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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

A Castlevania in all but name, paid for by its players

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019) is the game Koji Igarashi made after leaving Konami: a gothic castle explored room by room in the manner of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Its Kickstarter campaign raised $5,545,991 in 2015, the most any video game had raised there at the time. ArtPlay developed it with Shutaro Iida as director, 505 Games published it in June 2019, and it had sold more than two million copies by 2023.

In May 2015 Koji Igarashi asked strangers on the internet for $500,000. He had spent more than twenty years at Konami, produced its Castlevania series for most of the 2000s, and helped make Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997), the game that turned the series into one huge castle to be explored room by room. Konami had stopped making that kind of game, so he left and pitched one of his own. The goal was reached within four hours. When the campaign closed on 13 June 2015, 64,867 backers had pledged $5,545,991. Wired summed up what they were paying for: “essentially a classic Castlevania without Konami’s trademarks”.

It took four more years to arrive. Wireframe’s reviewer opened his verdict in July 2019 by calling Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night “a Castlevania game in all but name, and even then the subtitle isn’t too far off”.

Fast facts

  • Developer: ArtPlay, the studio Igarashi co-founded after leaving Konami.
  • Publisher: 505 Games.
  • Producer: Koji Igarashi. Director: Shutaro Iida, a former Konami programmer.
  • Kickstarter: 11 May to 13 June 2015; $5,545,991 from 64,867 backers against a $500,000 goal.
  • Released: June 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows, with the Switch version a week later; Wireframe listed it at £34.99.
  • Sales: more than one million copies by June 2020 and more than two million by August 2023, by the publisher’s count.

The campaign

The money did not pay for the whole game. Igarashi already had investment behind it, and the Kickstarter, Wired reported, was meant to enlarge the budget, pay for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One discs and show that Western players wanted the game. They did. On 11 June 2015, with a day and a half to go, the total passed the $4.19 million that inXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera had raised two years earlier, and MCV reported that Bloodstained had broken the record for a video game on Kickstarter. That run of record-breaking role-playing and adventure campaigns is told in the CRPG Renaissance entry.

Making it

Igarashi produced the game and Shutaro Iida, who had worked at Konami from 1996 and moved on to the Castlevania series in the early 2000s, designed and directed it. ArtPlay could not supply all the hands it needed. In 2017 an ArtPlay representative explained that the studio was doing the game design, story and overall production, while a hired developer, DICO, built assets and levels; Inti Creates, first announced as a partner, worked only on the promised retro-style spin-off. That spin-off, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, came out first, in 2018, in the style of the 8-bit Castlevania games.

What it plays like

The heroine is Miriam, whose body has been grafted with magical crystals, and the castle she explores is the one Symphony of the Night players remember: stained glass, enormous chandeliers, “a labyrinthine sprawl of corridors, multi-layered rooms, and hidden paths containing secret treasures”, all lit by a blood-red moon. Wireframe found that even the enemies’ behaviour was “pulled straight from the Belmont archives”, and that a trick for getting in a fast second attack still worked for “those who still maintain the muscle memory 20 years on”.

The new idea is the shard. Every enemy Miriam kills has a chance to drop one, and with it she inherits that creature’s power: a beam of lightning, a summoned familiar, a shield or a passive boost, each drawing on her mana. Bosses drop the shards that open up the castle, such as a double jump or “a reflector beam that gives you access to previously inaccessible areas”. As in Symphony, the castle is a single connected map, and new abilities let the player back into places that were out of reach before. That structure is what the Metroidvania entry describes, and what fans named “Igavania” after Igarashi.

Reception

Wireframe gave it 74%. The reviewer called the castle “a treat to explore” and the combat “responsive and satisfying”, but found the side quests grindy, the crafting “mostly inconsequential”, and the game marred by “a disappointing slew of bugs and glitches”. He once wandered the castle for more than an hour because a line of dialogue had not triggered, and he disliked puzzles that sent him back to “a chest you didn’t know existed in an area you last visited five hours ago”. He concluded: “there’s no denying ArtPlay succeeded in creating exactly what it said it was going to.”

The Switch version, released a week after the others, was the weak one. 505 Games’ community manager acknowledged its problems within a day of its release and listed fixes that WayForward and ArtPlay were working on, from crashes and input delay to Miriam’s jump.

Afterwards

Sales passed one million in June 2020 and two million by August 2023, and versions for iOS and Android followed in December 2020. Igarashi and 505 Games went on to announce Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, a 2.5D action role-playing game set in the 16th century; it was due in 2026 and was then delayed to 2027. Shutaro Iida died in February 2026, aged 52.

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