Fans of the games watching the Dead by Daylight x Castlevania livestream: LEON! Um, that one Ayami Kojima Dracula design from that one PlayStation game no one cares about! SIMON!
Fans of the show watching: Who are these people?
ETA: CONTROVERSIAL STATEMENT FROM BEHAVIOUR: "We chose Trevor because he is...the ultimate Belmont." I don't know how Nocturne's going, but in the games, I'd argue Richter's set up for that title, weakness to cream pies (not that kind) (that we know) notwithstanding.
NON-CONTROVERSIAL STATEMENT FROM BEHAVIOUR: "Everyone should play Symphony of the Night at least once."ETA: 2 EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL STATEMENT FROM BEHAVIOUR: Shanoa gets just a costume for another character?! (Yui, but still.)
(The Nurse as Death is good, though.)
Also, I'm not sure the TV fans watching knew The Thing about Soma the stream casually spoiled.
Costumes announced so far: An Alucard alt; Leon, Simon, and Soma costumes for Trevor (not the deluxe costumes that are actually separate characters, like Alucard; it's still Trevor's face and voice - it's like he's cosplaying); Castlevania Chronicles and Rondo of Blood costumes (both his final demon boss form and this one; I didn't recognize it at first; I originally thought it was based on Malus) for Dracula; and Sypha, Maria, Shanoa, Jonathan Morris, and Death costumes for original characters (again, for these voices & faces aren't changed) . Some of these have delayed release dates.
FIELD REPORT: I can't with this Alucard. His hair is poofy, and his build is too willowy, even for Alucard. And the voice is outright whiny. I watched a few snippets of the show to see if it was the show voice; it isn't, but I'm not fond of the show voice either.
The motion of his cloak while he's running is very Symphony, though.
A FEW DAYS LATER:
- I was going to make a crack that they should have gotten Xenomorph Rocket Sled Dracula from Curse of the Moon, but, lo and behold, they did use Xenomorph Rocket Sled Dracula! The final boss form they took wasn't from Rondo of Blood! I didn't recognize him without his Xenomorph rocket sled. Man, Curse of the Moon and Castlevania Chronicles: good job on the deep cuts, Behaviour.
- While the streamers I watch are going up against wall-to-wall Dracs, I haven't seen much of Mr. Cronqvist myself. A couple nights ago, I wanted to see what Detective David Tapp made of this Dracula nonsense, but Dracula was nowhere to be found in the five matches I played. In the last match, though, Tapp did team with a Claudette to body-block for a Trevor that had run the Unknown we were against for the last gen-plus. (Honestly, though, Trevor, you didn't have to teabag at the exit. You picked up some bad habits in a very short period of time.)
- Speaking of Trevor: From his voice lines and demeanor, this is a very straightforward incarnation of him, all stalwart, heroic Belmont, with none of the cockiness from later games. I was going to express concern that fans of the show would probably revolt at this version of the character.
- Instead, there seems to be a lot of complaining that Alucard can't just merc every killer he faces. (Everyone expressing this idea on the subreddit is completely confident that they are the first and only person who has thought of it.) Yeah, but, say, a Xenomorph wouldn't be stopped by a wooden pallet, either. You have to make some accommodations to fit the characters into the game. It's all for fun. You can't take it too seriously. Behaviour certainly isn't, because:
- If you play as Trevor or Alucard after buying the DLC with cash money and cleanse one of the killer's "totems" - an activity that typically involves disassembling a small pile of bones that usually materializes near a wall on a map - you'll hear the "stage clear" NES jingle, and you'll get this charm in your inventory with which to decorate your character:
Whiny Alucard or not, this is a good chapter.
With Nicolas Cage guest-starring. And by "Nicolas Cage," I mean "Otzdarva."
The Castlevania chapter of Dead by Daylight had its playtest beta (or PTB) a bit ago. YSK DbD runs its PTBs by letting those interested access a beta version of new upcoming content for about a day, for free; it's then killswitched for fine-tuning, and after a few weeks, the 1.0 version of the content is released as paid DLC. This may be a bit redundant, as the DLC's full launch is in a couple days, but I thought I'd share my interim thoughts!
If you haven't seen it in action yet, a video overview (of both survivor and killer, despite the video title) from the foremost DbD streamer, Otzdarva, is below. Obviously, he's going to be focused on gameplay intricacies from the perspective of a long-term DbD fan, but it's a good, comprehensive, relatively-concise visual showcase.
