Castlevania: Belmont's Curse 100% Review — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] What's going on everybody, Mortem here, this time bringing you my review after 100% for Castlevania, Belmont's Curse, which just released a few days ago in fact, though honestly I

[00:17] only learned about it from my audience having recommended it to me, I didn't even know it was releasing before that, and after jumping in and trying out the demo I had a good enough time with it to decide to commit to reviewing the entire thing, which is what we're doing here. So

[00:31] rather than give you my usual spiel about the 100%, we're going to approach this a little differently, because the thing I really want to tell you here is that this, I think, is straight up the first Metroidvania I have ever reviewed on the channel, and from my demo video, I know some

[00:46] people do not like calling Castlevania games Metroidvanias, but that is what the genre is called, so I really don't know what to tell you. However, while having finished this, I do not really plan on making this type of game a focus on the channel by any means. This was interesting

[01:01] enough as a bit of a one-off and was just different enough from the things I've covered previously, probably because I don't play many of them, that it just sort of grabbed my attention and I wanted to see it all the way through, especially since I had, honestly, a good chunk of free time right

[01:14] as this released, which was convenient. But if it wasn't obvious from having said all of that, I did pay for this. Obviously, no review fee or anything. The game is $30 US, which is what I paid for it.

[01:26] Now, honestly, as 100%s go, this is not a difficult game to 100%. You basically need to do a 100% clear, which is relatively easy to do because the game actually marks by percentage, by area, things you have not found yet.

[01:41] So the game itself does a good job of keeping track of all of that. And while there is one achievement for beating the game in under four hours that sounds difficult, there's actually a bunch of difficulty options that make that trivially easy if you want it to be.

[01:53] And we'll talk more about that in the difficulty section here in just a moment. So the process of getting all the achievements for it is a relatively simple one, provided you want to spend the time on it.

[02:05] From there, though, let's talk about our slightly more general overview. So this game, being effectively a side-scroller, is not one I would have picked out for myself. As I mentioned, this game was brought to my attention by my viewers, and something about the demo just stuck with me, and I needed to finish the entire thing.

[02:21] Part of that was the game's, I guess you would call it a difficulty curve. I don't know if the people who play these games regularly would feel that way about it. However, because I don't play a lot of these games, a lot of the bosses and things, I would say, had mechanics and approaches that I had not seen much of.

[02:37] That made, you know, like a first encounter with him maybe a little difficult in places, only for like subsequent attempts to get way, way better. In fact, I was able to no-hit a couple of them by the end of it. And so there was a sort of, I guess, knowledge or difficulty curve to those boss encounters especially that kept me pretty engaged.

[02:55] I also found exploration really fun. Although I will say, because I was trying to be super thorough as I was playing, I didn't get some of the later traversal mechanics until much later, like the aerial dash as well as the double jump.

[03:07] And those are like game changers entirely for how you get around. In fact, once you've had them, it's hard to go back to not having them because of how like integral they feel to your movement. And that stuff made exploration all the more rewarding.

[03:20] On top of that, there are some extra endings to track down, like there's a bad ending, a normal ending, as well as the true ending. On top of a whole bunch of secrets in order to get that true ending in particular. And for all of those reasons, and I'm sure some slightly more unintuitive things,

[03:35] Castlevania Belmont's Curse pulled me into a genre I am not overly fond of, and honestly still don't plan on playing much of, in a way that this genre just typically does not. So, let's keep it rolling. Next up with the technical state of the game.

[03:48] How is this thing running? For me, I ran into two separate problems that were definitely a little bit annoying, but not exactly game-breaking. Starting with the cutscenes, I guess you could call them, occasionally as you are moving through an area, your character will be forced to stop

[04:03] as the game sort of pans out a little and then enters a dialogue section. Those transitions from, like, gameplay into that little dialogue segment, my FPS would just tank, like, every time that happened.

[04:15] And I'm running, like, a 4090, and this is not exactly a graphically demanding game. So I assume that it's something on the game's end, because my FPS would drop to, like, 20 every time that happened, which was just odd. On top of that, I did have one slightly more serious issue, I guess you could say.

