Bloodstained Returns in 2026 With a Wild New Look

Six years after Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Koji Igarashi and his team are back with a new title, Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, coming to PS5 in 2026. The reveal trailer dropped a few days ago, and reactions have been... mixed. Not because the gameplay looks bad—it seems kind of sick—but because the game’s new cel-shaded aesthetic is a bit of a shock to the system.

If you watched the trailer and thought, “Wait, is this Bloodstained or a mid-2000s cutscene compilation?” you're not alone. Characters look like they’re made of wax. The cinematic cutscenes feel like they're ripped straight from a PS3 launch title. It’s not a total visual disaster, but it does feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the game, especially considering how much the gothic atmosphere matters to a Castlevania-inspired series like this one.

"Why is everyone made out of plastic?" – Tyler Colp, PC Gamer

Before diving into The Scarlet Engagement, it’s worth remembering how we got here. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night launched in 2019 as the long-awaited spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Directed by Igarashi himself, who had left Konami years earlier, the game was Kickstarted in 2015 and raised over $5.5 million. It was eventually released to solid reviews and sold more than 2 million copies across all platforms. Fans praised its level design, tight combat, and sprawling Metroidvania map, even if some of its visual elements and bugs felt rough at launch.

Before that, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon launched in 2018 as a retro-style companion game, developed by Inti Creates. That 8-bit spin-off was a love letter to early Castlevania and introduced some characters and mechanics that carried into the main game. Curse of the Moon even got a sequel in 2020, further expanding the franchise with NES-era flair.

So Bloodstained is no longer a scrappy indie experiment—it’s a full-blown franchise with lore, characters, and expectations. That’s why The Scarlet Engagement has a lot riding on it, especially now that it’s aiming to stand out in a much more crowded space of gothic side-scrollers.

Dual Protagonists, 2.5D Combat

Mechanically, The Scarlet Engagement does look like a strong follow-up. It features two protagonists—Leonard and Alexander—and you’ll actually control both during gameplay. According to the PlayStation Blog, one character is directly playable while the other assists automatically, giving players the ability to create combo attacks that combine both characters’ abilities. That alone adds a strategic layer not found in the first game and hints at a more dynamic combat system.

Level design appears to retain the 2.5D setup from Ritual of the Night, with side-scrolling traversal and real-time combat. Cursed cities, moody castles, and grotesque monsters are all back, albeit now drenched in cel-shading. The trailer also showed off larger NPC crowds and more interactive environments, which could suggest a deeper narrative structure than before.

What’s missing is a clear sense of how this story ties into the original game. The Scarlet Engagement is a prequel, but CD Projekt hasn’t laid out exactly where Leonard and Alexander fit into the broader lore. Ciri—sorry, Miriam—is nowhere to be seen so far, so it’s possible this new game is trying to establish its own arc before looping back to known characters.

Aesthetic Whiplash or Visual Evolution?

It’s fair to say that Bloodstained has never nailed a universally loved art style. Ritual of the Night was heavily criticized for its inconsistent visuals—2D UI elements slapped onto 3D environments, stiff animations, and bland color palettes. Post-launch updates improved some of that, but even fans admitted the game’s look was its weakest link.

With The Scarlet Engagement, the devs are clearly trying to unify the style with cel-shaded models across the board, even for things like treasure chests. It gives the game a more cohesive feel at times, but those weirdly glossy cutscenes undo some of that progress. There’s something uncanny about how characters move in the cinematics, and it doesn’t quite mesh with the hand-animated charm of similar games like Blasphemous or Hollow Knight.

Then again, maybe that doesn’t matter much once you’re in the flow of the action. The gameplay looks fast, expressive, and ambitious. And if the dual-character system lands the way it should, this could be the most engaging combat system Iga’s delivered since Order of Ecclesia.

Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement release date

The Steam page for Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement is already live, and more details will likely come in the months ahead. A 2026 release gives the team time to refine the visuals and smooth over any disconnect between style and substance. What’s clear is that this isn’t a reboot—it’s a continuation. It’s Bloodstained through and through, for better or worse.

As with the first game, there’s a lot of potential wrapped in some odd presentation choices. But if the gameplay hits and the story delivers, even the strangest cel-shaded faces won’t be enough to keep fans away. The PS5 era of Bloodstained begins soon.