Fan of Castlevania? Then you’re gonna love Castleboy.
Castleboy is an Arduboy platformer created by @ZappedCow (Joel Lauener) and @Increment. Castleboy was based upon the popular Castlevania game created in Japan but later released in America in 1987 for the NES system.
Castleboy takes you on a familiar trip with the classic three-stages divided into numerous blocks/levels for you to complete. Be quick tho, there is a timer that runs out. When this timer runs out, you’ll lose a life! So be careful, not only for the varies enemies you will have to face, but also time itself.
Traverse deep into dungeons and castles to battle vampires and various bosses. Take on the character of Simon and use your magic whip to kill any vampires that get in your way. You can also whip the lamps on the map to get either coins or useful throwing knives. These can come in handy when battling against the enemies that throw projectiles on you – be careful, it takes two throwing knives to kill an enemy – make sure to double tap!
Like the Castlevania game, you start with four lives and five hearts, in a health bar style form on the top left screen. If you fall off the map, you lose a life
The original game was praised for its difficulty, gameplay, soundtrack, and visuals. A lot of this praise continues through to the Castleboy game, created in 2017 in November for 3 months! However, if the makers were to make any adjustments to the game, it would be in sound effects! Sound effects are important to any game in feeling immersed and adding to the experience. While there are some light sound effects, I feel this could have really been explored with the varies enemies, scenes and weapons.
The things I love about the game are the visuals and animations. The game devs did a really great job in making cool animations. The whip attack and the movement is smooth, responsive and snappy. The scene really comes to life with the classic scrolling backdrop and block type map layout – which I do believe can be edited using an online tool called TilEd. The devs really took the small details and brought them to life – considering its a black and white screen, that’s a difficult task to do. The simple torch animations mixed with the detailed blocks used to create the map tie up the game to create an excellent experience. This game definitely makes it into the Favourites category on the 8BitCADE XL.
But that’s just my view! Check out castle boy on Github and if you want to see Castleboy begin played, check out this video below:
If you want to get the console that I used to play this brilliant game on, check out the Kickstarter for it below.