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Mina the Hollower, Castlevania: Belmont's Curse by Rafiki Yesterday, 8:18pm PDT Mina the Hollower I just don't get the hype. The devs said it's directly inspired by 2D Zelda games, and the Bloodborne influence is obvious from anyone who's played Bloodborne. Bloodborne (and Souls games) break up monotony by having enemies and bosses with a big variety of surprising and challenging move sets and a low margin of error. Beating them feels like an accomplishment. Zelda breaks up monotony by guaranteeing one new item per dungeon that changes combat, helps you solve puzzles, or unlocks access to new areas. Mina has a variety of enemies but leans hard into Zelda's hack and slash combat, so they're much simpler and less interesting. I can only remember one boss fight, but that's only because I died like 8 times. As for items, you can randomly discover "sidearms" that are just extra attacks like Castlevania items, many of which are of dubious value, and you find trinkets that you can equip to provide various bonuses, most of which are also of dubious value. I try to finish every game just out of principle of paying for the stupid things and I think I've cleared 6/8 dungeons or orbs or whatever, but I'm bored and don't want to play anymore. I also had minor control issues. You can dodge attacks by jumping or by diving underground. You have to hold the jump button to burrow, which necessarily means you have to wait through the jump animation in order to go underground. Are you like me and hold the jump button after decades of muscle memory from games that trained you jump higher/farther by holding the jump button? Well, then you're going to dive underground when you don't want to. And when you're underground you speed up a little which threw off my timing and made me feel like the character was lurching out of control sometimes. This is compounded by a trinket that allows you to float after jumping by holding the jump button, so you're almost certainly going to burrow when you don't want to. There's also a weapon that can toggle between a melee attack and a ranged attack. You can press a shoulder button to toggle, ok cool, or you can press the jump + attack button which you're going to fucking do when you want to jump and attack. Finally, healing vials are mapped to the A button (on Switch). To talk/interact, you can press the Y button. Or you can also press the A button. Never do this. You will accidentally use a healing vial and flip your control off of the ceiling. I find it impossible that these issues didn't come up during play testing. Finally, the game uses pixel art as some dumb "homage" to Gameboy Color games. On the handheld screen I can kind of tolerate it, but blown up on a 65" television screen it looks like shit. Here's the promotional art: What not just do THAT? Keep the limited palette, but clean, sharp lines! Castlevania: Belmont's Curse In contrast, I want to keep playing Castlevania. It is a more accessible Hollow Knight: Silksong. Recommended for anyone who thought Silksong was too hard or would be. It is all about fluid platforming with jumping and sliding and air dashing and wall jumping and grappling and ground pounding, mixed in with heavy combat. It is penalizing without being punishing. The platforming can get really demanding and there's lots of traps like spikes, saw wheels, smashing blocks, etc. that will reset you to a platform if you touch them, but they only take off a sliver of health instead of 1/3rd. On the other hand, enemies can truck you, but you can avoid everything if don't just charge in and spam the attack button. Like Silksong, it does overuse locking you into a room to fight a gauntlet of enemies and some hordes can feel frustratingly cheap, but it's easy enough to power through it compared to dying and starting over 50 times. There are some balance issues. Bosses are much, much easier than the standard combat. They have pretty simple attack patterns that are easy to avoid if you slow down and pay attention. Out of the 6 or so I've fought, I died one time on all of them learning the fight, and the third boss I flubbed through without dying at all. From an accessibility standpoint, I get it. If a boss is a brick wall, you can't advance the game. But it feels odd to struggle through getting to a boss only to breeze through the encounter. Another issue is projectile enemies predict your position to the last millisecond before firing so you can only dodge something after it's already launched, and the game has a habit of putting these enemies right on the edge of a platform and some of them won't fire until you're within a certain distance. God forbid you have to grapple over to them, because there's a 90% chance you'll get shot out of the air. They also have a kick if you're in melee range that can knock you off of the platform into a pit, and it's novel the first time but enraging the 20th time you manage to land on a platform only to be INSTANTLY kicked off. Unlike Mina, Castlevania didn't opt for shitty pixel art as some homage to the earlier games in the series. It looks like some kind of Japanese comic book style, and there's lots of COLORS, and vistas, and pretty elaborate background art through every room, and a lot going on in background and foreground layers. It's really impressive, doubly so because it's never distracting and enemies are always clearly visible and readable in every area no matter what's going on. Give the art team a raise, they clearly enjoyed working on this game. Maybe it's not fair to compare the music in this game to the earlier composers because they are living legends, but the music in this game is completely forgettable. The only track that stands out is a remix of the Simon's Quest daytime theme. I know some nerd is going to point out that Hollow Knight was inspired by Symphony of the Night, and DUH, nerdlinger, but this game is clearly carrying the baton from Silksong. I like it. It is a good game. It is not the best game, but I don't regret paying full price a few days after launch, and that's a big recommendation.

Mina the Hollower, Castlevania: Belmont's Curse by Rafiki Yesterday, 8:18pm PDT