Castle in the Darkness was released on Steam in 2015 and capitalized on the trend of frustratingly difficult throwback platformers. It currently holds a “mostly positive” ranking out of 968 reviews, so it’s safe to say that the game was a critical success. People love castles. People love darkness. You can’t go wrong!
Developer Matt Kap later brought his talents to work on The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, and now that he’s done with that project, he’s bringing in fellow Rebirth developer Simon Parzer to help him bust out Castle In The Darkness 2.
Development studio LABS Works recently suffered a major setback on their game Astalon when their programmer broke his collarbone, pushing the game back to next year some time. A few days later, they posted a tweet teasing the announcement of a new game. A few tweets later, they debuted the first mini-trailer for Castle in the Darkness 2, which boasts a significant visual upgrade over the first game.
Not that the first game looked bad. It simply looked like a game more or less completely designed by a single individual. Even the best developers can only do so much by themselves, which is why Kap brought Simon Parzer on to help with the sequel.
Kap explained as much, saying that he kept the graphics on the first game simple in order to speed up the development process. Now that Parzer and a few other individuals are covering the technical side of things, it frees Kap up to work on the graphics, audio, and game design.
Castle in the Darkness won players over with its Castlevania and Metroid-inspired gameplay and its sadistic and merciless difficulty. Some people are just into that sort of thing. It stands to reason that if you were a fan of the first game, Castle in the Darkness 2 will likely be your jam as well. More of the same isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the original thing was good. Why fix it if it isn’t broken?
LABs Works has promised the community a new mini-trailer on the second day of every month. They haven’t announced a release date, but if they’re releasing the trailers monthly, that likely means it still has a way to go. Until then, masochists can get their thrills replaying the first game and dying every few minutes or so.
Making us wait an entire month for every new mini-trailer is a form of torture, which doesn’t surprise me at all coming from these guys.
