RAVINE
Mar 9, 2024
Castlevania ReVamped
Developer / Publisher: Lv.4 GAMES
Mar 9, 2024
Editor's Notes
I had an absolute blast with this - an excellent interpretation of the original Castlevania games.
Graphics felt very faithful to the original, as well as the music. There’s a built-in CRT shader, but I went with ReShade. Not much to say here - looks and sounds authentic, good stuff.
Progression was fairly linear, with a pretty clear order of powerups. Get fancy new ability, run up against a new obstacle a few rooms later, then figure out where to backtrack. The map was nicely laid out, and it wasn’t difficult to work out where to go next. Starting out, controls were the expected janky feeling of the Crappy Starter Whip, but as you unlock more abilities it feels great. Fast travel becomes available pretty early on, but later on zipping around the map becomes fun and easy.
The card system is neat, although I didn’t interact with it an awful lot. It lets you add some modifiers to your abilities, and has a few utilities like adding a corpse run so you can recover money on death, dropping more hearts, stuff like that. I used the laurel for 95% of the game, because I am very good at taking unnecessary damage. Probably would have been fun to try out the other abilities.
It was a pretty decent challenge level, maybe a little on the easier side although I played on normal difficulty. Most of the bosses went down in one attempt. There’s a nightmare difficulty if you enjoy that kind of thing (I generally don’t). I couldn’t even make it to the first save room when I tried.
I finished my first playthrough in under 3.5 hours, so I’m classing it as a Minivania. However, there are multiple endings to try for as well as an unlockable Boss Rush mode, so there are a few other ways to have fun if one playthrough isn’t enough.
Definitely worth checking out!
Summary
A reimagining of the first Castlevania game as a metroidvania, taking elements and inspiration from all official tellings of Simon Belmont's first encounter with Dracula.
Where to play
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- Windows
- Linux
Resources
