We love demakes around here, and there sure are a lot of good ones these days. Some of them are real, fully playable games. And some are pixel art mockups. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the latest to get the demake treatment, though it does fall into the latter category. These are pixel art mockups of what Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night might look like if demade as a Game Boy game. And it looks phenomenal.
So phenomenal in fact that it makes me sad that it’s not a real game. These beautiful screen shots are brought to us by Game Boy Demakes, an account that spotlights the best of modern (and sometimes not-so-modern) games demade with Game Boy visuals. If you have time you should browse through what they have posted. It’s all top-notch, authentic-looking Game Boy graphics.
Game Boy Demakes has even created a Game Boy rom file for the mockups over at their Patreon page. It’s free to download for everyone and you can use your favorite Game Boy emulator to load up the mockups. This is great if you use filters and want to see what this game looks like with your favorite filters applied. That’s why my above screen shots all have scanlines on them. Because I put scanlines on everything.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night of course is Koji Igarashi’s spiritual successor to the Castlevania franchise, which he was a vital part of in the later years of the series. The game has been accompanied by two 8-bit style spinoff titles, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon and Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2. The Curse of the Moon games are sort of demakes themselves, resembling the Castlevania titles of the NES era pretty strongly both in visuals and game play.
We can only hope that this gets popular enough to inspire someone to actually demake Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night for real on Game Boy and have it be a fully playable game. That might actually be my preferred way to play it.