Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

When it was released back in 2010, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow shook the franchise to its core, switching genres and rebooting the entire storyline. Instead of being a Metroidvania, putting the focus on the exploration of a labyrinthine environment, the game follows the God of War approach of creating awe-inspiring set-pieces punctuated by brutal action. The game mostly succeeds at what it tries to do, building a melancholic atmosphere while telling a tragic and exciting tale, but it is also dragged down by strange narrative decisions, a baffling post-credits scene, and problematic controls.

The protagonist is Gabriel Belmont, a knight of the Brotherhood of Light chosen to save the world after his wife is killed by a beast and an evil spell blocks Earth from the heavens, preventing souls from moving on. His task, as it’s laid out by his colleague Zobek, is to kill the Lords of Shadow – three supernatural beings that rule parts of the world – and acquire their pieces of the God Mask, which is fabled to grant so much power to its wearer that they would be able to counter the spell and even bring back the dead. Gabriel, then, sets out on a journey to both avenge and save his dead wife.

The story puts the spotlight on Gabriel and his inner turmoil. He’s presented as an ambivalent figure that is both “savior” and “destroyer”, a man that must be of “pure heart” but is also consumed by anger. As Zobek describes him, Gabriel is a “knight in shining armor with death at his side.”

Zobek is the narrator, speaking a little about Gabriel and his quest before each level. This is a great narrative choice, as it gives Zobek a creepy edge: the character talks as if he is there, watching Gabriel’s actions and deeds from afar, hidden from sight. His words show that he’s really rooting for the protagonist, but since they imply that he’s stalking Gabriel, they lead us to perceive that there’s something off with him and distrust the character.

However, there’s a problem with his narration: the things Zobek says can rarely be seen during cutscenes. This is an issue when it concerns Gabriel’s inner struggles: Zobek will tell us about them, but the cutscenes with the protagonist will rarely show them to us. Take the moment when he says that “a steely resolve has taken hold and compassion is now gone from [Gabriel’s] heart.” We have to take this on faith because there’s not a single scene in which Gabriel is given the choice to show mercy to his enemies and chooses not to. In other words, the narrator talks about an important change in the protagonist’s heart, but this change is not depicted on the screen, where Gabriel acts the exact same way as always.

The fact that the protagonist is a stoic, introspective character only aggravates this problem, as he rarely speaks and uses very few words when finally decides to do so, which doesn’t give us too many elements to chew on. If the story of Lords of Shadow is about the protagonist’s inner struggle, dealing with how his vengeful nature corrupts his heart and makes him similar to the monsters he destroys – they’re all driven by violence –, the fact that this struggle rarely appears in a visual manner drains the power of the protagonist’s narrative arc, since what we hear from Zobek doesn’t exactly find a reflection on the screen.

Lords of Shadow gives the impression that the person who wrote the cutscenes and the one who wrote Zobek’s narration are two different people that never spoke with each other during development. There are very few scenes outside the narration that depict Gabriel’s inner conflict, for example, such as the one in which the protagonist sees himself as his wife’s murderer while wearing the God mask. This is a very early scene, in which Gabriel is faced with a disturbing vision that paints his quest and his personality with dark colors, associating his objective with a very painful act of violence. However, it’s also a vision that the character never mentions again.

Even though the cutscenes mostly ignore this thread, the rest of the story keeps following Gabriel’s transformation into a corrupted being nonetheless. Some of the monsters he finds, for example, hint to this tragic outcome: Malphas’ backstory – told by Zobek and some scrolls – tells of a powerful woman that was brought down by love and grief, while the Lords of Shadow themselves point at the duality of human beings. Gabriel is set to destroy them, but is becoming more like them with each victory – according to the narration at least. There’s even a moment when Zobek says that a “dark force took hold of him,” making Gabriel’s enemies cower in fear.  In other words, it’s all moving toward a final inner battle, and one that Gabriel may very well lose.

However, when the time to deliver arrives, the narrative backs away. Here we have to go into details, so a spoiler warning is due.

* Spoiler Warning *

The climax is a fight against Satan, but instead of being presented as the culmination of his inner struggles, it’s framed as only an epic fight that will decide the fate of the world. Gabriel seems at risk of dying, not of turning into a monster: the focus is not inside the character, but outward. So, Gabriel just kicks Satan’s ass and all is well. Marie appears and says that God is merciful and that all is forgiven – even though there is not much to forgive.

