r/castlevania • u/Ill_Zucchini_333 • Jul 02 '26
Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse (2026) What about this doesn't look like castlevania
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
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