Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night

Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night – Quadrapop meets Castlevania

What do you get when you cross some of the gaming elements from Tetris and similar puzzle games and the classic game of Castlevania? Something like Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night, is what!

This game is quite a bizarre combo and does strike me as a little lost and out of its comfort zone. Clearly this game isn’t out of its depth but a platform battle game is seldom the setting for more cutesy puzzle games. With ghouls, demons and other things that would tend to go bump in the night all lurking in the various levels all prove a range of challenging opponents in a head to head duel of matching three or more similarly coloured squares.

In essence you must move from room to room, sometimes uncovering secrets and food to restore your health or, more usually, discovering creepy beasts set on beating you in the puzzle game. As with nearly all puzzles of this type, you must try to arrange the falling pair of blocks in a sequence to clear them, get points and defeat your opponent. If you do it well, you’ll cause havoc to your opponent (sending random blocks crashing down on their side of the divide). Conversely, the exact same can happen to you and will if your opponent is a bit tougher than a zombie!

As you shift between the rooms (connected by paths), you can only get access to some areas if you manage to unlock the routes – through defeating opponents and winning keys etc.

There are some nice touches to the game, like the animated fights which are a little distracting but also help to lift the excitement offered by the game. The touch-screen controls are pretty good although the default setting does cause a little problem with dropping the blocks when you’re trying to rotate them or move them from side to side. Otherwise this is actually quite a solid puzzle game and certainly one that will entertain the young and young at heart for quite a while.

If you enjoy puzzles and have a bit of a dark side to you or just sick of the sappy cute puzzle games then this will definitely appeal.

Rating 82%

Positives

Vampires and puzzles together at last!

Challenging and ability to choose difficulty setting

Plenty of opponents and hidden treasures to find and explore

Negatives

A bit repetitive

Arguably Castlevania should stick to what it’s better known for...

Controls are a little awkward and make the challenge a little more fiddly