[04:31] However, it's probably going to be more serious for others than it was for me. As regular viewers of the channel know, this is a PC channel, and I play everything with keyboard and mouse because that's just who I am as a person. Unless it is quite literally impossible for some reason or another,

[04:45] I'm going to use keyboard and mouse. However, that's actually a little funny in regard to this game because playing this game on PC, It has some sort of issue in relation to how it detects controller devices that causes endless scrolling of a cursor.

[05:00] In fact, you're probably going to see my cursor on screen as well. And I guess you could say that's another bug because that never goes away. However, what I'm talking about in particular is that if you have more than one control method plugged into your PC,

[05:13] the game seems to have trouble identifying which one it's supposed to use. And what results is that it's like the game is endlessly scrolling as if a key is stuck, but nothing is actually stuck. I solved this by unplugging my extra controller type devices.

[05:29] I have like a little hand keyboard type thing that I use. But the gist of it is you basically need to have a singular control device plugged in on PC in order for it to not do that. And even then it sometimes still does it,

[05:41] at which point you just kind of have to like save and reload until it stops. So even if I wanted to use a controller I would have had to completely unplug my keyboard and everything which I not about to do which was very annoying and so I obviously wanted to put that somewhere here in the review That is a relatively serious issue and I hope it gets dealt with soon It annoying

[06:00] Moving on, though, let's talk difficulty. So, I said this game was relatively easy to 100%, especially because it's easy enough to trivialize things via the difficulty. Now, the game itself has a baseline difficulty that it will not ask you to enable.

[06:14] It just kind of is what it is. I guess you could consider that normal mode. However, if you go searching through the menu options, you can enable what is called custom mode. Custom mode introduces a whole bunch of helper features that the game does warn you will mess up their intended balance

[06:28] as the baseline difficulty is the developer's intention. But if you are struggling or you just want to adjust something, custom mode exists. It allows you to adjust the damage you deal, the damage you receive,

[06:40] whether or not you want to be functionally immortal and quite literally invincible, or if you want to do smaller stuff, like, say, allow yourself to respawn directly outside of a boss store, or increase your experience gain.

[06:52] None of these affect achievements at all. So if you want to use them and, you know, get the achievements as quickly as you can, you can absolutely do that, and that includes the achievement for beating the game in under four hours. On my end, I was happy to turn on the boss room respawn, if you will.

[07:08] If you die, you just immediately respawn outside the boss, alongside the increased experience gain to make things move just a little bit faster in general for when I did that achievement. However, I did also want to point out that you can use this stuff to make the game a bit harder than the baseline as well if you want to.

[07:23] Those fighters work in that direction as well, so something to bear in mind, I suppose. But, next up, we've got the story set up and my thoughts on it. Now, Castlevania is a long-running franchise. If I'm not mistaken, the original one released in 1986.

[07:39] Pretty sure that's correct. They recently celebrated their 40th anniversary, if my memory serves. And to that end, I want to be very upfront that I am not by any means up to date with the franchise, if that wasn't obvious from the fact that I didn't even know this game was releasing until relatively recently.

[07:53] So I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I have any idea, like, where this takes place and the timeline and all that, But I do know some things about Castlevania that I've just kind of picked up in my proximity to the gaming space over the years.

[08:05] So it's not brand new to me or anything. But my understanding is admittedly limited. So keep that in mind as we move through this. But that aside, we play this game as Rose Belmont in 1499, in particular around the area of Paris.

[08:21] Rose and her father Trevor were called here to investigate and combat some evil that is of course brewing in the darkness, which, I mean, if you know anything about the series, is obviously Dracula. Not a lot of other places that was ever going to go.

[08:35] Rose, though, following in her family's long tradition of being vampire hunters, is here to hunt some vampires, and so it's all going to work out in the end, ideally. We've got some help along the way, however, with a deck of tarot cards.

[08:48] Rose's mother died some time ago, I believe in childbirth if I'm not mistaken, but she left behind, to Trevor specifically, until she came of age, a deck of tarot cards. These tarot cards are meant to guide Rose along her journey, and they do just that.

