Tag: 7Levels

With the original Castle of Heart, released back in 2018 as a Switch exclusive, developer 7Levels decided that they wanted to bring back really old-school action-platforming to the market. One that gave us the difficulty of yesteryear wrapped in a shiny new hardware package. Castle of Heart managed to earn a reputation for being quite difficult, but not always for the right reasons.

Seven years on, 7Levels have half remastered, half remade Castle of Heart with a significant number of improvements, both visually and behind the scenes, to make this the definitive version. And they haven’t skimped on the difficulty in the process.

Castle of Heart’s story is one we’ve heard countless times in the fantasy genre. An evil wizard gains too much power through shady, otherworldly dealings and begins to subjugate the world. One priestess dares to stand against him, earning the wizard’s wrath. And, when a brave knight stands up to the wizard to protect the priestess, the wizard abducts the priestess and turns everyone else into stone. But, don’t you know it, thanks to the priestess’ tear, the knight is only partly transformed. Grabbing his sword, he goes on a mission to rescue the priestess, slay the wizard, and, hopefully, undo the curse before it does him in fully.

As the brave knight, you have twenty visually distinct levels to survive, along with a handful of bosses to slay on the way to saving your love and yourself. While the knight is mobile, the curse is still active, slowly turning him to stone as you fight your way to salvation. Health pick-ups from the environment and defeated enemies will restore a portion of your health, but you’re always on a strict time limit, watching it whittle away as you charge across each stage. And charge you will have to, if you want to make it to the end before crumbling into stone.

As the knight, you can dual-wield weapons for extra damage, block attacks, dodge roll out of the way, and jump high enough to put most superheroes to shame. All of these skills you’ll need to chain together on a regular basis. You’ll want to dual wield, whether that’s with swords or crossbows, to deal extra damage because every little bit of health you save makes the difference between life and death.

With your health always depleting, losing too much of it causes your arm to shatter and eventually the rest of your body follows suite. Getting through enemy encounters and environmental traps as quickly as possible is therefore paramount to your survival. The stages are littered with health pickups and enemies drop slivers of health on death, while hitting a checkpoint restores you fully before the next section. However, between the damage dealt by enemies – which increases in later stages – and how long it may take to get through an encounter, you always feel like you’re on the back-foot. Even with gems hidden throughout each stage that increases your total health, it always feels like you’re one step away from crumbling to dust. The sense of urgency is very real.

That said, enemy encounters have been retooled. Unblockable attacks now have a visual prompt, and early enemies don’t take as many swings to put down. You can get caught between them though, which makes for some troublesome times but, thankfully, your dodge roll also knocks down enemies to create some valuable breathing room. Enemy placement can be a bit of a pain and feel unfair at times, such as projectile enemies at the lip of a jump you need to reach or flying enemies just going about their business near a rope you need to swing on.

Stages are very linear, but the developers build upon each environmental design after they’ve been introduced in early levels. Before long, you’ll be swinging across large gaps to land on collapsing platforms, jumping over spikes, and leaping into a group of enemies. These are some of the best moments in the game and require you to be absolutely on point to make it through. There’s no room for even a tiny misstep in these sequences.

That said, instant death haunts you on just about every step of your journey. Mistime a swing or jump too late from those floorboards, it’s curtains and right back to the last checkpoint. To mitigate the number of instant deaths in the game, the developers have liberally placed checkpoints around the stages and give you infinite lives. There’s no game over screen here, just another chance to get it right. While that is appreciated, it doesn’t mitigate how unforgiving certain instant death platforming sequences feel, such as having to make it to the top of a flooding mine before the water catches you were even a split-second delay in your response time determines whether or not you succeed.

Castle of Heart: Retold has been rebuilt with better textures and materials, improved meshes and geometry, and significant lighting improvements. It is, quite simply, gorgeous with much of the game falling into the screenshot worthy status. The 3D world with a 2.5D perspective making for a stunning spectacle, with multiple layers of scenery adding tons of depth to each location. Animations have been improved as well, for both our hero knight and the various enemies you’ll encounter, making the game feel closer to a remake than a remaster at times.

While it seems that the bulk of the original’s issues have been addressed – such as combat difficulty, control issues, visual quality, and a complete script rewrite – Castle of Heart: Retold still has some issues that keep it from old-school greatness.

While enemies may be visually distinct, with each area introducing new ones that fit the biome, attack patterns are repeated. Later encounters less about learning and exploiting new move-sets, and more about dealing with more incoming damage. This may make it easier to use the same tricks to defeat them, but between the escalating damage and your life draining away, I found it made more sense to just jump over enemies and rush past those that I could.

Another issue that increases the difficulty is a common problem that most multi-layered 2D games suffer from: foreground elements obstructing the action. That happens in quite a bit in Castle of Heart: Retold, especially in the sliding sequences. Yes, it makes the game look beautiful, but when that tree trunk or rock in the foreground hides the edge of a cliff or drop from a roof at any point in a long platforming sequence, it can feel infuriating.

On the whole, Castle of Heart: Retold is a great remake/remaster of an existing game that focuses on fixing the original releases problems, while bringing back old-school action-platformer difficulty. With a beautiful visual upgrade and plenty of tense set-pieces, it will suit those in the mood for significant challenge from their platformers.

Pros:

• A gorgeous visual remake
• Some nicely constructed platforming sequences
• The turning-to-stone premise keeps you on the edge of your seat

Cons:

• Some sequences can be very frustrating, especially when the environment can obscure your view
• Later enemies just feel like reskins with the same move-set

Score: 7/10

Castle of Heart: Retold was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One/Series S|X, PS4/5, and Nintendo Switch 2.