Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse — Evil Empire Takes the Vampire Killer to Paris on October 15

Twenty-three years have passed in the Castlevania timeline since the events of Dracula’s Curse, and the series’ next installment drops the action into a location the franchise has not used before: 15th-century Paris. In Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, Rose Belmont — the successor to Trevor Belmont, who ended Dracula’s rampage in 1476 — must descend into a city under siege from monstrous creatures and an impossibly materialized castle hovering over the French capital. The game launches October 15 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.

The developer is Evil Empire, the studio that built Dead Cells after acquiring it from Motion Twin. The studio’s relationship with Castlevania began with a DLC crossover — Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania — and Konami’s experience working on that project apparently redefined what the publisher thought was possible with outside developers. When Evil Empire subsequently pitched Konami on another Dead Cells collaboration, Konami countered with something the studio had not asked for: stewardship of the next full Castlevania release. Evil Empire told PCGamesN at Gamescom 2026 that they were “honored by how much trust” Konami had placed in their vision. Motion Twin remains involved as advisors, a continuity from the DLC project that now carries through to a full franchise entry.

The design system Evil Empire has built for Belmont’s Curse reflects their background in non-linear action games. The playable map spans both Dracula’s castle and the surrounding city of Paris — two zones that interlock across the same non-linear structure. Players work through enemies and bosses to accumulate experience points and upgrades, while key items progressively unlock access to new map sections. It is, in structural terms, a metroidvania — a genre label that traces half its etymology to this exact franchise — but with a wider and more varied geography than series entries have typically offered. A gameplay trailer released September 3, which Konami titled “Bloody Tears” after the series’ most recognized musical track, shows combat pacing noticeably faster than the historical norm, with expanded attack options and traversal moves that suggest Evil Empire has adapted Dead Cells’ mechanical fluency to a different kind of map.

The lore connects intentionally to two previous entries: the story picks up the consequences of Dracula’s Curse (1987 in the West, the starting point of the console series) and Curse of Darkness (2005), setting Rose’s mission roughly two decades after the latter. Evil Empire has structured this so longtime players can trace the narrative lineage while newcomers receive sufficient context to follow the plot independently. Tsutomu Taniguchi produced the game at Konami, bridging the franchise’s internal knowledge base with Evil Empire’s external perspective on the series.

The 40th-anniversary framing functions as both context and pressure. Konami described Belmont’s Curse as the first of multiple planned products marking the anniversary, which means the franchise’s near-term trajectory will be calibrated partly by how this entry performs. The publisher spent much of the previous decade criticized for allowing major IP — Castlevania included — to sit dormant. Choosing an outside indie studio with a specific track record in the genre, rather than developing internally or contracting a larger developer, represents a different kind of bet on the franchise than the approach that preceded it.

What Evil Empire is actually building, under the nostalgia and the anniversary, is a systems game. Dead Cells worked because enemy patterns, upgrade trees, and map design all responded to each other in ways players could learn and exploit over time. Whether that same rigor transfers to a fixed-world action-RPG with Castlevania’s inherited mechanical vocabulary — and whether the result satisfies both the players who grew up with the 1987 original and those who have never held the Vampire Killer — will not be visible until October 15.

Tags: gaming, Action RPG, Konami, Belmont’s Curse, Castlevania, Evil Empire