Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

The Vampire Killer does double duty. In a fight it is a fast, flexible weapon for picking enemies apart at range and pouncing on them when they stagger; out of combat you crack it onto anchor points and swing across gaps like a trapeze artist. Chaining swings into attacks is where the game feels best, and players who learn to stay airborne will find routes and angles others miss.

Bosses are the second pillar. Classic Castlevania foes such as Death, Medusa and Carmilla return, joined by new ones including Joan of Arc. Beat one and it is sealed into Rose's tarot deck as an Arcana, which gives you a spell to cast and a special action to use in fights and exploration. Picking which Arcana to bring is a big part of how a run plays.

Your loadout fills out the rest. Weapons span seven distinct categories, and Relics trigger effects on offence and defence. Combining finds from exploration into a build that suits you is the long-term hook, and the maps mix brand-new ideas with nods to classic Castlevania stages. Adjustable difficulty, a keyboard-only option and full DualSense support make it easy to set up the way you like to play.

Belmont's Curse opens in Paris in 1499, as the bells toll and the city burns. Monstrous creatures have crawled out of the shadows overnight, and a castle that should not be there now looms over the rooftops.

Trevor Belmont, the hunter who defeated Dracula in Castlevania: Dracula's Curse, walks into the chaos with his daughter Rose at his side. Together they carry the holy whip of the Belmont clan, the Vampire Killer, and start cutting down the beasts pouring from the castle.

Rose quickly finds that the attack is not random. A conspiracy runs beneath the city, and following it drags her into the kind of gothic nightmare her family has fought for generations. The question hanging over the campaign is whether one young Belmont can save Paris, and what it costs her to try.

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is out now on Windows PC through Steam at US$29.99. Local Steam prices are RM100 in Malaysia, S$35.50 in Singapore, ₱1,445 in the Philippines, ฿845 in Thailand and Rp 400,000 in Indonesia; it is not sold on the Vietnamese store. It supports 11 languages, including Japanese, Korean, Russian and both Chinese scripts, with no Southeast Asian language. The minimum PC is a Core i5-8400, 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 1650 on Windows 11, with just 10 GB of storage. Full controller support covers DualSense, and a keyboard-only option is included.