I spent the last week playing through Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
With the level of polish and content it has, I can't believe this was a Kickstarter game. Every environment is unique and gorgeous, and the level themes are wonderful. There are 127 enemy types in this game, and each one has a chance to drop up to five different items with very little overlap. There are like ten types of primary weapon, though most of them are completely outclassed. And there are over 100 subweapons from which you mix-and-match five to form the rest of your kit. I only played around with a few of these but they were appreciably distinct.
There is an extensive and easy to understand crafting system, but it's mostly worthless. I would look at the crafting tree and say "All right, after I find a warlock staff I can forge a breastplate that gives +27 defense." I'd keep an eye out for a Warlock Staff and it would finally drop in the same room as a chest containing a +31 breastplate. This wasn't my universal experience with the crafting but it was the overwhelming majority, which is unfortunate because the game largely relies on craft materials to reward you for exploring.
Admittedly the Meal and Enhance Shard systems are more useful and draw from the same pool of crafting materials, but food items are a tiny subset of all of the materials, and I challenge anyone to use more than a handful of shards in a single playthrough. There are occasionally more useful weapons and armor, and permanent health/mana upgrades, but most of the time going out of your way to open a blue chest just gives you fucking nothing (or money, which is as useless). Speaking of health/mana upgrades, most of them are hidden inside "Metroid walls," you know, walls that look the exact same as every other wall but are breakable. It's a delight when you find one but it did lead to me wasting a lot of time attacking basically every wall in the castle.
With all of the boxes there are to tick—and you can track each of them in the menu—this could be a fun game to 100% for you obsessive completionists. I'll never know because I'm not one, but also because I downloaded a patch to fix the frequent crashing which also randomly reshuffled the flags of chests I had collected in the overworld, locking me out of one quest tree. At least it fixed the crashing. While I'm on the topic, there are a few rooms where the game chugged badly on PS4, especially the gambler boss fight, though it was usually fine on a technical level.
Bloodstained is modeled after Castlevania, so that means lots of backtracking! Except the map can be explored almost completely on the first go, so the backtracking is an exercise of just keeping your head down and power rushing from Point A to Point B. This is a useless experiment, but if you played through the game while refusing to explore any path or open any chest that you can only get from backtracking (except when required by the story), I wonder what your map completion percentage would be. Probably over 95%.
Speaking of backtracking, I got hopelessly stuck and had to consult a guide five times. For two of these I will take some blame, but the other three are absolutely 100% the game's fault for having a completely stupid critical path. This isn't a dealbreaker but it is a depressingly high number since I had to consult a guide like twice while playing Super Metroid, which is from 1994 and has no text in it.
In the end, do I like it? Well, I think it's mediocre. I almost want to say that you should buy this anyway, just to reward one of these kickstarter nostalgia projects for so obviously not phoning it in, and really putting in the effort, but at its core the gameplay just isn't very good. My chief complaint with Bloodstained at the end is my complaint with a lot of RPGs: it feels like a massive Skinner box. It just isn't very fulfilling. Obviously something kept me playing because I beat it in a week, but when I look back at my time on the game I have to ask what.
- Was it the joy of mastering a skill? No, the game doesn't even ask you to get better. I beat most bosses first try without using healing items, of which you have infinitely many. I think skillful play is possible in this game, but with Miriam's clunky moveset I don't think I would have even enjoyed it more if the game were harder. But I'll never know because you are locked to Normal difficulty on a first playthrough.
- Was it the engaging writing? Hell no. Miriam is the worst kind of Boy Scout character and while the rest of the writing was just about average for a video game, it certainly isn't a selling point.
- Was it the excitement of a novel experience? Nope, the game is hardly innovative, basically just being a supercut of Castlevania games. You've seen all the monster types by midgame and everything after that is just the previous thing but with more health and does more damage.
So what was it then that kept me playing? Well like I said, the environments and music are excellent, I guess it's satisfying to see numbers slowly ticking up on a screen, and Miriam gives me a boner
