As promised (to myself) I immersed myself in more of Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, continuously pressing on through challenges and evil demonic beasts (as seen above). If you haven’t treated yourself to this game yet, it’s a metroidvania type that takes places in late 1800’s anime-ified England. You play as Miriam, a young orphan cursed to be a Shardbinder, a being who is slowly being consumed by demonic crystal because of an alchemists curse. She can consume other shards, granting her numerous abilities throughout her journey.
Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night has a fun cast of characters; Tonight I met Todd, a poor soul cursed to roam the halls of this demonic castle as a Killer Barber, a demon that typically cuts more than just hair (and wears high heels for some weird reason). In order to release him from this strange and unusual curse I’ll need to find different hairstyles on my journey, and then impart my knowledge to him so that I can get him one step closer to humanity, and one step closer to achieving the perfect look:
This was the last hairstyle I obtained before calling it a night. I also unlocked a French Braid, and of course lots of weapons and cosmetics. 😛
I’ve also been doing a lot of Alchemy, and stocking up on potions to ensure that I can escape certain situations… and also feed an old lady who keeps rewarding me with extra swag. I made her these chips and she gave me designer sunglasses as a thanks… late 1800’s Anime England is weird.
My biggest challenge was defeating Zangetsu, a super powerful fire samurai, voiced by David Hayter himself! There’s no hiding that dummy thicc voice from me! 😛 It took me awhile, but I finally learned how to defeat him; though something tells me that I’m not quite through with him yet, and not because he’s also a playable character now! I guess at some point I’ll have to take control of him, he looks like he could be fun to play.
In order to improve my experience I ventured over to the PCGamingWiki and found a fix for jagged 3D models that appear during NPC chat and the status screen. On the left is what it looks like without the mod, and on the right is with the mod in place. By default, the game is set to render these models at 1080p even if you’re running at a higher resolution (1440p in my case). This mod upscales the models to 4K for a less jagged look. The mod can be located here.
All in all, from the 7 hours I’ve invested into this game thus far, I can say that if you like Metroidvanias you should definitely consider this one (assuming you’re like me and haven’t played it already). It has stunning visuals, excellent voice cast and it’s a fun kind of grind with a gripping story… or perhaps it’s the month of Halloween possessing me to have a good time. 😛