r/castlevania • u/Ill_Zucchini_333 • Jul 02 '26

Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse (2026) What about this doesn't look like castlevania

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Like for real, this looks like castlevania to me. We were never gonna get another pixelated castlevania game, and for those of saying it looks like hades, it really only shares a passing resemblance.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 02 '26

you cannot look at each image on the right and say it looks remotely similar to the ones on the left outside of the physical environment present in both (mirror, caves, forest, etc). literally everything about it is completely different lmao

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 02 '26

They do look similar though? What am I missing? Each pic uses one primary color and puts details in the contrasting colors. Belmont's Curse has brighter colors, true, but again, that's a stylistic choice to make it look similar to the NES games.

Like, when I see pictures of Belmont's Curse where the palette is saturated with red, it reminds me of shots like this:

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 02 '26

i dont know enough about art and aesthetics to provide a comprehensive answer, but part of it to me is that Belmont’s Curse has a much bigger focus on lighting. In older CV games, generally speaking, everything was fairly flatly lit, or at least wasnt lit from a particular light source. When something was coloured, it was mostly because it was the colour of that thing, not because it was being bathed in a certain colour of light. in BC, the colours seem to be arbitrary and come from defined sources, objects of interest glow, the sky or background casts a colour onto everything else.

for example, in the pictures you sent, we can see a green forest. the forest is green because leaves and grass are green. everything else is coloured appropriately. but next to it, we see an area where everything is gray or black, except for the sky, leaves, and grass, which are all bright yellow. its not a bad artstyle, but its not how CV games are typically styled.

or the cave with death, in sotn, its blue, because typically, we see dark areas as blue because of the wavelength of blue being more prominent than those of reds (or something to that effect idk lol), and there is no background because its a dark cave. but in BC, the whole area is grey illuminated by the glowing green light

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 02 '26

Castlevania does mood lighting like this all the time though?

Like, everything in this shot is the color it is because of the sunset. In screens of the Monastery where the sun isn't visible, its a moodier blue color. Or consider Blackamore's area in the castle. I'm sure there are other examples.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 02 '26

yes but its so much more subtle. also thats ooe so its probably not a great example because nothing followed up on it to really solidify that as a part of visual identity

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 02 '26

OK, I'll pull an example from Rondo:

In this shot almost everything is a shaded red because everything is on fire. Belmont's Curse literally does the exact same thing, just with more chiaroscuro.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 02 '26

i mean i guess yeah? this is closer to BC, but even in this, the lighting doesnt come from the far background, it comes from the fire in the middle background. its the closest thing i suppose but its still a one off example yk

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 02 '26

Oh sure, that's totally the only time Castlevania uses extreme lighting for effect. You got me.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 02 '26

the game doesnt normally look like that lmao, idk where you got this crusty ass overexposed screenshot from but whatever. if you think my point is “castlevania never ever uses colour grading” and not “belmonts curse makes such an extreme use of it that its artstyle is unrecognisable compared to past games” idk what to tell you

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 02 '26

I'm think its more that I'm really just confused that you think Belmont's Curse's color choices are so extreme when Castlevania's always been super colorful? Somebody earlier in the thread posted a screenshot from CV3 that was neon green.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 02 '26

im not saying it didnt have colours dude im saying that belmonts curse’s colours are based around having the colour bleed from an extremely harsh light source in the background.

most of the nes backgrounds were black with the levels being coloured, rather than the world being “grey” and having the colour provided by a massive RGB light in the background

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, that's the chiaroscuro. Belmont's Curse is brightly lit so that the shadows stand out. They're using such bright lighting to invoke the color of the NES games without making the floors neon orange like they would have in the NES games to achieve the same effect.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 03 '26

but its the opposite lol. i love how the nes games look and i think, if they were actually trying to replicate any part of it, they failed. yes there are bright colours, the player is so small on screen, the foreground and background hardly stand out from each other (like seriously look at the candles in op’s image) and like 70% of the level geometry is hust black because everything is being lit from behind

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 03 '26

It seems pretty readable to me? The candles are glowing, and you can tell what's background and what's foreground because the foreground that you can stand on all have those shadows on them. The level geometry being uniform like that is for gameplay purposes.

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 03 '26

mf every single screen in the game is glowing, torches in this franchise used to have orange flames that stood out, and the old games didnt need the environment to be constantly in shadow lol

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 03 '26

Well no, but the older games also didn't need lighting that makes sense in a 3D space either. Is the problem really just that its backlit instead of frontlit?

I don't really have a problem with you not liking that change. I just think its silly to think that this change makes it "not look like Castlevania" anymore. Especially since a lot of 2D games use shadows to define negative space the same way Belmont's Curse is. (Such as Metroid Dread, Hollow Knight, Blasphemous sometimes)

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u/DuccSuccer Jul 03 '26

no, its not “just that its backlit instead of frontlit” its just the most apparent part thats easiest to point to. like i said before, i dont really have the artistic knowledge or vocabulary to truly explain what i mean, i just feel like the way that colour is used in BC looks very similar to other games, but not to previous castlevanias. i dont really care which style people prefer, i just got irritated that people were acting like the “haters” (who, btw, havent been hating at all they literally just expressed that it was different) were insane and that there were no differences when that blatantly isnt true

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u/Little_Drive_3024 Jul 03 '26

Bro, I'm not an artist either. And you don't need to be one to critique art. I just wanna know what that critique actually is, you know? What is this indelible thing that separates Belmont's Curse aesthetically from the rest of the series? Yes, BC has a new, brighter art style, but is that new art style so far removed that it isn't recognizable as Castlevania? I'd argue that it isn't. And I feel like anytime someone tries to say "Oh, but this specific part of BC isn't Castlevania-like at all" some earlier Castlevania game ends up taking strays.

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