Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is an 8-bit Castlevania revival coming this month

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was one of the biggest video game Kickstarter success stories of all time, and Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania throwback is set for a release later this year. Before then, though, there’s another Bloodstained coming very soon. A spin-off title called Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon was just announced at the BitSummit indie games show in Kyoto, and it’s going to be released in a couple of weeks.

While Ritual of the Night is attempting to evoke Igarashi’s exploration-heavy Castlevania games like Symphony of the Night, Curse of the Moon reaches back to the series’ earlier past — specifically, it looks a lot like Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse for the NES. The color palette is very much 8-bit, though there are large-scale animations and boss fights that the NES wouldn’t have been able to handle. I played the 3DS version for a while, and it actually looks great on the system’s low-res screen.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is coming out on May 24th for just about every platform imaginable: Switch, 3DS, PS4, PS Vita, Xbox One, and Steam. It’ll cost $9.99, but anyone who backed Bloodstained on Kickstarter beyond its $28 tier will get it for free.