Castle in The Clouds

CW: Rape

Skip Straight to the Horny Parts

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Synopsis

It's like Castlevania, but with booba

Castle in The Clouds is a pixelart style metroidvania game, developed by pixelteishoku and Libra Heart, and published by Critical Bliss in 2021. Keen eyed readers might recognize this art style from Sword of Succubus, which was also developed by Libra Heart. This game allows you to chose between an SFW or NSFW version of the game on bootup. I have no idea what the SFW version is like and I don't intend to ever find out.

Take up arms against the monsters! You are a busty bounty hunter named Lily who's dedicated her life to killing monsters and collecting treasure. A bunch of monsters have taken over the area surrounding a town. How far are you willing to go get your bounty?

You may not know this, but Castlevania is my favorite game franchise. I very nearly have a complete collection of all the games. Even the ones commonly considered flawed (I don't think any of them are outright bad). I'm happy to say that as a massive fan of the genre, Castle in The Clouds can sit up there with some of the best of them.

Story / Characters

Story-wise the game is pretty light. You are a bounty hunter. While chasing a thief, you fall into a trap and get sexually assaulted by a room full of her subordinates. You seek out the chief thief in search of revenge. Along the way, you receive quests from people in town and the Adventurer's Guild, which point you to the next dungeon. I appreciate that the story is light because the retro-pixel style doesn't leave enough screen real estate to impart complex ideas. The commitment of the devs to keep everything true to style is admirable. Still, it did make the text pretty challenging to parse sometimes.

All the human women in this game pretty much have the same bodytype. Slim-thicc with big boobs. It gets a little visually confusing in some of the sex scenes because it's hard to tell who's doing what, but I can always respect a dev who has a type.

Player Characters

Lily is the player character for the game. She's a hardcore bounty hunter who wants nothing more than to be rich. She kills monsters and people at the whim of the adventurer's guild, gaining gold and boning down all along the way.

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The Thief (who I don't think has a name) is the initial antagonist of Castle in The Clouds. Once you defeat her, she's pretty much out of sight, out of mind. Like all the characters in this game, her breasts are lovingly animated into a constant state of motion. Once you beat the game, she becomes a character you can switch to; however, this has no effect on the story.

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The Fighter is another playable character after beating the game. If she existed in the main story I didn't notice, or get a screenshot of her in action, so I believe she only exists as a playable character. Selecting characters is done on the fly similar to Castlevania III for the NES.

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Bosses

As I mentioned earlier, the story content around these bosses is pretty light, so I'm not going to be able to go into much detail. They're all a bunch of big tiddy bosses that are on-theme for the area in which they reside. The Poltergeist is the boss of the Haunted Mansion, the Ice Queen is the boss of the Ice Cave, etc. They're all totally stacked, which is excellent, but they only exist as enemy sprites. There are no higher-quality renders or sex scenes with any of them except for the Succubus. The lack of other sex scenes after defeating a boss seems like a missed opportunity.

Gameplay

Like I've explained above, Castle in The Clouds pretty closely follows the Metroidvania formula. For those unaware, Metroidvania is shorthand for a game that typically has a wide-open map, which you explore and traverse by gaining new abilities. This game has you starting off with a jump and an attack, but by the end, you're wall jumping, double-jumping, climbing on ceilings, and walking on water. Each 2D Castlevania game post Symphony of the Night has an ability watershed moment. A point in the game where you've mastered the controls and the map. You become an unstoppable monster, tearing from one side of the castle to another. While the contrast in abilities in Castle in The Clouds may not be quite that stark, it still felt good when all the powers started clicking for me.

While it's common for Metroidvania games to take place in one sizeable interconnected map, Castle in The Clouds takes more of a level-based approach. Still, you can switch between levels whenever you want. Kind of halfway between Castlevania II and III.

There are plenty of secret passages and powerups that reward exploring. Still, the patterns never become too obvious, so this game had me attacking just about every wall I saw. One secret in particular controls which of the three endings you get. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm so familiar with the format or if it just wasn't complicated, but I got the Best Ending on my first try, and upon reflection, I don't think I ever actually died. It wasn't until I was going through my screenshots that I noticed I didn't have a single picture of the game over screen. Thinking back on Sword and Succubus, I remember it as a lot harder. That might just be me, though, as I'm much better at Metroidvanias than Zelda-likes.

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Horny Parts

• Character Models

  Every single woman in this game, regardless of rendered size, is beautiful

• Heaven

  Everyone in heaven is horny and has sex all the time. That's definitely my idea of heaven so this resonated with me

• Tentacles

  There are these barriers that you can only remove by... well...

• Slime

  I was fully prepared to call this dev a coward, because While I could have sex with random tentacles and goblins, there were these balls of slime sitting around, completely unfuckable. But I see now that they were saving it for later in the game.

• The Bosses

  I already posted pictures of all of them. Go look up here

Horniest Part

• Sex Scenes

  Always animated, always jiggly, always thicc. Those three things are also my new years resolutions!

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Rating

Positive

I loved Castle in The Clouds. The animation was crisp and smooth. It's truly amazing how much they can convey with such a constrained medium. But then again, it's easy to forget that indie pixel art can look like this. Sure we're used to Mario and Donkey Kong looking good in 8 or 16 bit. Yet the 2D indie scene is flooded with default RPG Maker assets and people using pixel art to cut costs. But by using pixel art, without really understanding it like the artist of this game does, you end up with something soulless. The art and animation in this game are a masterpiece. The controls are tight, and the action is fun. I will definitely be keeping my eye on this dev.

Additional Things of Note

I couldn't tell you why they capitalize the "The" in the title but not the In. I'm not sure what styleguide they got that from but it doesn't affect anyone's life in any way, except mine. Because I had to keep remembering to capitalize it each time I wrote it.

~ Null

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