Like God of War but with vampires. Spoilers ahead!
With Metroid Dread on the horizon, I thought I’d catch up developer Mercury Steam’s other works, especially as I also have fondness for the Castlevania series. Although I haven’t played God of War, apparently the Spanish studio’s first entry in this soft-reboot takes a lot of ideas from it.
What this translates to is linear-ish levels filled with button-mashy combat encounters, combined with lots of whip-enhanced clambering and some puzzles thrown in for good measure. Oh, and the Quick Time Events. Sigh. I think most of these modes of play work well, except for those damn QTEs. There’s nothing worse than having to redo a whole boss phase because you missed one button press in a cutscene or couldn’t mash fast enough. Three of the boss fights also liberally borrow from the Shadow of the Colossus notebook, but it’s a pale imitation at best.
Anyway, enough griping about that. I wanna talk about how this game looks. It looks good! There’s plenty of variety in the environments from spooky forests to spooky cathedrals and castles, to a spooky desolate wasteland. Maybe spooky is the wrong word for the actual feel and tone though… it’s more going for “epic”, Lord of the Rings style. So you get these memorable vistas of lofty gothic architecture or ancient ruins, and it feels like a momentous quest through a real world.
On that note, there’s some great worldbuilding here, and a bunch of namedrops and references to Castlevania lore, even though the game itself doesn’t try too hard to fit in the existing continuity. Which is fine with me! I think you can make it work if you squint a bit, anyway. The story also approaches some interesting themes… even if it drops the ball with the actual plot and character arcs. Patrick Stewart lends gravitas to the narration but it tells more than shows.
Gabriel Belmont is the hero of the day, and his story is very “prequels Anakin Skywalker”. It’s supposed to be about a tragic fall from grace, but ends up more like “he was tricked into being evil offscreen”. It also leans on fridging his wife to give him motivation, which sucks as a story beat. It’s bad. The eponymous Lords of Shadow are holy knights of yore who were also tricked (somehow), their dark halves becoming rulers of werewolves, vampires, and undead who now dominate Earth. Gabriel captures their dark power to try and resurrect his dead wife (sigh), and we’re told of his descent into madness, yet at the climax he has an earnest monologue about forgiveness and redemption based in surprisingly explicitly Christian philosophy (the series usually dances around this kind of stuff), while throttling Lucifer himself! Then in the epilogue he’s Dracula.
The DLC fills in the interim a bit, with some puzzle-heavy stages, a brief playable stint as the child vampire Laura, and a protracted QTE-filled boss fight. It’s about Gabriel absorbing more dark powers which makes him evil, I guess. They didn’t get Picard back to narrate these but Robert Carlyle (from The Full Monty, and the baddie in the third Brosnan James Bond film) does a good job as a soothing Scottish Belmont. These two packs are good additions to the main game to expand it a bit as epilogue chapters, but they don’t fix any of the underlying issues.
Not to harp on the issues too much. For the most part it’s a well-made game and I found it an enjoyable experience with some great setpieces and art design. Fans are divided as they often are but it seems to me from the outside to be the most ambitious and accomplished attempt at a 3D entry in the series… but it’s debatable of course.