It seems they leaned heavily into the vampire aspect of the experience over the Castlevania. Players have been demanding a killer who's a vampire for a long time - it seemed like an obvious oversight in their murderer's row of, er, murderers - and it turns out they couldn't pull the trigger on that with an original character because they had a popular pop-culture incarnation of the ur-vampire in their licensing sights. Dracula's powers revolve around a vampire's traditional transformation abilities - like that German intro to Rondo of Blood promises, he has the power to turn into a bat, for mobility, and a wolf, for, um, also mobility, but you can't hunt or down survivors as a bat. (You can know not only pet the dog, kind of, in Dead by Daylight, using pointing emotes, but you can play a killer who's a dog.) Drac also has his sometimes first-stage final boss fire pillar ability (no triple fireballs) as a standard attack while in bipedal form. I can't play killer to save my life, so I can't give any test drive notes, but the experience of playing against him seems focused on recreating the experience of trespassing in a vampire's domain, hearing his cackles and wolf-form howls in worryingly closer variants of "the distance" throughout the battlefield, until his talons are around your neck.
Dracula's castle will also materialize in the background of outdoor stages, and it looks terrific:
He is called here by my inability to pull a suitable outdoor map in PTB RNG.
...but I think this brings us to a problem with this DLC: it needed a stage. In the U.S., at least, the franchise is called Castlevania, not Dracula; the man needs his home. This might have been a problem with timing: the last DLC the game had was for Dungeons & Dragons, which itself introduced a castle stage for its lich killer, Vecna. I've heard a number of folks online label this stage as being "too complicated" with its portals and magic tricks (I haven't played it myself; I took a vacation from the game shortly after the switch to Unreal 5 due to comp issues), and they weren't keen for a new castle-themed area. Perhaps this had some influence. Maybe DbD's developer, Behaviour, also wanted to avoid going toe-to-toe with Nintendo given the Smash Bros. stage, but come on. Behaviour could have gone toe-to-toe with Nintendo, given the quality of their past work in this area.
I'm also not crazy about the chase theme - it's not bad, not actively bad, but it doesn't live up to the musical heritage of the franchise. It sounds like someone just running their hands back and forth across a pipe organ keyboard. (The wiki says it references the final boss theme of the first game, but I'm hearing it only very faintly; maybe my ears are broken.) Otherwise it's a passible Castlevania Dracula - the use of sounds as detailed above is excellent, the different forms hunting you are neat, they've got the look down. There's also a hilarious trap you can trigger at the endgame exit gates with using one of his rarer items:
Castlevania old-school difficulty rears its head! The performance for Dracula is also all right, but there's not much in his lines that screams Castlevania Drac to me - they're quite generic, in writing and delivery. Given with how Behaviour usually knocks it out of the park with franchise DLCs - Brad Dourif & Jennifer Tilly contributing tons of voicework for the Chucky DLC; Nick Cage rambling on about getting to meet Sadako; creating the best version of Michael Myers outside of the original movie in the content that put the game on the map - "passable" is a disappointment.
Also I know DbD's all about the gory moris now, and they had to work in the goblet smash somehow, didn't they, but it's odd that a vampire doesn't bite his victim for his finisher. C'mon, Behaviour. There's been rattling about you selling additional moris for months now. Let Drac have a good chomp.
Trevor is Trevor.
Reception from fans of the show - at least, from DBD players who know the franchise from the show, as those are the streams I'm watching - seems positive but a bit confused. Otzdarva, the premier DbD streamer, introduced the content as being from the show when what we had in the PTB was clearly game-based. I've seen other streamers wonder why Dracula has white hair - after all, in the show, his hair's dark, right? I don't know what show fans think about this incarnation of Trevor Fucking Belmont yet, pre-Warren Ellising. I can understand why the Curse of Darkness/Pachislot design was used, as it's the one that has the most recent assets on which to base a DbD character, but I'd bet he's a bit pretty-boy for show fans. I mean, the man has absolute territory. I imagine there will be a cosmetic for show Trevor (additional costumes weren't revealed in the PTB).
I've also seen fans of the games dismissive of these concerns, but as someone who loves the games and actually didn't watch the show due to the anticipated EDGE, I don't think show fans should be dismissed; it's by far the most prominent incarnation of the franchise right now, and a lot of people really love it. They should come away from the DLC with a good experience - not only just on general principle, but also for the health of DbD and Castlevania.
So, in conclusion, we now have a game where Trevor Belmont can join forces with Ash Williams, Jill Valentine, and Nicolas Cage, or Ellen Ripley, Cheryl Mason, and Steve Harrington, or Lara Croft, Laurie Strode, and Alan Wake, to face off against Dracula. Or Michael Myers. Or Ghostface. Or Leatherface. Or Sadako. Or a Xenomorph. What a time to be alive.
Regarding playtime, not publication date. Though I suppose the latter applies as well.
