Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Review

Review

After the terrifying volcanic eruption of the Loki in 1783, a horde of demons rapidly set upon city after city and their inhabitants, leaving them defenceless. A solution needed to be found swiftly before all hopes were vanished. The solution came from a group known as the Alchemist Guild. They transplanted crystals with demonic powers into human volunteers in order to combat the demon’s hordes. Many of these volunteers perished in battle, but not before repelling the devilish hordes. Despite their success, those amongst this new breed of humans who were left living, known as “Shardbinders,” needed to be eliminated too, as they possessed demonic powers with the crystal implants. All Sharbinders were sacrificed, but Miriam and Gebel miraculously survived.  However, Miriam fell into a deep sleep. Ten years have now passed, and the demons have returned and taken refuge in a castle. At the same time, Miriam woke up and embarked upon an incredible adventure, known as the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night!

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a side-crawler action/ RPG game developed by ArtPlay and published by 505 games on the 18^th of June 2019. This game is available to purchase on Steam, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.

As you start a new game, the difficulty level will be set as normal. There are another two levels of difficulty, Hard and Nightmares, which will be available for selection after you successfully finish the game on the original difficulty mode.

Miriam’s adventure starts on a Galleon ship where she will need to find a way up to the deck by moving through rooms and fighting several types of demon along the way before reaching the shore, where the castle is located. It’s a pretty good tutorial, showing you how to use the interface and so on so forth.

As a mentioned above, the locations are basically made of rooms. Most of these rooms will have demons to fight, which will keep you on your toes all the time. Miriam is free to move back and forth from one room to the next, but be aware that each time she re-enter a room, the demons will re-appear, which is also great in terms of levelling up as each time she kill an enemy, she’ll receive experience points.  There are chests with goodies in some of the rooms, so make sure that Miriam reaches them as they will provide either items for crafting, weapons, armour (clothes), masks or other important goodies. She will also come across green and red rooms in her epic story. The green rooms have a large stained glass which gives her the ability to travel back and forth between green rooms that she has discovered within the castle. The red rooms are extremely important as it’s here that she’ll be able to save her process and regenerate her health and magic points.

Miriam will be fighting constantly and acquiring shards by killing demons. She’ll be able to use these shards to access demonic powers. For example, very early on in the game she will be fighting some sort of octopus. After killing it, a shard will shoot into her body and will be able to use that power against other enemies, but it will cost magic points to do so. There are stacks of enemies to kill and therefore stacks of shards to acquire. She can regenerate her magic points by sitting down on chair and breaking items that have a purple globe or light in them. If a purple rose appears after breaking an item, pick it up and it will slightly regenerate the magic points. Otherwise, find a red room, save the game and both the magic and health will be fully restored.

She will also come across other characters within her adventure. For example, at the village she can talk to Johanne where she’ll be able to enhance shards, craft items and prepare foods. Talking with Dominique will enable her to buy or sell items, and conversations with other people will give her side quests with great rewards if she successfully achieves them. She’ll fight additional characters somewhere within the castle too, but I’ll let you discover that.

Boss fights are frequent and you’ll either access important items to move forward, or skills.

This game is extremely addictive and must say that I am super impressed with every aspect! I enjoyed the story, the constant fighting, acquiring new shards to enhance Miriam’s fighting skills and how easy and well done the interface is. After 11 hours of gaming, I have only managed to see 30% of the game and I am deadly hooked on it.

Super artwork and soundtracks. Great story with stacks of enemies to fight and items to find and you can use your keyboard or your gamepad for controls (which are extremely responsive, by the way). I am just blown away by this game - it’s a jewel!

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Steam Store Page