It has been just a bit over 2 years since the release of the IGAvania Kickstarter game, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and it’s time to take a look back on how it has improved itself as a game over the past two years, so let’s rewind back to the release date of June 18th, 2019.
The first major thing I want to cover here is the release, Bloodstained was a very bare-bones release, having a Story Mode and that was pretty much it upon launch, as it had only finished the development cycle, the Switch version saw a release a week later after the rest of the systems. As of this date, the Wii U/Vita versions are MIA and likely never going to release with Sony effectively ending its handheld and Nintendo having moved onto its latest incarnation of a console, the Switch.
Though Zangetsu mode was a fun addition, it was very bare-bones and had only a few notable things, like a boss fight with Miriam at the end of the Halls of Termination where Gebel is normally in the base game. It also had a few additional lines from David Hayter the man behind the voice of Solid Snake, unfortunately, this was the only major upside of this update.
The next update however turned into a bit of a different one as we got the Boss Revenge mode, where you take one of the game’s four bosses that are playable and fight Zangetsu/Miriam/Dominique in a sort of gauntlet style boss fight where each one is more difficult then the last and the idea is to get a fast time for this mode, more or less it was a nice little challenge for players to compete against one another. Do I believe this helped, possibly because it also added a fix for the randomizer mode which I was still playing at the time mind you, I wasn’t getting many seeds completed still after all this.
Overall is Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night worth it, considering it’s under 20$ these days, I would say so if you were considering it, get it but be wary of the version for your platform of choice, I’d recommend sticking with the Steam version of the game if you can, you can also get the PS4/Xbone versions of the game, they do handle pretty well in this writer’s humble opinion. With a few more updates on the timeline for Bloodstained to go I say it’s looking more and more worth it every time a new update arrives.
So should you get Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Yes, it’s got a fair bit of content to it and can provide bang for your buck, three playable characters, several different modes to choose from, yeah I would say get it, it’s usually fairly cheap now.
Note: All screenshots were taken from the Playstation 4 version of the game are were done by me.