After all, when Zobek reveals that it was Gabriel who killed his wife, he also reveals that the protagonist was unconscious while doing it, being controlled by Zobek himself – who is one of the Lords of Shadow. Since he wasn’t in control of his own actions, Gabriel is not the one to blame for the murder, but Zobek, who used him as a tool to accomplish his dark purpose. In other words, the reveal doesn’t do much dramatically: it was Gabriel’s hands that delivered the blow, but not his mind.

It’s especially sad because the elements that lead to this final inner battle – and Gabriel’s defeat – are all there. The villain is no one other than Satan himself, for example, a figure that is deeply connected with notions of corruption and temptation, being himself a good figure that eventually fell and became monstrous. During the climax, Gabriel is said to be standing on the edge of a precipice, but instead of giving the last push, manipulating the protagonist into doing a horrible action, Satan just tries to beat him to death.

The fight itself is also designed to mirror Gabriel’s inner struggle, since he has to keep switching between dark and light magic to defeat Satan. To win, Gabriel has to maintain an inner balance, transitioning between his good and dark side, without relying too much on either of them. It’s a perfect battle, thematically speaking, but the cutscenes that precede and come after it doesn’t tackle this theme, never tying it to the battle itself.

So, this is the ending: Gabriel wins, all is forgiven, and the only rub is that he can’t actually bring his wife back from the dead, but just have a small moment with her before she moves on. Not the most dramatic or satisfying of endings – winning is anticlimactic when the narrative is building up to the defeat – but it’s not horrible or offensive. That is, until the post-credits scene comes absolutely out of nowhere, showing that Gabriel somehow has become Dracula – a revelation that has the same energy of this brilliant scene.”

Lords of Shadow leaves the impression that its story was supposed to end with Gabriel losing his inner battle and turning into a monster – a vampire – to defeat Satan and save his wife, but somewhere along the way the developers decided that a happy ending would be more palatable to a wider audience and backed away from this tragic conclusion – but decided to keep its result nonetheless. The problem is that you can’t have it both ways; Gabriel either wins his inner battle and remains a man or loses and becomes Dracula.

Since they opted for the happy ending, the developers have put themselves into a corner, having to offer a new explanation to the whole the-protagonist-suddenly-turns-into-the-series-iconic-villain” thing with a small piece of DLC. This robs the transformation from any real build-up and reduces it to an arbitrary event that is disconnected from everything that came before: Gabriel turns into Dracula because now there’s this portal to this magical world with this huge menace that was never mentioned before. Since only dark creatures can enter its realm – because of reasons – Gabriel becomes a vampire.

In other words, Lords of Shadow manages the impossible: it makes the transformation of the protagonist into a monster a random event in a narrative that was building up precisely to this outcome.

* End of Spoilers *

Most elements of the game are uneven in terms of quality. Take the level design, for example. Instead of a labyrinthine interconnected map, Lords of Shadow is composed of several different levels, which vary greatly in complexity, size, and purpose.

There are levels that are just an arena with a boss fight, while some are focused on platforming and parkour – such as the one where you have to move between three towers to collect fairies to open a door –, while others contain a series of puzzles that build upon the same idea – such as having to guide beams of light to open doors or press switches to redirect currents of electricity. There are some stand-out moments as well, such as when Gabriel gets stuck inside a music box or when he has to play a monstrous version of chess with a vampire. The variety does wonders for the pacing of the game and keeps things refreshing, as you rarely know what awaits you in the next level

Just like God of War, the scale of the environments also impresses. In a moment clearly inspired by Santa Monica’s classic game, for instance, Gabriel moves between huge structures by walking over the immense chains that connect them. The fixed camera angles are used to great effect, often making the protagonist a tiny pixel on the screen to show how the buildings and mountains that surround him completely dwarf the character – if there’s one thing that Lords of Shadow nails it’s the epic tone it’s going for.

Most of these levels offer multiple paths and hide secrets to incentivize exploration and decrease the linearity of the adventure. These secrets come in the form of power-ups that increase Gabriel’s health, magic bars, and item limit, offering tangible rewards for the trouble of going after them. The game only falters when making some of these secrets impossible to obtain until we have acquired a late item, as we have to replay the whole level again just to get it, which adds nothing but filler to the experience.

