Time to spice up your love life with some beautifully horrific creatures! Romancelvania by The Deep End Games is an action platformer that also doubles as a dating show. Will Dracula ever be able to find true love? That’s for you to find out!
In the beginning of Romancelvania, we see a tired Drac, their castle laid to ruins, saddened and despondent. Along comes the Grim Reaper with a solution to liven up the old soul: a dating game show. Explore the world outside the castle (now a refurbished bachelor/bachelorette pad) to recruit new monsters and mythical creatures to be your next love. Make the right choices and your monster lovers will swoon and provide you with better powerups.
The story behind each character starts to unravel as you ask them more questions and start to know them. The banter and campy sexualization gets silly at times, and I couldn’t help myself from laughing out loud. Other times, however, I didn’t want to dive deeper into their personality because their starting mood was annoying and flat. Some characters had drastic mood changes that turned them into a negative pile of mush (like the succubus once she got a chastity belt). Romancelvania would also pop in during your gameplay (quite mood-ripping and aggravating, by the way) and show you two characters bickering or talking. Sometimes their banter wasn’t that bad and was resolved by the end of the dialog sequence, but you still had to pick a side anyways. This banter was only important if it was between two lovers that you cared about, but ultimately distracted from the current quest that you were on.
The gameplay in Romancelvania has its ups and downs. While there are many powers and weapons to choose from, the input system controlling all interactions is problematic. Buttons would be triggered multiple times (most likely due to the game reacting to when something is pressed down as well as lifted), making you accidentally skip through dialog and interactions, and performing slightly delayed attacks. I didn’t see too much of a problem with delayed attacks, but more of a problem with actions triggering when I didn’t want them to. Some actions are not linked to your weapon system so you have to perform button combos to do them. When playing with a joystick, these button combos are triggered as you’re moving around the area, interrupting your normal attacks for something that is slower and less powerful.
That’s not to say all the moves in Romancelvania are bad, I thoroughly enjoy trouncing around and battering enemies with my big hammer. The healing tornado of blood is another great move because you don’t have to worry about collecting health biscuits, and there’s a secret tactic where you can stand in while the boss attacks you and the attacking and healing will balance itself out. I mentioned biscuits, but there are other one-time weapons that you can toggle through, including the unholy hand grenade, wave of bats, and the bonerang (it’s a boomerang made of bones, get out of your head). A lot of Romancelvania feels like the devs said “This is a silly thing,” and implemented them without proper game design. The grenade explosion is impossible to land because the item goes through the enemy and explodes after two seconds, and any kind of hit doesn’t seem to create a reaction to the enemies.
The dating simulation part of Romancelvania is also lackluster. You are given different dialog choices, but the game only hints at the tone of the choice, not what you’re actually saying. Seeing the tones pushes me away from making choices that seem mean to the characters, rather if I was given a chunk of dialog to work off of I would have to figure out myself what kind of tone was implied. You also have to vote other characters off (similar to the Bachelor/Bachelorette TV shows), meaning you can get rid of the ones you just recruited. The romantic pacing feels too fast and I wish I could get to know the characters more naturally. In every level you visit there is a romantic spot you can bring a character to, but you can’t bring any character you want there for some reason. Because of this, the characters you bring on a date are typically like “Why’d you ever bring me here?” and here I am playing the game thinking to myself “I had no other option, now enjoy your tea.”
Overall it feels Romancelvania is trying to do too much. There are too many levels that are hap-hazardly designed, too many lovers that you have to juggle, too many powerups, yada-yada. As a Kickstarter game, maybe the developers went overboard in offering more than they could handle. I would’ve preferred a game with 6 characters that were direct references to mythical creatures (honestly, “Dead Pirate,” what in the world is that?), had two love sequences with three characters each, and explored their minds and personalities more. Probably the character that was most interesting was Lulu the Elder God (it’s Cthulhu) because there were multiple silly quests and bosses to battle. The Dead Pirate and another vampire were both sitting around, being boring and mopey. Romancelvania doesn’t tell you this outright, but every character is linked to some action or move. Figuring this out completely changed my perspective on who I should be swooning, as I wanted better powerups. There should have been a different system set in place where you can level up and gain any power, no matter who you date. I stopped talking to the demon DJ Brocifer, but it was only him that could make me resistant to fire.
For being a “metroidvania,” Romancelvania is fairly linear. Don’t get me wrong, Metroidvanias are all linear, but what makes them work is hinting at secret locations and places that you can’t reach. Romancelvania doesn’t have any exciting hinting; when you defeat the boss in a location there’s nothing else to find or do, so backtracking isn’t really necessary. The powerups and moves that are given to you don’t feel earned: Grim plops them in front of you for the most part. The levels don’t always feel cohesive, which harps back on having too much happening in the game. There’s a point when you’re done talking to the Dead Pirate and suddenly this unicorn brings you to a candy world, completely non-sequitur from what’s happening in the game.
Romancelvania presents you with a confusing mixture of 2D and 3D art. The two styles clash at points, where the clean and discernible features on the 2D character versions make the 3D models look like glistening wet Play-Doh. Part of me wishes they made the whole game in 2D, but there are two factors that hold me back from wishing it too intensely: the wonderful set design and the HORRENDOUS USER INTERFACE. The world, as oddly laid out as it is, looks wonderful. There’s a great amount of depth to the world, almost to a fault where it looks like you can explore down the hall or around the corner. The UI on the other hand… needs work. It looks similar or worse than the game jams I’ve done, and I completed those in a week. The UI art and design looks hastily put together in an illogical sense. Words are placed over images, making them unreadable, fonts are stylized to illegibility, weapon and move icons are bland and easily to be confused with another. As someone who works mainly in design and programming UI and UX, I found the UI to be the most distracting and degrading part of Romancelvania.
A slightly less annoying part of Romancelvania is the audio design. I’m not talking about the dynamic and wonderful music by Jim Bonney (one of the reasons why I bought the soundtrack along with the game), but the choices in sounds don’t fit the game. When you receive a powerup and a short info screen appears, closing out of the screen sounds off an air horn. This is the most obvious misuse of sound effects that slowly drive you crazy. Most of the time UI sounds should not make themselves so obvious unless it’s important, and if it’s that important it should only happen once or twice. The airhorn sound solidifies the thought that the devs took a lot of silly ideas and haphazardly dumped them into their game.
I know I harped a lot on Romancelvania, but it’s mainly because I really wanted it to do well. Having backed their project on Kickstarter and watching them slowly develop content over the course of four years was exciting. I hope the developers keep pursuing to update the game. Romancelvania has a lot of charm and I found myself enjoying moments more than I would have in other games, but the game is just not polished to the point where it should be.
In summary: Mildly interesting platforming and dating sim gameplay, a mish-mash of designs and ideas, an awkward conglomeration of 2D and 3D art assets, and some poor sound effect choices blaring over the thoughtfully put together music backtrack.
Jordan purchased Romancelvania on PlayStation 5 for the purpose of this review. Romancelvania is also available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC
