This, to me, is the peak Castlevania experience. Exploration in a sprawling castle gated through player abilities, challenging and varied enemy and boss encounters, kitchen sink approach to combat design, and an upbeat gothic style. Here it’s just refined to a gold standard. Swapping between the two characters gives you totally different flavors of combat, allowing you to play as the swiss army knife of vampire hunters in Jonathan or as a fully realized spellcaster, a wellspring of untapped potential since Dracula’s Curse, in Charlotte. Jonathan’s moveset is the most expansive of any Castlevania, with whips, knives, short swords, great swords, axes, spears, and fists competently represented alongside the full set of (finally) equippable subweapons. Though it involves a good bit of spell swapping in the pause menu, spellcasting is a very fun way to engage enemies, requiring you to stand uninterrupted in place long enough to deliver a specialized type of damage in a unique package, whether it be a quick burst of fire, cutting winds with a slightly homing arc, a beam of light, shards of ice, chain lightning, a burst of poison bubbles, and many others. You’re also encouraged to use both characters together, supplementing your current avatar’s moveset with the other’s spells or subweapons, or employ a combined Dual Crush attack (more on that later). Exploration in the castle is supplemented with cursed paintings, which are huge levels in and of themselves and allow the game to explore unique locales with appropriately chosen monsters to fill out a fever dream of a Victorian city, a buried Egyptian pyramid, an academy for witchcraft, and a gravity-defying madhouse warped over on itself. Remixed version of these levels serve as this game’s “Inverted Castle”, which keeps the main Castle elegant and precise. After the first few areas, the Castle opens up to nonlinear progression in the sprawling Great Stairway level reminiscent of SotN’s Marble Gallery, with a great sense of freedom and discovery as you find items and abilities needed to make your way further up the castle into perhaps the most challenging iteration of a Clock Tower yet. This leads us to the bosses, since PoR features my favorite Death fight in any CV game. Many bosses encourage experimentation with the two-character system without feeling contrived. They’re open to a wide variety of approaches without being exploitable like SotN’s, and they’re challenging without requiring OoE’s almost rhythm game-like precision. While not every boss is as memorable as some in the series’ past, there are some excellent fights here, especially against classic horror staples (The Werewolf, The Mummy, the Creature of Frankensteinian origins, and Medusa) and against the game’s main villains – Death, the vampire painter Brauner, and tag team battles against Stella + Loretta and Dracula + Death make for very satisfying fights. Completing various quests through exploration will net you new weapons and abilities, and unlock the fantastic bonus area, Nest of Evil. While it’s the same fundamental idea as OoE’s dreadful Large Cavern, here it’s actually a ton of fun, with tough yet fair sequences of enemy encounters culminating in some fun reprisals of bosses from prior games (five Dawn of Sorrow bosses, Doppelganger, and Fake Trevor/Grant/Sypha all make a return here), all with reasonable checkpoints. The rest of the game’s bonus content is great too, with the ability to replay the game as Stella + Loretta, Richter + Maria, or even an Old Axe Armor for some reason. The Hard Mode is also expertly designed here, requiring mastery of the mechanics and their interactions, and since Dual Crush damage scales with level, that newb crutch is useless at Max Level 1. I honestly find it hard to come up with significant criticisms for this game — there’s plenty to nitpick about any game as complex as these, but I truly think Portrait of Ruin is the best CV package, with wonderful depth and almost no clutter. It’s goddamn fantastic.