The other collectibles we can find are the scrolls of dead soldiers, which talk about the history of that particular place, register their last moments alive or offer hints about how to proceed. They’re mostly fine, helping to build the lore and create a sense of danger, but sometimes these scrolls fall flat, especially when they still offer bland tutorials ten hours into the game: “If one is running low on Magic, it’s important to become focused again, as this is what makes the enemy drop Neutral Elemental Orbs,” one of the scrolls says. As a message in a loading screen, this is okay, but as a scroll written by a dying soldier, it’s just cringeworthy. It’s also curious that one of the scrolls mistakes the pronoun related to one of the Lords of Shadow, referring to the character as a “he”, when everything indicates we are dealing with a “she”.

Although the levels can be fairly expansive and offer multiple paths to the same goal, the game is generally bad at signposting. The fixed camera angles, for example, are great when it comes to framing the action in a way that emphasizes its scope, but they can also make it difficult for us to see where we have to go and how to get there. They make Gabriel small to better display the scale of the locales, but in the process, the camera angles also make the shining spot that indicates where the protagonist must use his “hookshot” tiny as well and, consequently, hard to see. Since the places Gabriel can actually reach in the levels are sometimes arbitrary, with invisible walls blocking him from getting to specific platforms, a clear visual sign marking the interactable objects in the level becomes crucial.

There’s this level called Titan Graveyard that particularly suffers from this problem. There’s a moment when the way forward – the entrance to a cave – is hidden from us by the camera angle, meaning that to get there we have to blindly try things such as turning right or left when it appears Gabriel is moving towards a wall. Some platforms also can’t be reached because of invisible walls, but failing to get to them is now even more frustrating because there’s this poisonous water around that kills Gabriel. Finally, there’s this moment when we have to defeat some enemies to acquire two magical objects, but the enemies in one of the places we have to go only spawn if we’ve already acquired the other object – which is hidden in the aforementioned cave – making the whole objective frustrating and arbitrary. Actually, I believe the developers never intended for us to be able to reach this “second” place before the cave, since its magical item moves a statue in a way that creates a path to get there. However, if Gabriel is standing on the platform in the middle of the room, the road to this “second” place is on the upper-right side of the screen – which means this road is the first thing we see when we arrive at the place – and it’s not even hard to get there, since Gabriel must only run and double jump from this very platform.

Finally, we have the combat. Gabriel has two types of attack that complement each other, a horizontal one that is intended to hit multiple enemies, and a vertical one that is better when dealing with just one monster. It’s God of War but with an interesting twist, which comes in the form of the magic bars that grant Gabriel new combos and powers.

Their basic function is a simple one: light magic heals Gabriel with each blow he delivers, while shadow magic increases the damage of those blows. We can’t activate both simultaneously, so it becomes a matter of assessing what is more important at the moment: going on the offensive with shadow magic or heal Gabriel?

The element of this system that most impacts the combat is how we recharge these magic bars. To do that, Gabriel must acquire “neutral elemental orbs”, which release from each blow he delivers if his focus gauge is full. But to increase focus, Gabriel must keep hitting and parrying without taking damage, as it resets the gauge. This puts the spotlight over the ability to parry and dodge correctly, reading the monsters, since not getting hit is essential for increasing focus and, consequently, Gabriel’s magic bars.

The problems with this system are twofold. First, there are the controls, as blocking and dodging are mapped to the same button: we press it to block and add a direction with the analog stick to dodge. This means that it’s too easy to do one while wanting to do the other, especially if we are instinctively trying to change the direction Gabriel is facing while blocking, since this will trigger a dodge instead. The second problem is that it makes encounters unbalanced: if we are having trouble against a specific enemy, it usually means that we can’t parry it or dodge it successfully, so Gabriel’s focus never increases, the magic bars never recharge, Gabriel can’t heal, and we are doomed to fail. It’s a system that punishes those who don’t play well and reward those that are already great in the game, widening the gap between them.

Presentation-wise, Lords of Shadow certainly impresses with a striking art direction that creates memorable gothic environments: Gabriel frequently finds screaming faces carved on mountains or stones, grotesque statues of beings made of different animals, and a castle that is excessive in size, with its immense pointed towers.

Meanwhile, the melancholic soundtrack tries to mirror the ruined state of the world, building a serious and somber mood. It works perfectly when Lords of Shadow is doing its own thing, since Gabriel’s journey is supposed to be a tragic one, but when the game is paying homage to classic Castlevania games, such as when presenting a bizarre clockwork level, this melancholy feels out of place.

With a character-focused story that is ultimately marred by a terrible ending, an ambitious, but problematic level design, and an impressive presentation, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is a deeply uneven game that offers a memorable but also quite flawed adventure.

September 13, 2019.