Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PC) review "The encore I always wanted"

I've heard "Metroidvania" titles disparagingly referred to as "getting lost simulators." Apparently some people don't like following a pathway, only to hit a dead end and having to retrace their steps. To each their own, I suppose. Personally, I love that sort of thing: poring over a map, trying to remember where I've been, feeling completely immersed and engaged in charting, exploring and looting the living hell out of a complex, all so I can bump off the bosses hidden throughout the place. That sort of configuration serves as a good break from your standard “run to the right until I tell you to stop” affairs that typically make up the platformer genre.

Two games fostered my love for this sub-category: Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but especially the latter title. It thoroughly thrilled me to the point that I constantly checked game websites in the late '90s for word of a sequel. While we got plenty of follow-ups in the years after its release, none of them quite measured up to Symphony's greatness. Okay, Dawn of Sorrow got close, but “close” isn't “equal.” I gave up waiting for a worthy successor and accepted that game's place as the king of Gothic pathfinders, unaware that the product in my mind had yet to come...

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night does more than borrow portions of Symphony's moniker and one of its key developers, Koji Igarashi. It adapts significant pieces of Konami's classic, giving us a title that's part remake, part modern re-imagining. Once again, you storm a dusty old castle teeming with mythical menaces and Goetic demons, armed with only a sword and a sense of righteousness. You take the role of Miriam, who enters the mysterious fortress in search of its lord, her longtime friend Gebel. Little does she realize that someone else is working behind the scenes, manipulating Miriam and her allies...



If you've played Symphony, you should know the drill here, including its campaign's plot beats. After crossing a drawbridge and chopping up bats and ghosts in the castle's entryway, you find yourself surrounded by branching corridors and various other avenues that lead you to a multitude of destinations. Some take you to tiny rooms occupied by helpful weapons or armor, others end with obstacles you can't possibly cross yet. The third type of path is the one you need to find: those that lead you to bosses and special abilities. Explore long enough and you'll battle a flying, needle-like demon deep within an archive, netting one double-jump maneuver in the process. Pound your way through a subterranean desert and you'll inevitably fight an alchemist who unwittingly guards a swimming skill.

You progress beyond those troublesome places with your new talents, only to run afoul of additional dead ends that require you to scour for further abilities. You do this for ages until you stumble upon the "final" boss, with around half of the castle uncovered. You challenge the man, beat his face in and witness a very disappointing ending that basically chides you for not searching to your fullest. So you go back to the drawing board and figure out your next move...

Here's the thing: Ritual is not the "walk in the park" Symphony was. It's loaded with difficult scenes that wear you down if you're ill prepared, and it laughs in the face of linearity. It borrows a bit from Simon's Quest in that it hides its campaign points beneath riddles, the solutions of which require you to scour the grounds for new items and abilities that allow you to get past particular segments. However, unlike that dreadful NES installment, this one does a better job of providing clues through conversations had with NPCs at the hub. One person tells you to seek out a creature bathing in blood because that's the secret to delving deeper into the castle. However, the game doesn't spell out the whole sequence of events for you, leaving you to explore and discover that you need to annihilate a certain boss and use her power at just the right place--in this case, a fountain full of blood--to press onward.



Much of your success hinges on what I hinted at above: stealing your opponents' skills. Much like Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, you earn crystal shards from fallen enemies that give you an edge in both battle and progress. Some of them give passive augments that beef up particular stats or grant you special perks, like regeneration. Others come in the form of Castlevania's staple sub-weapons or special attacks you can pull off. On top of that, an alchemist in your hub upgrades some of your crystals, provided you possess the proper crafting materials.

Just when you think Ritual couldn't possibly offer more, it shoehorns some actually decent fetch quests to keep you busy, not to mention a handy crafting feature that allows you to turn random trash into useful and unique equipment. Hell, it doesn't even stop with that, as this adventure has all sorts of small touches that bolster the experience that much more, including a cooking function. And you know what's great about it? Eating certain foods for the first time grants you permanent stat bonuses, so it's actually worth your while to break from monster slaying to bake a cheesecake or fry some fish. Secret levels and hidden super-bosses? Yeah, you'll find plenty of those, too. One of them sends you through an 8-bit gauntlet and ends with a fight against a creature that suspiciously resembles Dracula from the original Castlevania. Another pits you against rather familiar, whip-toting zombie who was most likely a vampire killer in a past life...



On average, I'm usually done with pathfinders like this in under ten hours. Heck, I could've been done with this one around that same time. However, with all of the secrets to discover, incessant collecting, side quests to complete, equipment to build and items to farm, I ended up logging nearly thirty hours into this game. I'll probably add more to that in the future, when I restart the quest and play through as Zangetsu, the protagonist of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon who appears as a secondary playable character here. My point being that this product isn't merely a dated carbon copy of Symphony. It offers everything that title did, sans its B-movie charm, but adding enough simple content to keep the experience fresh and invigorating.

I'll just go ahead and say it: this game is everything I would've wanted in a modernized Metroid-style Castlevania. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night absolutely succeeds at what it set out to do.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 03, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.