Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a 2019 action role-playing game developed by indie studio ArtPlay and published by 505 Games. The game is considered a spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, and was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in June 2019, for Amazon Luna in October 2020, for Android and iOS in December 2020, and for Stadia in July 2021. ArtPlay, an independent studio co-founded by former Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi, used the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to demonstrate the demand for the game to potential sources of funding for it in 2015. The campaign successfully raised more than $5.5 million from backers, eleven times its original goal, making it one of the most successful video game campaigns on the platform. Ritual of the Night received generally positive reviews upon release, with many describing it as a worthy successor to the Castlevania games that inspired it. Most of the stretch goals from the Kickstarter campaign were distributed as free content updates, with a few additional items as paid downloadable content. Ritual of the Night was the second game to be released in the Bloodstained series; a retro-style companion game, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, was developed by Inti Creates as a stretch goal and released earlier in May 2018. It received a sequel, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2, in July 2020. A prequel, Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, was announced in 2021 and planned for release in 2027.