting to get just what you want.
