Nearly two decades after the last mainline 2D Castlevania game,the team behind 2023’s Dead Cell’s Return to Castlevania DLC has been given the keys to Dracula’s Castle for real. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse aims to breathe fresh life into this 40-year-old series with a creative blend of old and new ideas. With a brand new Belmont wielding the family whip, familiar foes in your way, and modern conveniences that have become expected in the genre, developer Evil Empire has largely hit their mark – but if you are a longtime fan expecting Belmont’s Curse to be a completely faithful revival of the series we played back in the early 2000s, then you will want to think again. This is a different breed of monster you're hunting, both for good and for ill.

Belmont’s Curse picks up in Paris about 23 years after the events of the NES/Famicom classic Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (the game Netflix’s original Castlevania series was based on). This time, the Belmont in charge of dishing out pain to the various creatures of the night – including big, bad Dracula himself – is Rose Belmont, the daughter of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades. Trevor leaves Rose on her own to get to the bottom of what is going on in Paris, and the story that follows over the next 10-15 hours is one that boils down to what fans of Konami’s 40-year-old series would expect: Dracula comes back, and you need to kill him.

Belmont’s Curse does sprinkle some nifty twists into the cauldron here and there, many of which revolve around that titular “curse” and the mysterious set of Tarot cards Sypha left to her daughter before her off-screen death in childbirth.

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