There's no reason to act coy: even if it doesn't have that word in the title, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a Castlevania game. And a pretty good one!
Bloodstained takes place in an alternate version of England with magic and alchemy. The Alchemist's Guild had managed to created people known as Shardbinders with supernatural abilities by fusing them with demonic crystals. Then, because they're jerks, the Alchemist's Guild decided to send a message to society by releasing some demons. All Shardbinders died in the demon-summoning ritual except two: Gebel, who somehow survived the rite, and Miriam, who did not take part because she fell into a mystical slumber immediately before the sacrifice. Ten years later, Gebel summons a demonic castle from hell to destroy the world, and Miriam, the protagonist, awakens from her slumber and vows to stop him.
It's your job as Miriam to punch you way through Gebel's castle, find a way to destroy the it, stop Gebel, and save the world. As a classic-styled Metroidvania, the game consists of running around the game world looking for the ability or power-up that gets you into the next area until you've uncovered the entire map and beaten every boss, killing every demon you encounter along the way.
Like the Castlevania games that came before it, Bloodstained is played in the 2D plane. You can move left, right, jump, and duck. The huge, sprawling castle is similarly divided into a bunch of smaller rooms arranged on a 2D grid. It doesn't make much sense as a building (and it feels a bit weird to have an underground desert or an alternate dimension ice cave), but we can just blame that on the demons.
Even though the gameplay is 2D, the graphics are 3D. All the characters and monsters have 3D models rather than 2D sprites, and the environments have depth. The creators clearly put a great deal of effort into decorating the castle, as it's filled with rooms with unique, beautiful backgrounds. The gameplay also sometimes incorporates the third dimension by having Miriam move along a predefined curved path in the 3D space. This feature is usually used just to show off a set piece, but there's one level and one boss battle that are each built around 3D space to great effect.
As far as general gameplay goes, you can run, jump, attack, and... that's mostly it. You can back-step, and eventually learn how to double-jump, but that's about all the movement abilities you have. Unlike games where you eventually learn a bunch of special maneuvers, Bloodstained sticks with the basics. Miriam does unlock plenty of special abilities over the courses of the game, but the movement-based one aren't pragmatic for combat. (There actually are weapon techniques you can learn... but I didn't use a single one the entire game, since they're tied to specific weapons, and I never used a weapon that had a technique.)
Bloodstained's greatest strength is its customization. There's a ton of options for Miriam's equipment, letting you tailor her moveset to your playstyle. Even looking at just the weapons, there's already tons of options. There are 10 different types of weapons, each of which has its own general moveset. On top of that, within each weapon set there are plenty of weapons that have some sort of special effect or quirk to them. This gives you tons of options to find a weapon you like. (I ended up using greatswords for basically my entire playthrough, since they're one of the few weapon types that can hit low enemies). The rest of your equipment consists of headgear (which shows up on Miriam's model), armor, and two accessories.
On top of your regular equipment Miriam can equip five demonic shards. There are several different types of shards, from projectiles to support to pets to passives, and this is where you really have freedom to develop your playstyle. Nearly every enemy in the game has a small chance to drop a shard, which Miriam can equip to gain a special power, usually related to the demon that dropped the shard. Shards can also be leveled up across two power ratings: rank and grade. Rank is increased by spending materials to power up the shard, while grade is equal to the number of shards of that type you have.
Unfortunately, the shard system has a couple of drawbacks. In a certain sense, the freedom is constricting. Yeah, there's a ton of shards to choose from, but there's also only so many interesting variations of a shard that can shoot a projectile. If you find a shard that you like, you might spend your crafting materials to increase its rank and grind a couple of copies to increase its grade, but once you've done that, using any other shard will be a handicap. You can level up a few shards, but you can only feasibly have a fraction of your arsenal battle-ready without an absurd amount of grinding. Also, the game tells you what aspect of the shard grows stronger as its rank increases, but not its grade. As a result, to maximize your shard's power to you need to grind its grade, but you won't know how its power is increasing, which makes it hard to feel a benefit from your efforts.