[09:03] We're going to gather up clues, and thanks to these tarot cards, we'll give us hints about where to go and what to do in order to figure things out if the game isn't directly explicit enough. But what this actually functionally means is usually tracking down needs, fighting a boss who then gets absorbed into your tarot cards,

[09:20] and you take some of their power and the form of, like, spells and things you can cast as a result of all of this. Over the course of that, we're obviously going to track down and try to put us out to Dracula's plans and machinations,

[09:32] as we try to get the strange and occult whipped into shape here. Other than that, the main thing I want to mention is that, as I mentioned, there are, in fact, multiple different endings. There's a bad, normal, and true ending. They do kind of all build off of each other, though the bad ending is technically missable.

[09:48] And I'm relatively certain you have to get the normal ending before you can get the true ending. I'm not entirely sure on that. I did not check, admittedly, but I'm pretty sure the true ending requires you to get the normal ending first. If I'm wrong on that, I'm sure somebody will correct me about it.

[10:02] But in particular, getting the true ending was pretty fun. There's obviously, like, some puzzles and stuff you have to track down and figure out in order to make that happen, and that was pretty fun. And unsurprisingly, it centers around the titular curse.

[10:15] So Rose Belmont is the subject of a curse. I believe it's called the Crimson Curse. And without saying too much, the true ending kind of plays directly into the title more than anything else. But that is where I'm going to leave that before we talk about the progression systems.

[10:29] Now, this game does have a few RPG elements to it. We are going to be leveling up as we fight and kill things and find experience statues. As we level up, we gain attack and defense. It's also possible to find permanent upgrades to those as we explore.

[10:43] We're also going to pick up a whole bunch of different weapons, seven different weapon types with four weapons in each set. We also gain our arcana from destroying individual bosses,

[10:55] or in some cases just finding and completing some things. Those give us various spells, and those spells can be upgraded by performing certain acts with them, usually just like, you know, using them to kill things, etc. enough times and that gives you upgrades to them that make them even stronger. You can also upgrade

[11:12] your health and mana by picking up health upgrades sort of heart container style. Every four of those you find for health and mana respectively increases your total and then there are your relics. Rose can equip up to three relics at a time and there's a bunch of different ones to find and you can mix

[11:27] and match those and get all sorts of different effects out of them and that's pretty much what you looking at progression wise I would say the two parts of this that were my favorite were the weapons as well as the arcana So on the weapon side of things as you would probably expect each family of weapons has a different play style to it I wound up enjoying

[11:45] the whip the most because it, uh, they definitely focus more on keeping enemies at a specific range from you. Whereas the basic sword is probably the most straightforward, but you can also get things like, say, a two-handed sword that typically have charge attacks, the longer reach of a spear,

[12:01] fifth weapons etc and like I said they all kind of play a little differently and it was fun to mess around with them but the arcana are where things get really interesting because you earn mana by killing things and so there's some interplay there between using your weapon

[12:14] gathering up mana and then actually casting your spells some of which are devastating there are plenty of them that are optional I mostly use the cross but I would say the other favorite of mine was actually the one you get from the tarot card the whisperer which allows you to pass through

[12:29] enemies, freezing them, and then dealing damage, but there's a good chunk of variety there, and more interesting ones than that even, but I will say a lot of bosses are immune to the status effects caused by these arcana cards, so that's something to keep in mind. Either way, next up,

[12:43] let's move into the gameplay and world section. As a Metroidvania type style of game, you'll probably know more or less what to expect here, but we're going to be moving through several large zones. Each of these zones is divided

[12:56] up into sub-areas that we'll need to move through, platform our way through all sorts of different puzzles and enemies in order to reach our objectives, earn progression, and find us more ways to traverse things. Typically,

[13:08] as we progress the main story, we get extra movement abilities like that aerial dash or double jump that I mentioned, and those are going to give you more access to more secrets, which the map is very handy about marking for you.

[13:21] Any sub-zone on your map that It shows as a dark purple, still has something to discover, where they kind of move to an amber-yellowish color when you've found everything in that given area. Now, these zones are broken up by mirrors of life and flash travel points.

[13:35] Mirrors of life are basically your save points as well as your respawn points. Now, the game does save fairly regularly, so you don't have to worry too much about dying. However, every time you use a mirror of life, the game checkpoints you there, but also saves your game.

