Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night faces delay and Vita cancelation

You won't be able to play the game until 2019 now... and not on the Vita.

The crew handling Kickstarter notifications for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night had some bad news to share today: the game will now miss its tentative 2018 release window, and when it does finally arrive, the PlayStation Vita will be ignored.

The news came in the monthly email, which started with a note from IGA (the game's producer) saying he had two important announcements.

"Our first announcement is that the game will now launch in 2019," IGA said. "The most important reason for this is to raise the quality level, especially after all the very valuable feedback from the Beta Backer Demo."

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has had a somewhat troubled development history and has missed a target before. That led to the cancellation of a planned Wii U version, so it's not a huge surprise that an additional delay would lead to a similar fate for the Vita edition.

"The decision is largely due to Sony's plans to discontinue the Vita console, ending production of physical copies and stopping certain online store support features," IGA added. "It is extremely unfortunate, but as a result, we won't be releasing the game on Vita."

If you backed the game and selected Vita as your intended platform, you will have the opportunity to either specify a different platform (at least for now, it is coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC) or request a refund. Fangamer will be emailing affected parties to facilitate that process.

Today's notice didn't say when in 2019 the game will actually arrive, which is probably for the best. The vague window gives the team plenty of time to polish and still have something ready by the end of the revised window. And backers (like me) can take solace in the fact that if the game arrives in early 2019, that's only a little over four months away. Where has 2018 gone?

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Staff article by Jason Venter (August 20, 2018) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.