What is a Castlevania game? Nothing but a miserable little melting pot of horror tropes drawn from famous literary archetypes—Carpathian gothica populated by Universal monsters and their lesser minions—with inspirations that run the gamut from Scandinavian folklore to Greek myth. Schematically, it is a series of platform-navigation sequences interspersed with combat encounters, levelling, magic, and weapon forging across a Metroid-inspired map.