[13:49] And this is where you'll come back to if you die ordinarily, unless you, like, enter the zone, in which case it's usually there. Now, later on in the game, you can come across the ferrymen, who will act as our fast travel point, and take us to the different zones or areas that we have unlocked the fast travel for.

[14:06] I will say, I do wish these fast travel zones were in more useful locations. Most of them are a little out of the way, and so you'll fast travel, but then still have to do a bunch of running to get where you need to go. and with all the backtracking in the game, that gets old pretty quick.

[14:20] Now, I would assume this is a relatively basic observation. However, I will say that as somebody who does not play these games, seeing the game slowly ramp up the platforming and challenges there was interesting,

[14:32] as I haven't really experienced that much. And one of those platforming puzzles, the Chaos Shards in particular, were one I never got comfortable with until pretty close to the end of my time with the game. but relatively early you get an ability that allows you to pass through these sort of translucent blocks you keep running into,

[14:50] and you can essentially turn on or off, whether or not you can pass through them, or if they act as any other platform would, and a lot of puzzles lean into this pretty heavily, with you needing to, like, turn this on or off at the appropriate time,

[15:03] and on keyboard and mouse, this is a little awkward. This is probably the only thing about the game that would have maybe convinced me to use a controller, but after changing the keybind for it, which was awkward by default, on top of just some practice,

[15:16] I did eventually get the hang of it. But I will readily admit that I struggled with that one for some reason. But that really is what most of the gameplay is. Running through the streets and underbelly of Paris as you track down leads and clues,

[15:29] to track down the boss fights, to get the progression, to, of course, continue the story and get where you're going and learn the secrets. I will say the secrets themselves stay the same from play through to play through, so that's actually one way you can speed up a run for that under four hours achievement, because you don't actually have to go track those down and learn them, and you can skip basically whole sections of the game that way.

[15:51] With that said, let's move on to combat a little bit. Combat was probably a little on the simple side, but still really engaging to me, mostly because, again, I don't really play this kind of game that much. But if I were to break it down, I would say it really comes down to three different things.

[16:06] The weapon you have equipped, the arcana that you are using, as well as understanding where to position yourself. If you can figure those three things out, you're pretty much good to go. As a bit of a nitpick, as a quality of life thing, I would have loved to have seen like a loadout system where you could quickly swap out Rose's equipment between different decided sets.

[16:25] That is to say, like, Arcana weapon and relic setups, like, super quickly, just, like, maybe with a couple buttons at most. That would have been nice for me personally, as you do have to, I would say, switch them out a lot as you traverse.

[16:38] And, of course, as you'd probably expect, certain weapons are better against certain enemies, just the same as Arcana. But with that said, movement, I would say, is relatively self-explanatory. In fact, I would say a lot of the boss encounters in particular can be mostly trivialized if you just kind of know where to stand when.

[16:55] Like I said, with enough practice and learning, I was able to no-hit a couple of bosses. I think Medusa is a prime example of this. It's very easy to no-hit Medusa once you kind of learn her pattern and just know when to move. But what makes it really, really fun to me, anyway, are the arcana and weapon types.

[17:11] So, on the arcana side of things, as I mentioned, a lot of bosses are immune to the status effect side of your arcana, and so, while you can use them on regular enemies pretty freely, you've really got to keep that in mind for the bosses,

[17:24] and focusing on ones that just simply provide more damage are usually the way to go there or at least in my opinion I should say To that end the Holy Cross is a bit of a classic and I like mixing that with the whip in particular,

[17:37] because both of those ideally will deal more damage if you can hit them at just the right distance. The best whip you get, Vampire Hunter, actually deals an extra flame attack

[17:49] if you hit an enemy at it at the right distance, that is to say the tip of your whip hits them, thus dealing more damage, and then igniting them as well, doing extra damage. And the crosses are kind of the same way. The holy crosses you get from the first boss, if you throw those,

[18:03] they'll go through an enemy and come back and potentially hit twice, but if you catch them right at the edge of it, it hits them several times. And I really enjoyed playing around with that as a mechanic in particular, like that was really fun for me, but there are other weapons as well.

[18:16] I use the spear a good bit just for the extra reach. I like the idea of the fist weapons, but I never got entirely used to them, I would say, so I didn't use them too much. There's like a sword and shield option.