Dredge
It's more way fishing than horror. The art style looks killer, but the eerie elements are limited to "someone is trying to raise something eldritch" and "look at these fucked-up fish." And there are some great fucked-up fish in this game!
It's just a bit more pedestrian, and a bit more focused on the tried-and-true, admittedly-addictive fishing game loop, than advertised. Do I regret playing it? Not at all. It's a good game, and it largely deserves the attention it's received. Absolutely dive in if you're so inclined. But I was ready for it to be over a couple acts before it was.
Mothmen 1966
A visual novel (with a few basic puzzles) patterned after old pulp comics, featuring a pixel-art neon green & blue palette that looks absolutely killer. Combined with the off-the-wall events and the noir-ish writing style, you can capture some spectacular screenshots with this game:
The writers went for the fences, or at least a triple, with where the story goes. There's one moment (here) that absolutely would have drived certain audiences wild if this game were more widely-known. A good short experience.
Hello Goodboy
A child wakes up in a limnal space and goes on an adventure with a talking canine spirit guide through two of four season-themed environments, where the duo meets friends, helps them solve their problems, and eats lunch with them. (You even bring your choice of beverage!)
There are a variety of problems with this sweet game with adorable art: loading times on Switch are large; the dog doesn't really act like a dog; there's no real reason you shouldn't be able to see all four seasonal areas in one go instead of requiring a New Game Plus; the game's aimed at kids, but it's too talky and not doey enough (though, not having kids, maybe I'm wrong in that department and they'd enjoy it as a digital storybook).
My real frustration, though, is the translation. It's in clunky, nonfluent English that's not up to modern presentation standards and is not at all suited for a children's game. It's credited to one "proofreader" at the Gameeleon localization studio, and I don't know if this is typical of their output, or they got a bad-apple translator, or the editor, if there were an editor, screwed things up, but whoever let the translation go in this state really ought to be ashamed of themselves. (In fact, since a "proofreader" was credited and not a translator, was the translation AI, with a lone human "tidying up"? If so, that human did a poor job of that, too.) The title comes from a small studio in Southeast Asia that might have not had the contacts to hire translators with a more rock-solid reputation in the Western market, and it seems like someone took advantage of them badly here.
That's awful, because while the game is far from perfect, it deserved far better than the translation it got, and its moral is really good and strong - one I've actually been referencing and remembering in difficult times over the past few months. Plus, the point where that metaphor - the one guiding the entire game - is revealed had me on the floor.
Battle Axe
Look at the screenshots for Battle Axe, and it seems to be one of the most beautiful titles ever made: a top-down fantasy arcade beat-'em-up set in Seiken Densetsu 3 land. It embraces its arcade aspirations with unparalleled relish, too: music with a perfect arcadey sound-font and an ever-present narrator announcing every caption and gameplay event ("FAE HAS FOUND SOME CHICKEN") and a lightning-lashed attract mode of a ravaged landscape and fell beasts building to a crescendo of "YOU THINK YOU REALLY CAN DEFEAT ME?!" and full-screen pixel art of an archvillain with a dramatic chiaroscuro and glowing eyes. It's an extraordinarily confident game with exceptional joie de vivre.
I wish the gameplay were on the same level. The first problem: stuff can come at you from all angles, yet you can attack in only eight directions, which makes managing to attack while evading really tricky at first. (Do not use the D-pad with this game. Go full analog stick. Also, use the elf and make liberal use of her directional spinning attack that makes her invincible for its duration.) Figure out that problem, though, and you're still contending with a thoroughly-unreasonable enemy attack rate and pop-up rate - running into enemies or traps that appear out of nowhere; an utterly constant respawn rate in the second level - and a very low health meter, with no extra lives and no continues. For whatever reason, funding or otherwise, Battle Axe is very short (only four levels), and the devs decided to compensate with cheap hits and unfair deaths. It makes for a frustrating experience, and I frankly wish they'd gone for "unfortunately easy" over "aggravating." (The Curse of the Moon dichotomy!) Also, given the wonders of the first level, you're expecting an escalation of the art that never comes. Everything looks great, mind, but it's the same level of great throughout, with nothing unexpected or inspiring (it's floating meadow-cave-castle-lava cave & dungeon) and no real "wow" ideas or showstoppers. They're clearly capable of more, but it didn't get done here. If you play it, play on Easy instead of the default Hard, expect an adjustment period for the controls, and don't buy it at the full $30 price.
(In fairness: As I discovered in getting additional screenshots for this article, I should point out that the Infinite Mode, though offering no new assets, is good for an occasional dose of mindless dungeon-crawling fun once you've gotten the hang of the gameplay's idiosyncracies.)
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