Okay, after 100%ing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and spending a couple days (yeah I'm fast) thinking it over, I think I'm ready to write out my thoughts on this.

With Bloodstained, the summary of this review is: it was worth the wait.

It's a metroidvania (some people are saying 'Igavania' now but whatever). You play Miriam, a cute girl on her first canonical adventure! Through exploring the world (mostly a big castle), you'll find monsters who drop ingredients. You can find other ingredients around the castle, in chests or sometimes in walls. You can talk to a farmer at the home village who'll grow crops for you if you provide him with seeds!

Once you've got the ingredients, you can start cooking. Miriam starts off as a pretty terrible cook, but as you progress through the castle you'll occasionally come across cookbooks which will teach Miriam new recipes, allowing you to cook more interesting and innovative food items. These can range from rice dishes to creative meaty hot pots to a nice hunk of juicy prime steak. Cooking food is one way to make money, but it's also necessary to complete specific requests made of you - and each time you eat a specific meal for the first time, you gain some permanent bonuses. Cooking has never been so much fun!

Oh, yeah, and there's something about saving the world, a fistful of cool weapons (I loved the guns the most), tons of awesome spells you can steal from enemies, interesting pieces of gear, trinkets, cosmetics... and all designed by the metroidvania master himself, Koji Igarashi.

This time around they don't really hide from you any of the 'cool moves' your swords and stuff can do. You can find books which clue you in on the exact motion on the d-pad you gotta do to get a thing out of your weapon. So if you input 236 on the d-pad and attack, your sword might throw a fireball or whatever. In other games, you'd have to buy a book or whatever that maybe tells you the specific move for a specific weapon or just guess it, and in some instances guessing it was all you had. Bloodstained has all (or most of at least) the techniques Miriam can learn and use on bookshelves scattered around the world, and you can still just guess moves if you think your weapon has something cool to play with.

The areas are all 'cool I guess'. Most are pretty much what you expect from 'the castle' but there are a few that at least stand out quite well visually. Traversing them is at least pretty fun, but I noticed the removed the thing where you jump backwards on receiving damage which I think impacted the level design somewhat... on the plus side, no more annoying enemies waiting for the on the other side of a gap! On the other hand, well, things are a bit more dull. It reminds me of Symphony of the Night where you walk into a room and there's basically just a bunch of guys standing around, basically waiting for you to show up. Not really a problem, but very typical of this kind of game.

Actually getting around the world is at least plenty of fun, and as your options open up you get that wonderful feeling of growing more and more in power until honestly you're trivialising everything. Some people aren't into that, I think it's fine, after a certain point you will completely outlevel everything and no matter what gear you use you'll obliterate anyone you fight in a few hits. I kinda like that.

This is maybe the first game in a while that's drawn me in so completely. I kind of was hesitant while downloading, thinking, "oh gee I loved Curse of the Moon because it was a classic style game, this is one of those metroidvanias" but I ended up loving it.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will probably be my 'Game of the Year' (for whatever that's worth).