Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse Hit Me in the Worst Way

Paris Is Burning... My Damn Patience Is Running Out

Paris is burning... I'm running out of damn patience

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is the millennial equivalent of Westwood Studios' The Lion King on the SNES. Both are amazingly colorful video games that are adaptations of a very popular franchise, and both have a very difficult moment early in the game that I just can't get past.

Go back and play the first level of The Lion King and you wouldn't know it's a title that has brought gamers of a certain age to tears. Throughout Pride Rock, baby Simba roars, jumps and jumps on enemies to defeat them, while the platforming challenges are light, with nothing more than a few intermittent death pits to avoid. It's an engaging opening number that introduces you to the game's systems well, but a poor number that sets you up for the absolute hell you're about to endure by the end of the game.

Like The Lion King, Belmont's Curse begins with a similar trap. The action platformer's hours, which see you exploring the streets and sewers of Paris in flames, were challenging, but nothing a little time, patience, and practice could overcome. It was good for a while. It is really very good

You play as Rose Belmont, daughter of Syfa and Trevor, who has been summoned to Paris with her father by a priest and seeks your family's expert help to combat the city's supernatural terrors. Starting as Rose instead of her famous father means you start from scratch with no holy water, no cross, not even your family's famous chain whip. You only get one sword and must build your arsenal of weapons and powers as you investigate the "mysteries" that plague the city.

And the game insists that you're actually solving a puzzle. Throughout each area, Rose encounters ghosts or statue watchers who give her the clues about each boss that you absolutely need to figure out where they are and how to make your way to them. My first inkling that bad times were ahead was when I noticed that a boss called the builder had fled to the clock tower. When I got to what I thought was a clock tower - because there was a big clock behind me!! - Not only was the boss I was looking for not there, but I actually ran into Dracula himself, and since I wasn't strong enough to face him, I immediately started the bad ending and changed the credits.

It's actually very neat that you can go to the end game whenever you want. I still don't know exactly how powerful I need to get to not automatically start the bad ending, but braver players than they can figure out. Of course, knowing there's a bad ending means there's also a true ending, which if the developers at Evil Empire read their history (and I'd say they did), means we'll have to change that in the near future.

A future that I can't reach right now.

Restarting after a bad ending, I had to ask a colleague who I knew played the game to help me review. After his hint, I was on the right track to find the real manufacturer. And... his fight was surprisingly easy. After a trio of unlocking bosses that were difficult in their own unique ways, fighting the builder was a cakewalk.

At a certain HP threshold, the boss runs away and you have to chase him through narrow corridors of pistons that either drop from the ceiling or shoot off the sides of the screen. These pistons are placed over spike pits with collapsing platforms, meaning you have to be quick on your feet to get through the section. I did so and reached the second boss room, where the fight continued as simply as the first stage.

Then, at the threshold of another HP, you have to chase him again. Back through the platforming section you just completed.

This is what happens every time. It is demoralizing

And I can't do it. Even without the brutal timer adding a suffocating layer of anxiety to the whole thing, going backwards is much harder than going forwards. Pistons shoot off the side of the screen so fast that I can't even time it. There are difficulty settings that allow you to turn off death or change how hard enemies hit, but that's for combat. No setting can make the platforming part any easier. During my second attempt at the boss, I turned off death and tried to practice the section backwards before starting the second phase of the fight. No (if you run out of time, the whole area will explode and kill you. I don't know yet if turning off death automatically completes the section for you.)

It felt bad, in a bad way. Unlike games like Souls (you know, that other genre of game that's well-known and sometimes notorious for its difficulty), here I can't backtrack and get stronger for it. Maybe I needed a break. Or maybe I need to release the game in its entirety, because either the developers are ashamed of themselves and want to fix something to make it easier, or there's some godlike YouTuber who can show me how it should be done, because I still can't see it.

With The Lion King, there was a legitimate financial reason for that game to be difficult. The developers admitted that they made the game as hard as it would take to get through a typical Blockbuster rental period. We don't rent games anymore (or at least not like we did back then), and this level of difficulty seems almost cruel.

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