Playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a lot like listening to Iron Maiden. I was but a tween the first time that band lit a fire under my ass. Bruce Dickinson, their lead singer, stood atop a giant mosaic of a skeleton-man with a venomous sneer, looking out over a sea of screaming fans. Then came a funeral bell toll, guitars ripped–the audience erupted, and so did I.

But I’ve never been to an Iron Maiden show; the scene mentioned above took place in my parent’s living room in the early ’00s while watching old concert DVDs. Even then, Bruce reached right through the television and filled me with feverous elation. Koji Igarashi did the same with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It’s not the cool undead shit or electric guitars making me compare a Japanese game developer to a British metal band, either. Like Iron Maiden, I’m a couple of decades late to the party, and oh, boy, have I been missing out. Castlevania may be no more, but Bloodstained just might be able to carry on its spirit.

In 1783, the Laki volcanic eruption blanketed Europe in darkness, and from the ashes, demons appeared. This calamity was the work of The Alchemy Guild, a group of mages that guide the hand of the ruling class, trying to justify their existence in the wake of the industrial revolution. Opening a portal to hell for the sake of job security might sound extreme, but who in their right mind isn’t wary of automation?

The Alchemy Guild had a contingency plan though; the shardbinders, humans they imbued with demonic crystal shards. The Guild used these Shardbinders to halt the armies of hell from spreading further into the land of the living, and thus, the world was once again safe. Enter Bloodstained’s protagonist, Miriam, one of two remaining shardbinders who have been in a deep slumber for the ten years since the calamity.  In that time, her best friend and fellow shardbinder, Gebel, erected a castle chock-full of nasty demons. Confused and rightly miffed that he’d do so, she sets out to explore the castle and find out what’s going on.

While there is a creative, elaborate, and romanticized backstory, I never took Bloodstained‘s story all that seriously. The world-building is justification for the gothic architecture, mythical monsters, and all manner of magical what have you. It’s the story about, well, a goth crushing demons beneath the soles of her boot, and that’s all it needs to be. I think the moment that underlined this was when I discovered an enemy hurling fireballs while playing electric guitar. Dave Murray would be proud.

That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate the set dressing, though. The voice acting is stellar; Erica Lindbeck sells Miriam’s lines with an earnest gravitas. I could feel the weight mounting on our heroine’s shoulders as the plot ramped up just through her voice. Special shoutout to Zangetsu, who’s voiced by the legendary David Hayter and who was always eager to remind me that his skills were superior to my own.

The meat and potatoes of Bloodstained is without a doubt its gameplay. For years, I was under the impression that Koji Igarashi’s side-scrolling Castlevania games were just standard action-platformer affairs. If only I could go back and wedgie my younger self for assuming so. 

Bloodstained isn’t the sort of RPG where a party of misfits band together and save the world as a group effort, but more of the solo, lonely, dungeon crawling variety. The base stats pool grew as I defeated enemies and leveled up, but the fun of number-crunching came from customizing attributes through finding and crafting new equipment. I favored combat shoes for my offensive weapon, as they have a fast attack speed and let me dart in-and-out of melee range quickly. Then, I paired the boots with magic that allowed me to hurl throwing axes from afar. This playstyle meant I needed equipment that upped strength, the stat that increases melee damage, and intelligence, the stat that increases magic damage. My build was that of a glass cannon, getting in an enemy’s face with kicks then backing off and doing damage from with the axes. My health and defense were low as a result of this build, but it was no sweat, for I tried never to get hit anyway.

However, I was able to mitigate the health and defense issues in my character’s build through the cooking system. Back at the base of the castle, one of the NPCs taught me all sorts of culinary delights. These delectables gave me temporary stat buffs that made up for holes in my build. Did you know that rice balls add +10 health points and +2 constitution, slightly increasing your health and your defense? Well, they do in Bloodstained! I had to buy some rice and special seasoning off another NPC to gather the ingredients, but it was cash well spent.

Being a shardbinder, Miriam takes the powers of her demonic foes for herself. Enter crystal shards. Each time an enemy is slain, there’s a random chance they’ll drop a shard, and each one has a unique ability. That axe-throwing ability mentioned earlier was from a shard of an enemy that, you guessed it, threw axes. I like to imagine I caught one mid-air and never gave it back– serves them right, the prick. 

There are a ton of shards to collect, and they only get more wild as playtime mounts. Some offer passive buffs; others manipulate the environment, and others still grant attack abilities. Familiar shards are a favorite of mine, as these shards let me summon companions to fight alongside me. The Silver Knight familiar was a little ghost-buddy of mine that deflected projectiles coming my way and stuck enemies with the pointy end of his spear. Indeed, he was ride or die. 