[18:28] I will say my least favorite was probably the dual wielding. I could just never get a feel for the combos. You have the time to pull that off. But ultimately, while I wouldn't say combat is terribly complicated, it is really in how those things interplay with each other that makes it interesting and engaging,

[18:44] especially for me, as somebody who doesn't play a lot of these games, picking which weapon to use in what fight. what spell is going to be the best alongside, you know, learning where to be when in order to get out of certain attacks makes for an interesting and engaging experience with bosses in particular.

[18:59] I will say in a lot of like the regular rooms and stuff you'll be moving through, most of those fights aren't even necessary outside of a few arena things, but you still want to fight what you can or kill what you can easily because you need the experience,

[19:11] level up to get the extra attack and defense, which is just something you have to keep in mind as you move through. But long story short, combat was enjoyable, even if it wasn't exactly a mind-blowing experience. It was new to me and for me that counted for quite a bit.

[19:26] That said, let's move on to the Steam Deck and Steam Machine sections. Officially speaking, this game has a playable rating on Steam Deck and a verified rating over on Steam Machine, and I'm here to say that it might as well be verified on both.

[19:40] The reason that it has playable on Steam Deck in particular is that it has some small text you'll have to read, which is true, but ignoring that, it runs very well on both of those bits of hardware. Again, it's not exactly a graphically demanding title.

[19:54] However, the other thing that I want to mention outside of the small text itself is that the menus do kind of, like, zoom in, or don't exactly fill the screen the right way on the Steam Deck in particular,

[20:06] and, like, that's not unplayable or anything, but it does make certain things a little hard to read, which is ever so slightly annoying, but that's really the main thing to know there. otherwise, and so let's move on to positives, negatives, and then wrap this thing up. So,

[20:19] on the positive side of things, I enjoyed exploration a lot. Finding secrets, tracking down the true ending, all of that was really the highlight of this experience for me, and overall, the entire experience, being a bit of a learning one, was a pretty good time in that sense. Now,

[20:35] I don't know where that stands in relation to, like, the genre or other Castlevania games, etc but I had fun with it for what it was and part of that was the fun curve to like figuring out especially some of the combat encounters where I'm just not familiar with that type of game at all

[20:50] and the act of figuring that out was enjoyable for me and yet we do have a few negatives the main one being that weird stuff with controllers and things on pc and the weird fps drops every

[21:02] time it would go into like a talking segment that happens often enough that it just feels bad all around and then obviously the controller thing is incredibly annoying but looking beyond that stuff I would say uh my main gripes are just quality of life things I wish fast travel was a little less

[21:18] funky like it should be a little easier to get closer to where I actually want to go with fast travel and not have to fast travel and then travel across an entire zone still I don't necessarily need there to be more fast travel points but I do feel like they should have been placed a little

[21:31] better there's like maybe two of them that don't feel like a hassle more than anything else and And also, again, something like a loadout system for your individual setups for rows, because you're swapping equipment out a lot. It really feels like kind of an obvious solution to just, like, let you set up some presets there.

[21:47] But either way, that ultimately brings me to my conclusion for this one. I paid $30 US for this game, and I certainly feel like I got my money's worth out of it, so in that sense, I would give it a buy. However, that does come with, I would say, a bit of the obvious caveat that I don't play a lot of these games.

[22:03] I have no idea how this stacks up to other games in the genre, and if I'm being completely honest, I don't really intend to find out either, as just something about this game hooked me from the time I tried that demo and I just wanted to see it through to the end, and thus here we are, and thankfully I had a pretty good time with it.

[22:19] But I say that fully as somebody who's a bit of an outsider to the genre, and I'm sure people who are more familiar with it might have some more insight there. But speaking, of course, for myself, it was fun, and I feel like I got my money's worth out of it, which is where I'm going to leave this review.

[22:34] So, hopefully you enjoyed all of that. If you did, by all means, like, comment, subscribe. I'll let YouTube jazz. Not soon, but next year. I do plan on going through the Lords of Shadow games, as those are a different genre from the usual side-scroller stuff, so there's a little more Castlevania in my future for sure, but regardless of any of that, truly, just thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom, and have an amazing day.

[23:12] you