Castlevania is a beloved franchise, and many independent developers have made games that have taken inspiration from Konami’s titles. These include the Citidale Trilogy that were heavily influenced by Castlevania 1 and 3, and now a new series from the developers of that series has come in the form of The Skylia Prophecy. This time around, the game takes influence from the later Classicvania and some of the Igavania titles.
My problem with the Citidale games is that they often mimicked Castlevania without giving themselves a proper identity and ways of differentiating themselves. The Skylia Prophecy manages to solve that problem by virtue of following in the pattern of many other imitators of the series in general, rather than trying to be as close to the original games as possible. Instead, The Skylia Prophecy goes in a broad strokes approach and manages to do some interesting things in the process.
The game stars Mirenia, an 18 year old girl who unleashed an evil power when she was a teenager and now seeks to vanquish the evil with the help of a spell she seeks out. The game has a lot of interesting locations that are depicted in great visual detail, and the towns in the game will have many villagers giving you sidequests, and the sidequests are key to getting the best endings. This is overall a vast improvement on The Citidale Trilogy, and also takes inspiration from the Souls games in both atmosphere and design philosophy.
It may sound like I am criticizing the game for taking inspiration from other games, but that is not the case. Many famous titles blatantly borrowed from other games, such as Ninja Gaiden on the NES, taking ideas from Castlevania as well. The Skylia Prophecy is not the best game, but it is rather fun. There are a nice variety of spells and actions you can do here, and the enemies are fun to fight against, and the overall quality of the gameplay, music and visuals are much higher than previous efforts by Ezekiel Rage and I had fun with it. I think many others will as well and that is what matters here.
In the end, I will recommend The Skylia Prophecy, as it is a game worth checking out. If you like Castlevania or games inspired by it, you could do a lot worse than this one.
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