Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse has the ingredients of a revival—stylish combat, elaborate movement, gothic presentation and a trip to Dracula’s Castle—but its controls do not always connect with the precision the game demands. In a review published on 14 October 2026, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon describes a game that can feel responsive and satisfying one moment, then oddly loose or mistimed the next. The result is less a bad Castlevania than an uneven one.
Why the game feels off
The central issue is consistency. Belmont’s Curse often looks and sounds like a modern Castlevania: attacks land with punchy hitstop, animations are slick, and its tarot cards are gorgeous objects that double as special weapons and guides to bosses. Yet several inputs introduce friction precisely when the game asks for careful timing.
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Fenlon’s description is unusually specific: “It’s a hard problem to articulate, but there’s a little slack in this whip holding it back from being the return to Castlevania I want to wholeheartedly love.” That slack is most obvious in traversal, defensive movement and a handful of combat timings.
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Whip wind-up and grappling
The whip has a lengthy wind-up. That delay can be manageable in ordinary combat, but it becomes a serious liability in spike-filled platforming, where a swing must begin at exactly the right moment. Missing a timing window is not always a matter of player error; the attack’s preparation makes the intended response feel late.
#1 Best Overall
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Grapple targeting is also unintuitive. Rather than simply pointing the analog stick at the grapple point, the player can hold the stick toward the direction they want to travel. The distinction is easy to miss, especially while moving quickly, and a missed grapple can turn a traversal challenge into an avoidable fall.
The forward-slide dodge
The first dodge the game teaches is a forward slide. Fenlon found that it offered so few—possibly zero—invincibility frames that it caused more boss deaths than saves. A dodge that advances into danger without reliably protecting the character is difficult to trust, particularly when a boss appears to invite an evasive response.
Phasing, wall jumps and spike rooms
Phasing through walls and floors is bound by default to the controller’s left trigger. Some sequences require the player to hold phase, release it for a wall jump, hold it again, then release to land above spikes. Fenlon argues that using the controller’s longest-travel analog input for this repeated hold-and-release rhythm makes a precision maneuver needlessly narrow.
Rank #2
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The problem is not that phasing is conceptually complicated. It is that the required sequence leaves little margin for an imperfect release, so the control binding becomes part of the challenge rather than a transparent way to express the movement.
Other timing problems
Rose Belmont’s whip-pull attack feels as if its timing window is set too early. Healing requires holding a button for long enough that Fenlon sometimes believed the heal had completed before dying. These moments reinforce the same impression: the game communicates its intended action, but not always at the moment the player expects to receive it.
Does it get better after Paris?
Yes, according to Fenlon’s roughly eight-hour review session. He believed he was approaching the halfway point and found that the game improved after its opening hours in Paris, once Belmont reaches Dracula’s Castle.
Rank #3
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The castle has more inventive platforming gimmicks, directional clues pointing toward Dracula’s minions and a more puzzle-oriented structure than many older Castlevania games. Instead of presenting only a sequence of combat rooms and linear jumps, it asks the player to interpret spaces and work out where the next objective lies. That change gives the middle portion a stronger sense of discovery and makes the movement systems feel more purposeful.
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Presentation: impressive feedback, uneven storytelling scenes
Belmont’s Curse is strongly inspired by the Netflix Castlevania series and includes a couple of the same voice actors. Its best presentation elements are tactile rather than cinematic: attacks have satisfying hitstop, character and enemy animation is polished, and the tarot cards are visually striking.
Rank #4
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The early cutscenes are a weaker match for that ambition. Fenlon criticizes them as static artwork shown through panning shots, arguing that the scenes deserved fuller animation. The contrast is noticeable: combat communicates impact through motion and timing, while the story sequences sometimes present important material as a slowly moving still image.
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Fenlon also encountered a technical quirk during his review session. On a monitor set above 120 Hz, the game initially displayed a black screen. After selecting the in-game 120 fps cap, he observed the frame rate drop below that cap during cutscenes.
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These observations come from the review build, not an independently verified launch test. The review notes that the behavior could be specific to that build and might be smoothed out by release, so it should not be treated as a universal or permanent defect.
Best Value
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What to try if you see the black screen
- Set the monitor’s refresh rate to 120 Hz or lower before starting the game.
- Launch Belmont’s Curse and select the in-game 120 fps cap.
- Check whether gameplay displays normally, then watch a cutscene to see whether the lower frame rate occurs there as well.
- If the problem remains, record your monitor refresh rate, selected cap and whether the failure occurs at startup or only during scenes; those details distinguish the reported behavior from other PC problems.
A drop during cutscenes is not automatically evidence that your hardware is failing. The review specifically describes it as a behavior observed after choosing the cap, and the available evidence does not establish its cause.
How the strengths and weaknesses balance
| Area | What works | What feels off |
|---|---|---|
| Input response | Combat can feel punchy and satisfying. | Whip wind-up, early attack timing, uncertain dodge protection and awkward grapple targeting reduce precision. |
| Traversal | Whip swinging, phasing and wall-jump ideas support demanding rooms. | Long wind-up and left-trigger phasing make narrow timing sequences harder to read and execute. |
| Exploration | Dracula’s Castle adds clues, puzzles and inventive platforming. | The opening Paris sections make a weak first impression. |
| Presentation | Animation, hitstop and tarot-card design provide strong feedback. | Early story scenes rely on panning static artwork instead of fuller animation. |
| Technical stability | A 120 fps cap is available in-game. | The review reports a black screen above 120 Hz and lower cutscene frame rates in the review build. |
Should you buy it?
Belmont’s Curse is easiest to recommend to players willing to tolerate imperfect feel in exchange for a new Castlevania world, strong audiovisual feedback and a more thoughtful castle structure later in the campaign. It is a harder recommendation for anyone who expects every dodge, grapple and whip swing to be immediately dependable.
The most accurate expectation is not “a failed revival.” It is a promising revival with mechanical slack. The trip to Dracula’s Castle shows that the design can become more inventive and rewarding, while the controls and early presentation explain why the experience does not yet inspire wholehearted confidence.
Quick Recap
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