Food is a bit more common than other items in the game, however it’s still rare enough to make this a rather difficult game. Raising levels does make you do more damage and take less damage, but your health pool never gets very large so I tended to eat food soon after I looted it. Thankfully most of the later save points have food stored in the same room, but that food doesn’t regenerate, so you have to be careful that you don’t save if you have perilously low health. You can totally screw yourself by saving right before a boss with only half of your health. Moth’s adventure is only about 2-4 hours long, depending on how much exploring you want to do, so it’s not like you will lose a whole ton of progress.
The castle is a bit of a maze, so getting back to where you were can be a pain. This also works against the game when it comes to returning to treasure you missed after you gain new abilities and more power to take out those bloody vampires. The game does keep a very simple map, but the map only shows you the directions you’ve been, not any clue as to what you haven’t explored yet if you are looking back at previous areas. The Metroid style backtracking is mostly just a late part of Moth’s adventure, but it does add some replay value and quite a bit of extra time towards the end of the game. There are a couple items that will open up new areas to explore, such as the wand to freeze the water you will see fairly early on in the castle, but most of the backtracking is optional.
This paragraph involves a minor spoiler that I will need to discuss in order to give the game its proper review, but I was frankly happier not knowing it when I went in. So continue reading this paragraph at your own risk, or just skip past the next screenshot. I thought that there was only the Creepy Castle adventure and there was only one protagonist in this game. But there are, in fact, two different protagonists and two different adventures. Moth disappears at the end of his adventure, and then you unlock the ability to play a completely different adventure starring Butterfly. You meet her about halfway through exploring the Creepy Castle, and I actually liked her a bit more than Moth himself. Even though her species is similar, her adventure plays quite a bit differently with an all new castle and with a much more linear action game style. By the screen above you can see that there are more potential adventures to be unlocked in the future, perhaps taking a page out of the fantastic Shovel Knight. There are other nice little secrets and shout outs to be found, but I won’t spoil them here.
One issue with the 8-bit aesthetic choice is that in the yellow tinged backgrounds your character can get rather easily lost. Traps that match your color fairly closely are even worse, because the traps typically take off a lot more health than the enemies do. So when I was in a region of the castle where Moth really stood out, I definitely appreciated the change. Jumping and falling and general movement were not as tightly controlled as I would have liked, but perhaps some of this was due to using a XBox360 controller, my normal for PC games. Say what you want about Sony and Nintendo controllers, but they still make far better D-pads than Microsoft ever does. That makes the game more difficult than it needed to be, and it was already quite challenging even without that issue. Thankfully when you are fighting an enemy, you always have first choice. Even during the middle of a boss fight, if you have them down to half of their health, you don’t have to attack them back right away. You can heal yourself or use an item before you initiate the next attack, the only exception being during a mini-game.
The highlight of the whole experience for me was the music. Thankfully there are some great gallery options where you can see which enemies you have tackled and which lore you have seen and, best of all, listen to all the music you’ve unlocked. The game does get a bit tedious during the last half, but the music helped me get through the struggle in a lot better spirits. There were no major issues or bugs, but the game could have been a bit tighter or had a bit more variety. However, considering their budget, this was a very quality release and they might be a developer to keep an eye on.
If this was only Moth’s adventure, I’m not sure that I would think it was entirely worth the $15. But with all the extra content (including the spoiler above), and with more updates planned, that seems like a very reasonable price. This game is much more on the adventure scale than I was expecting due to the screenshots and trailer, but there is still enough action here to keep the action platformer fans interested. If you especially like games from the 80’s and early 90’s, I can recommend you give Creepy Castle a visit.
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Review Copy Provided By Publisher
