The ritual of the night does not feel very good in his last demo

At PAX East, I finally had the opportunity to try Bloody: Ritual of the Night. What I played I left intrigued but ultimately disappointed. Of all the Castlevaniainspired games to appear this year, as Cyber ​​Shadow and next DLC for The messengerI am now less excited about who comes from one of the most renowned developers in the series.

Ritual of the night was announced as Kickstarter in 2015. Koji Igarashi, a veteran of Konami who worked on the Castlevania series for nearly two decades, asked his fans $ 500,000 for his newly formed play studio, ArtPlay, to become the spiritual successor of the series. The campaign raised $ 5.5 million.

Since then, the game has been delayed twice. The Wii U, PS Vita, Mac and Linux versions have been canceled and a switch version has been announced. He is now ready to arrive later this year, releasing at least on the Switch by this summer, according to a February Nintendo Direct trailer.

On paper, Ritual of the night looks like Castlevania Game. All you are waiting for is there: summon various pets, enemies knocking you over when you are hit and even connecting to previous games via Igarashi. But in the demo that I played, things do not really get complicated. Everything was a little off, like a piece of furniture that looks beautiful but wobbles when you use it.

My session started in the middle of a giant clock tower in Demon Castle. Miriam, the main protagonist, woke up after 10 years of coma after magical crystals had been introduced into her body. She ventured to the castle to kill another subject of the experience that let the demons invade the world. At the beginning of the demo, she had already collected a number of crystals allowing her to perform all kinds of special attacks. His inventory is also filled with various regenerative potions, manufacturing materials and other loot. With all this, I started to explore the surroundings.

The first thing I noticed was how dark and dirty the world is. Nigh RitualIt's not really an ugly game, but at least in the demo I played, Miriam and the other characters felt detached from the environment, like actors performing in front of a green screen. Miriam's animations are fluid but she is not quite tied to the floor. In a deck section featuring rotating gears, she was standing right over them as they turned around. Although the arcs of his double-jump are precise and satisfying, they no longer feel synchronized with the various platforms emerging from the 2.5D world of the game.

This lack of harmony has repercussions on some of the fights. Miriam can manipulate various medieval weapons and dodge back or slide to avoid enemies. She has special attacks like fireballs and knives, and she can summon demonic tentacles, each consuming magic points. These special attacks are useful for dealing with less conventional monsters, such as a flying harpy or knight in armor hiding behind a giant shield.

Special attacks do not feel as powerful as they should in instant fighting. The damage is shown by numbers, but there is little sound or visual for the math to feel visceral. Sometimes fighting can be like clumsy fights in which you exchange health with opponents until one of you dies.

That's what was felt during the fight against the boss of the demo. A two-headed dragon caught me on one level of the tower, each head occupying one side of the screen. I had to dodge their fierce and incendiary attacks, and then counter mine, but I was often perplexed as to the position of the enemy hitbox and the end of mine. Miriam would suffer damage but would not suffer normal recoil, and my attacks would have landed with little visual or auditory feedback. The fighting animations looked great, but the real fight looked like tango with a ghost.

Ritual of the night is ambitious, both in terms of visual style and scale. Igarashi said that the size of his castle would be twice as big as anything he had done before, and the levels I have explored have certainly reinforced it. But they felt so rare. It's hard to know how much of this product will be recalibrated or polished before launch, but Ritual of the night feels heavy compared to some CastlevaniaThe most recent tributes.