That being said, I almost felt this game to be more of a trip down meh-mory lane, as its opening level wasn’t so much a Ghost ‘n Goblins homage as it actually was Ghost ‘n Goblins minus the heart-decorated underwear. As far as just the pure act of evoking retro arcade nostalgia goes, Cursed Castilla EX excels amazingly. There’s the aforementioned threadbare storytelling, the simplistic two button control scheme of just jump and attack, the “ROM OK” loading screen, the scanlines on the pixel graphics and the 8-bit synth music score, the “Continue?” screen asking you to insert more credits, and even the classic three-character high-score chart. This approach is of course extremely fitting as Cursed Castilla EX offers a pixel-perfect recreation of the vintage arcade game experience. And really you can ignore most of those previous two sentence as narrative is completely secondary to gameplay here (Heck, I genuinely did not even know my knight’s name until the King addressed him again at the end of the game). A demon has tricked the mourning Moura into transforming her tears into a key which unlocks a portal to the demon realm, and its up to you to send the demons back where they came from. If for some reason you crave some more of that vintage masochism – now luckily minus the real world change-chugging – then I have just the game for you.Ĭursed Castilla EX (a remake of 2012’s freeware Maldita Castilla, with additional levels and content) is a 16-bit retro platformer by Spanish developer Locomalito that sees you as the loyal knight Don Ramiro, sent on a quest by the King of Castile to slay the demon horde that have invaded the kingdom. Infamously unforgiving, the classic side-scrolling platformer required precision gameplay or it would punish you terribly as it ravenously consumed all your pocket money. And there were very few games that could gobble up your precious coins quite like Ghosts ‘n Goblins. I spent a large portion of my youth in dingy “gameshops”, pumping “two-bop” after ‘two-bop” into one arcade game after the other.
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