Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is the millennial equivalent to Westwood Studios’ The Lion King on SNES. Both are wondrously colorful video games that are adaptations of a much-beloved franchise and both have a moment early in the game so frustratingly difficult that I can’t progress.
Go back and play the first level of The Lion King and you’d have no idea this was a title that made gamers of a certain age cry bloody tears. Throughout Pride Rock, baby Simba roars, jumps, and pounces on enemies’ heads to defeat them, while platforming challenges are light, nothing but a few intermittent death pits to avoid. It’s a cute opening number that does a good job of introducing you to the game’s systems, but a poor one of preparing you for the absolute hell you’re about to endure for the rest of the game.
Like The Lion King, Belmont’s Curse starts off with a similar trap. The action platformer’s opening hours, which find you exploring the streets and sewers of a Paris in flames, were challenging but nothing a little bit of time, patience, and practice couldn’t surmount. For a time, it was good; really, really good.
You play as Rose Belmont, child of Sypha and Trevor, summoned to Paris with her father at the behest of a priest seeking your family’s specialized help to fight against the supernatural horrors plaguing the city. Starting as Rose instead of her famous father means you start at zero. No holy water, no cross, not even your family’s famous chain whip. You get just a sword, and are meant to cobble together your arsenal of weapons and powers as you investigate the “mysteries” plaguing the city.
And the game insists that you are indeed solving a mystery. Throughout each area, Rose runs into ghosts or statuesque watchers who give her clues about each boss that you will absolutely need in order to figure out where they are and how to open the path to get to them. My first inkling that bad times were ahead was when I got the clue that a boss, called the Builder, had fled to the clocktower. When I got to what I thought was the clocktower—because there was a big-ass clock behind me!!—not only was the boss I was looking for not there, but I had actually stumbled upon Dracula himself, and because I hadn’t gotten powerful enough to face him, I immediately triggered the bad ending and rolled credits.
It actually is pretty neat that you can head to the endgame whenever you want. I don’t yet know exactly how much more powerful I need to get to not automatically trigger the bad end, but braver players than I can figure that out for themselves. Of course, knowing there’s a bad ending means there’s also a true ending, which if the developers at Evil Empire studied their history (and I can tell they did), means we’re gonna have to flip this shit over in the near future.
A future that, at the moment, I can’t get to.
Restarting after the bad end, I had to ask for help from a colleague who I knew was playing the game for review. After his hint, I was put on the right track to find the actual Builder. And…his fight was surprisingly easy. After a trio of opening bosses that were difficult in their own unique ways, fighting the Builder was a cakewalk.
The trap was sprung.
At a certain HP threshold the boss flees and you have to chase him through narrow corridors of pistons that either fall from the ceiling or shoot from the sides of the screen. These pistons are positioned over spike pits with collapsing platforms, meaning you have to be quick on your feet to get through the section. I did, making it to the second boss room where the fight proceeded as simply as the first phase.
Then, at another HP threshold, you have to chase him again. Backwards through the platforming section you just completed.
In 90 seconds.
This is what happens, every time. It’s demoralizing.
And I can’t do it. Even without the brutal timer adding a suffocating layer of anxiety to this whole thing, going backwards is much harder than forwards. Pistons shoot out from the side of the screen at such speed that I can’t figure out the timing at all. There’s difficulty settings that allow you to turn off death or tweak how hard enemies hit, but that’s for combat. There’s no setting can make a platforming section easier. During my second attempt at the boss, I turned off death and tried practicing the section backwards before starting the second phase of the fight. Nope. (If you run out of time, the whole area explodes, killing you. I don’t yet know if turning off death will just auto complete the section for you.)
It felt bad, demoralizingly so. Unlike in a soulslike (y’know, that other genre of game known and sometimes celebrated for its difficulty), here I can’t back out and get stronger for this. Maybe I needed a break. Or maybe I need the game to release in full because either the developers are ashamed of themselves and want to patch in something to make this easier, or there’s a godlike YouTuber who can show me how this is supposed to be done because I can’t see it yet.
With The Lion King, there was a legitimate financial reason for why that game was so tough. The developers admitted that they made the game as hard as it was so that it’d take longer than a typical Blockbuster rental period to beat it. We don’t rent games anymore (or at least not like we did back then), and this level of difficulty feels almost cruel.