Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse Review: Hard, Fast, Gorgeous

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This Castlevania: Belmont's Curse review comes from someone who grew up on Symphony of the Night and stopped waiting for another 2D Belmont game years ago. It's a 2D Metroidvania from Evil Empire, the Dead Cells team behind Return to Castlevania. Konami released it on October 15, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch on the same day. I started on the demo, carried my save into the full game, and I've started a journey inside Dracula's Paris.

You play as Rose Belmont, daughter of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades, in 1499, 23 years after Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, as the Steam store page sets it up. Dracula's castle has risen in the heart of Paris. Rose carries a cursed mark on her arm, passed down from her late mother, and that curse makes her a prize for Dracula's forces.

Below, you'll find how the tarot system, the weapons, the bosses, and the PC version hold up, and who should buy it.

Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse Review Summary

• Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is the best 2D Castlevania I've played since Symphony of the Night, with fast combat and a map stuffed with secrets.

• Every beaten boss becomes an Arcana, a tarot-card spell you build out through three Works of Mercy challenges.

• Seven weapon families with four weapons each, plus a holy-shield parry on its own button so you can attack and parry together.

• Custom Mode adds checkpoints before boss doors and cuts trap damage, and you can switch it on or off freely.

• The Belmont's Curse PC version runs smoothly once it boots, but some Steam players hit a black screen on startup.

Rose Belmont's Tarot Deck Runs Everything

Sypha left Rose a tarot deck along with the curse, and almost every system in the game hangs off it. Beat a boss and, as the official PlayStation page puts it, the game seals that boss into one of her cards as an Arcana. Each one works as a spell and fills the slot classic Castlevania gave to subweapons. The cards also carry lore, dialogue and hints toward the next boss, which makes the deck a quest log in disguise.

Each Belmont's Curse Arcana has three Works of Mercy objectives tied to using it. Clear one, and you pick an extra effect for that spell. Clear all three and you get extra dialogue. The Cross is the one I kept on longest, since it hits harder the farther it travels from Rose, and that taught me to throw it from across the room instead of up close.

Captured bosses become voices in Rose's mind, and some of them are good company. Joan of Arc settles into a supportive role, and Medusa spends her time taunting. A few bosses barely speak once they're in the deck, which left me wanting more from characters this well voiced.

The deck doubles as your hint system, and the game gives you nothing else to point the way. Clues come as sketches, short poems, and ghosts who point toward secrets. I liked decoding them on a fresh evening and hated them when tired. My own icons on the map kept me oriented, but the map never flags a door locked by a lever you can't reach yet, and I lost one session to a corridor I'd walked past three times.

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Seven Weapon Families, One Great Parry

Rose has seven weapon families: longsword, dual longswords, gauntlets, sword and shield, spear, greatsword, and whip, with four weapons in each. The longsword rewards an attack straight out of a backdash, the Cestus Gauntlets build damage the longer a combo runs, and the greatsword trades speed for heavy, slow hits. The whip deals full damage only at the tip, so it plays like a spacing tool and punishes you for standing too close.

The parry arrives after the second boss as a holy shield, and it changed how I play more than any weapon did. It sits on its own trigger, separate from your attack buttons, so you can swing and block in the same motion. My first fights were all dodge rolls and backsteps. By the castle I was standing my ground against armored knights and turning their swings into openings.

Rose's whip earns its keep as a traversal tool. You can grapple to enemies and strike on arrival, swing from hooks across chasms, and even use flying enemies as platforms. Steam user NinJaRed wrote that the game opens up once the arcane whip arrives, and I'd say the same to anyone who finds the first hours slow.

Readability slips when four enemies fire at once. Overlapping attacks bury the tells for a parry, and early health drains fast. The grapple also has a long wind-up, so pulling yourself into a crowd can leave Rose exposed. I switched from the analog stick to the D-pad in my first week, and my platforming got cleaner straight away.

Bosses And Secrets Fill Dracula's Paris

The map covers the streets of Paris, the sewers, the bone-packed catacombs, a royal cemetery, Notre-Dame and Dracula's castle itself. Each area looks distinct, with saturated colors in place of the usual gothic gray. Rooms nod to the NES original, Castlevania III and Symphony of the Night, and breakable walls still hide meat.

The Fallen waits in the sewers as your first real test. A knight in mechanical armor drags the fight across several rooms, turning it into half puzzle, half chase. One vampire fight marks you with a counter of hits you can take before Rose succumbs, and it made me play cleaner than any health bar ever has. Death's fight has you swinging around a cathedral to stay clear of his scythe, and it's my favorite fight in the game.

Getting back to bosses hurts more. Mirrors work as save points; a few of them sit a long run from the boss door, enemies respawn when you save, and healing items run short, which turned some fights into slow attrition for me. The order you take bosses in also matters, and going off the intended path made a couple of encounters spike hard.

Custom Mode is the fix if that sounds like too much. It can put a checkpoint before boss doors, raise your damage and lower trap damage, and you can toggle it at any time. I left it off and used it once for a trap gauntlet that kept clipping me. Those gauntlets reward Relics, passive items that change stats, and you can equip up to three.

PC Runs Smoothly Once It Boots

The published PC tiers ask for a GTX 1650 at minimum and an RTX 3060 with a Core i5-10400 and 16GB of RAM on the recommended tier. My RTX 4080 sits well above what the game targets. It ran smoothly in the busiest fights. I did notice the odd hitch when moving between rooms, which Steam users reported too.

Several players in Steam reviews reported a black screen on startup, and that's the bigger PC problem. My own boots were clean, but there are too many reports to write off as bad setups. Steam user Togoat Gigio said launching in windowed mode at 1920 by 1080 fixed it, using -screen-fullscreen 0 -screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080 in the launch options. Steam user Ripley said it helps to set the monitor to 60Hz before launching and switch back once you're in, and warned against turning off V-Sync.

Players also report that ultrawide screens aren't supported and that the slide can't be rebound. Cutscene close-ups are the weakest visuals, with rough character models that look out of place next to the hand-drawn backdrops.

On Steam Deck, user NiceTry05 said the handheld holds its frame rate across most areas, with a small dip in one background-heavy zone. Until Konami ships a fix for the boot issue, try the two workarounds above before you refund.

Is Castlevania: Belmont's Curse Worth Buying?

Yes, if you like a Metroidvania that asks something of you, and I would pay full price for it again. This is a Castlevania Metroidvania with real bosses and secrets tucked behind breakable walls.

On PC, it runs well once it's past the boot screen. I haven't played the console versions, so I can't vouch for them. It's a full Metroidvania with no roguelike runs, and the Switch version on the Nintendo store plays on Switch 2 through backward compatibility.

Wait, if you want the pixel-art Castlevania of the 1990s. The art is hand-drawn with 3D models, the music mixes new tracks with classic themes remixed over electronic beats, and the combat leans toward modern action games. Worried about long runbacks? Play the free demo first, and its save carries into the full game.

FAQs About Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse

Final Words

Belmont's Curse plays like the work of a team that knows the old games by heart and still made its own calls. The tarot deck is the smartest of them. Every boss you beat comes back as a spell and a voice in Rose's head, and that gives the long middle of the game a reason to keep fighting.

Runbacks, a stingy hint system, and screens that bury parry tells will test your patience, and Custom Mode is there for anyone who wants less of that.

Watch for how Konami handles the PC fixes and whether more of this team's take on the Belmonts follows. Rose has earned a second game.

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