Castle In The Darkness

Castle In The Darkness is a fun and challenging shout out to the early days of video games! It's an action exploration platformer with some RPG elements, much like games from the Castlevania or Metroid series. It's super fast-paced, challenging, and full of secrets!

Castle In The Darkness is a metroidvania, indie and platformer game developed by Matt Kap, Nicalis and Inc. and published by Nicalis and Inc..
Released on February 05th 2015 is available in English only on Windows.

It has received 1,233 reviews of which 952 were positive and 281 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.4 out of 10. 😊

The game is currently priced at 2.49€ on Steam and has a 75% discount.

The Steam community has classified Castle In The Darkness into these genres:

Metroidvania Indie Platformer Action Difficult Adventure Pixel Graphics RPG Retro 2D Great Soundtrack Singleplayer

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at Castle In The Darkness through various videos and screenshots.

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Requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

OS *: Windows XP or later
Processor: Pentium 4 or higher
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: 256 MB or higher
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 120 MB available space
Sound Card: Any

Reviews

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Oct. 2024

Un fin de semana bien aprovechado por un bajo precio. Si te toco la epoca de jugar en un nes este es tu tipo de juego. Muy sencillo y con una dificultad adecuada, veo muchos comentarios diciendo que el plataformeo ocupa mucha precision pero siendo alguien que juega desde principios de los 90s no me parece, no es para nada injusto como muchos juegos de esa epoca y el control se siente pulido no como los falsos juegos "dificiles" (volgar the viking cough cough) que centran su dificultad en controles mal diseñados.

Sept. 2024

The lack of map and the high precision in the platform can turn people off, but the game is REALLY good and severely underrated. Solid metroidvania.

March 2024

Simple and entertaining. It's a mishmash of other NES games and metroidvanias that typically works well - it looks neat (although inconsistent, some enemies look like they were taken from other games), it sounds great (the soundtrack is just full of bangers), it controls fine (I found the platforming and the combat intuitive and simple). The main issue, I'd say, is the map, or rather lack thereof. This makes 100%-ing the game a chore because it is rather easy to forget about a branch of a location you've been to hours ago. Because this isn't a very popular game finding guides on the internet is a bit challenging which further extends the magnitude of this issue. There is a lot of bosses and most of them go down incredibly easily which is not necessarily a bad thing - I was afraid they would be NES-difficult, which is to say I expected cheap and irritating fights. They are, unfortunately, still present, but mostly during some of the late-game fights. They suck, obviously, screw the crab and screw the witch (they are just tedious, also you cannot skip the latter's intro which seems to be a bug.) The exploration itself is alright - I found basically all (like 98%) of the secrets myself and they were typically rewarding enough to make the whole process enjoyable. Too bad the backtracking sucks because of the atmospheric-but-still-annoying fast travel system (I feel like there should've been like twice the amount of the warp points.) The difficulty? I died a bit over 250 times during the whole game and most of these deaths were due to spikes which are an instakill. Are they cheap? Sometimes, but I wasn't really frustrated during the playthrough (this may be due to my experience with the so-called 'rage platformers'.) As I said before, most of the bosses were easy and the platforming was never overwhelming (even during the page rooms which were probably the hardest ones.) Also, I have to mention, screw the "die 500 times" achievement. I had to basically krill myself for like half an hour while watching some videos. Terrible stuff. Is the game worth it? I'd say yes, although expect some jank (the camera movement during screen transitions, for instance) and frustration (again, screw the crab.) It's a neat little game (took me about 10 hours to 100% it which isn't a terribly long time) and also, possibly, someone could find the game cool enough to finish the damn guides.

Jan. 2024

Awesome game. It was made for those of us who grew up with an NES. Lots of references to old games and a fair but familiar level of difficulty. The game is tough in some parts, but it knows that it's tough and give an appropriate number of save points to compensate.

Jan. 2024

Castle In The Darkness is a decent retro Metroidvania and while it is not the best the genre has to offer, it is still pretty fun. I enjoyed the numerous items and in general they all make you more powerful. There are a few items that act more as keys rather than being that useful (e.g. the mermaid fins), that I wished got more use. Overall I enjoyed finding all the power-ups even if they were not all super useful, it is nice to have a reward for exploration. On the topic of exploration, the map is very linearly designed and areas do not interconnect. The linear design caused a lot of slow down when backtracking for items, even with the teleport statues it was still sometimes tedious to re-walk a large portion of the map. I think a simply fix for this would have been to either have more teleport statues or to allow teleportation to save points, though the developer would have had to make a map for that last one. Yes, Castle In The Darkness just like the NES games it is meant to emulate, does not feature a map whatsoever. I can see this being a big problem for some players but in all honesty I enjoyed the lack of a map. It was a game of it's own charting out every area with pen and paper, a game I quite enjoyed. Map making is definitely an acquired taste, so if you don't like it you probably will have a bad time with this game Despite Castle In the Darkness' flaws I still enjoyed my time with it and can recommend it to retro game fans and Metroidvania fans alike.

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Data sources

The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.

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Last Updates

Steam data	18 November 2024 21:18
SteamSpy data	18 December 2024 10:19
Steam price	23 December 2024 20:44
Steam reviews	22 December 2024 20:04

-75% 9.99€ 2.49€

7.4

952

281

Online players

Developer

Matt Kap, Nicalis, Inc.

Publisher

Nicalis, Inc.

Release 05 Feb 2015

Platforms