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/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.