When math is involved, there’s always a scientific, optimal way to solve a problem, and being an RPG means math is involved in Bloodstained. Some of the shards are wildly overpowered, is what I’m saying — and Welcome Company is one of those shards. It envelops Miriam in a series of haunted paintings that both defend from enemy attacks and deal damage enemies on contact. Couple this shard with a good melee weapon, and even the toughest boss is a cakewalk. I avoided using it until my hard difficulty playthrough where it wasn’t so godlike. Welcome Company and a handful of other shards need some balancing, but it’s thankfully the sort of issue that can easily be mitigated with a patch. 

Some shards are far more valuable than others too, and it becomes a problem when they’re divvied up in the same way. Each time I defeated a boss, a powerful key shard was the reward. Make sense; several sections of the castle are gated behind some powerful abilities. So if those shards can only found through a mandatory boss fight, that works. The trouble is there are a couple of shards vital to progress that are not a reward for defeating a boss. One of these moments hit me like a ton of bricks, hours and hours searching every nook and cranny trying to figure out how to get past a specific obstacle, only to have the shard I need to get past it be dropped by a random enemy. I’m intentionally vague here, but here’s your hint: underwater.

I understand what Koji and his team were going for with this. Going over every inch of the castle with a fine-tooth comb after that much coveted 100 percent map completion should require flexing the noggin, but not at the expense of the core formula. Obtuse nonsense like this stands out bad, especially considering how immaculate most of Bloodstained‘s game design is.

Most of the progression and level design is perfection, though. In the first area, there was a ledge far too distant for me to reach. A couple of hours later, I got a double jump, which opened up more of the castle, but I still couldn’t reach the ledge. Then, I found an ability that flung me across ravines, but it couldn’t get me to that damn ledge either. It wasn’t until the last third of the game that I finally attained an ability that let me reach that ledge. There was just a chest with an ok-ish helmet inside; I laughed aloud, and I’m sure Koji did in spirit, too. It wasn’t worth the effort–on paper, anyway–but it’s part of what makes Bloodstained awesome; it just feels incredible navigating this labyrinth. Every hidden door, treacherous leap of faith, and innocuous floor tile is forever etched in my brain.

Curiously, Bloodstained is a retro revival that doesn’t opt for a pixel art style, unlike, say, the Castlevania games of the past or 8-bit-style prequel Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Instead, it rocks a pseudo 2.5D look, and it’s as gorgeous as it is mechanically sound. There’s plenty of traversal and platforming happening in this game, but not once did I have issues distinguishing what was in the background and what was tangible and in the foreground. That 2.5D aesthetic makes the images pop in a way that’s not possible with 2D pixel art. It also helps with particle effects, which ooze pizzazz, and I swear, this game has the most satisfying level-up notification in the history of videogames. Whenever I stuck the final blow on an enemy and the entire screen lit up with blue tendrils that collided into a “level up” message, it was pure euphoria.

Oh, and the soundtrack, my goodness. The soundtrack is something else. Grandious pipe organs, melodramatic church choirs, wailing electric guitars, punchy bass, classic wood stringed instruments, and even a bell toll; they’re all here and metal as fuck. Michiru Yamane walks a line between delightfully cheesy and genuinely powerful notes with her score. I developed a habit of eagerly inching closer to my monitor whenever the screen was about to transition to a new area because I couldn’t wait to hear a new song. 

Just shy of the 20-hour mark, I finally reached Bloodstained’s end credits. That number is slightly higher than the average of first-playthroughs, but I was forever lost down one rabbit hole after the other. Sure, the world needs saving, but I could also learn how to make the perfect bowl of curry, or gather materials to make the cutest outfit possible, you know? Not to mention that there are a few secret bosses that need to have their larynxes crushed. There’s a wealth of hidden content to uncover here, higher difficulties even up the number of enemies on-screen and tweak placement a smidge, and there are even speedrun and boss rush modes! I’ve barely scraped the surface of this behemoth.

Four years ago in 2015 when Koji Igarashi took to Kickstarter, he wanted to prove to the suits of the games industry that people still loved Castlevania. If they wouldn’t give him the series name, he and the fans would make sure it lived on in spirit. Now, in 2019, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is finally here, and it’s everything we hoped it to be. I might be late to the Igavania party, but it made me nostalgic for a bygone era of gaming all the same. As it turns out, the notion that this kind of game is antiquated turned out to be just a strange illusion.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is out now on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.