Belmont’s Curse is not for the easily overwhelmed. At any given time, the game requires me to track rooms full of arrows, laser beams, axes, icicles, boulders, and birds, any one of which could be hurtling toward my person and often all of them are at once. Thankfully, protagonist Rose Belmont has been gifted with an arsenal of tools to assist her deadly travels in Casa de Dracula, but again: overwhelmed. After a certain point, there are too many tools to keep track of and I just fall back on the ones that have worked the best for me. But one thing I’ve appreciated about my time with Belmont’s Curse is how it’s forced me out of that comfort zone.
I typically favor a ranged playstyle, preferring the spear and whip weapons because with them I can keep a healthy distance and still dish out pain. Movement tools like the air dash, thorn whip, and slide help on the defense side and I’ve come to rely on them almost exclusively. For me, the best and easiest way to avoid damage is to simply get the hell away from the damage. With this avoidant strategy, I’ve been having a pretty decent time until one boss: the miser Mammon.
Mammon is this big ugly “be thou not afraid?” biblically accurate angel-type creature that looks like a wheel with an eyeball in the middle. My first few attempts to bring him down went poorly. He likes to erratically bounces about the arena, spits lines of fire at different angles, and tracks Rose’s position before brutally slamming down on her. I was having a devil of a time avoiding those attacks, as running away from one often put me in the danger zone of another. I just could not move fast enough to get away.
Frustrated, I took a break, popping on a speedrun of the game just to see the tips and tricks the professionals use to get through it. Turns out they parry, a lot. I don’t like the parry as a defense mechanism in Belmont’s Curse for the same reason I don’t like it in other non–Clair Obscur games: It’s hard to do that shit on the fly. That difficulty is compounded because, as I’ve mentioned, Belmont’s Curse likes to throw everything at you, everywhere, all at once. The only reason I like parrying in Expedition 33 is because you’re just standing still waiting for the attack. Trying to figure out timings when 9 million projectiles are headed at your face is a fool’s errand, especially when the movement mechanics feel more like muscle memory to me than something I have to actively time.
But shit, I’d like to finish the game this century so I gave it a shot and it’s infuriating how well it worked. Instead of another gauntlet of failures, I beat Mammon within a handful of tries after picking the game back up. You know how in Zelda games, after you get a new item in a dungeon, its boss is often themed specifically around that item? That’s what this felt like, even though I’d picked up the parry four or so bosses previously. Belmont’s Curse gives you the freedom to find your own playstyle, but every so often it offers a test to check for understanding. I like that, it prevents things from getting too rote or stale. I don’t think I have the capacity to put the parry into my regular rotation, but next time I get stuck, I know to reach into my bag of tricks for something new.