The equipment and shard system is backed up by a robust crafting system. Almost every item in the game can be crafted. Crafting materials can be spent to rank up shards, create consumables, weapons, armor, or accessories, and even cook food. Every crafted food item in the game gives a small, permanent stat boost the first time you eat it, which I thought was a neat way to incentivize use of the cooking system. Additionally, once you craft an item, you can then buy it directly, so obtaining multiple copies of a crafted item doesn't require farming tons of materials. Lastly, every item that can be crafted can be broken down back into its components. (This requires using a consumable that can be purchased at a relatively high price early and farmed easily later on.) As a result, you never need to worry about using up a rare component because you can always get it back if necessary, and some crafting materials can easily be obtained by purchasing a crafted item and breaking it down.
The game design feels a bit inconsistent, as there are a ton of places where they streamlined the game for the player, but plenty where they made the game needlessly obtuse. For instance, the game includes a compendium that gives you information on all enemies and items you've encountered, including where to find them... except for items that come from respawning chests. There are rooms where you can save and heal, and rooms where you can warp—but you can't save or heal in the warp rooms. If you ever make it to a warp room, you can just warp to the main hub and use the save room there. So if you have access to a warp room, you can also get to a save room with no danger or risk. So why force us to take the extra minute to warp to the hub, walk to the save room, walk back, then warp back?
Similarly, the exploration system is generally user-friendly, with one notable exception. Your map of the castle will automatically be filled in with rooms, doors, and chests as you explore, and you can put your own markers down for other points of interest as well. This makes it relatively easy to find pathways you haven't explored yet. One easy way to become frustrated in a metroidvania is if you aren't sure how to proceed, and need to aimlessly wander the entire map to find the next area. Bloodstained avoids this by offering hints in the form of information on the theme of the next area. This is a fantastic way of doing it, as you still need to explore the castle yourself, but you'll know you're in the right place once you reach it. Except... There's one point in the game where in order to progress, you need to use a specific skill in a specific area to find a hidden, unmarked chest, without any guidance from the game. In other words, the game design is generally kind, with one glaring exception.
You also only have one save and one life, which I found a bit annoying. You die, that's it, game over. I understand that's how games usually work, but you don't have to lose all your progress when you die. Even if you lost your items, gold, and experience, I wish you could at least keep map progress. There's no way to tell where a save room is, so if you happen to bypass one, you're going to have that much more progress hanging over your head as you go further and further. Once you reach a certain point (without finding a save room), the dread from losing progress begins to outweigh the fun of exploration.
Performance is another area where the game suffers. At least on the Switch in handheld mode, which is how I played most of the game. Graphically intensive rooms had noticeable slowdown, and the game randomly crashed twice. It sometimes felt like the game was missing inputs (mostly when mashing attack, which could have something to do with it), and movement wasn't super-precise. (That's not to say it's imprecise, and it's good enough for what the game requires, but it doesn't have the precision of a game like Dark Souls or Monster Hunter.)
I think the biggest overarching flaw of the game is that pretty much everything is designed to encourage grinding, but there is nothing to follow it up. You need to grind to get shards, upgrade and crafting materials, food ingredients, technique mastery, compendium information, gold... It's very easy to get over-leveled from going after just a few of these things. And once you're over-leveled, there's no going back. The game is trivialized. Yes, sometimes it's fun to run around and curb-stomp everything, but once you can ignore enemies the game becomes nothing more than a subpar platformer. There are harder difficulties that unlock after you beat the game once, so maybe that restores the challenge, but I just played through on normal difficulty.
Let's finish off with something the game handles well: the story. It's simple, with just enough flourish to not be written off as an excuse plot. But it shows up relatively infrequently, and keeps cutscenes short. It strikes the perfect balance of keeping you invested without keeping you from the gameplay, even if it isn't going to be winning a writing award anytime soon.
If you want an innovative or memorable storytelling experience... Bloodstained won't give you that. But if you just want decent gameplay that'll entertain you for a dozen or two hours, then Bloodstained is a solid buy.
That being said, if you plan on getting Bloodstained and have a PS4 (or PS5), I think I'd recommend getting Castlevania Requiem instead, if you haven't played it before. Requiem is a compilation of two Castlevania games: Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. This an absolutely fantastic collection, as it gives you a taste of each type of Castlevania game: Rondo of Blood is a hardcore level-based action game, while Symphony of Blood helped pioneer the action-adventure RPG exploration 'metroidvania' sub-genre. If you haven't played Castlevania before, you couldn't ask for a better sampler. Having played both Ritual of the Night and Symphony of the Night, they deliver basically the same experience—so if you can get Symphony of the Night, a piece of gaming history, at a cheaper price and bundled with another game, why wouldn't you?
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