The staple of “hero rescues princess” is a tale told a thousand times and more, to the point where you think it’d be boring now. But as the Mario franchise has proven, it still works, it just sometimes needs a little spin put on it at times. Which is where Castle of Heart: Retold comes in.

A graphical remaster of the 2018 Nintendo Switch title, Castle of Heart tells the oft-told tale of a knight in shining armour on a quest to save his maiden fair from a sinister and sneaky villain. Except the caveat is he’s got to do it quickly or he’ll end up a very heroic statue.

It’s a weird one, this port. A mix of endless/timed-runner with some traditional hack and slash 2D platforming. Does it add a spark of hope to our flinty hearts, or should it remain still and largely ignored? Let’s find out.

Big Rubble In Little Eastern Europe

Our story begins with a familiar framing device: local sorcerer gets a bit uppity, makes a pact with Chernobog, turns our hero to stone and nicks his girlfriend. Because that’s what will woo every woman ever: turn their partner immobile and attempt to enforce Stockholm syndrome upon them. Fortunately, our lady is a priestess of a deity that Chernobog wishes to eliminate, and therefore has a mystical angle.

Leaving an amulet around the neck of Svaran, our protagonist, a single tear upon it causes him to reanimate from his solid state. There’s a catch, however: the curse isn’t removed, per se. Instead, it’s delayed, so we will eventually revert to stone if we don’t save the day.

It’s a bit Beauty and the Beast, what with the time-limit aspect and curses, but at least it’s a novel twist on something for a video game.

Light As A Rock

The gameplay of Castle of Heart is pure 2D platforming, and there are some cons to that which I’ll cover later. But as it stands, it’s about as basic as it gets. Our knight in rusting armour is Slavic Mario: he runs left to right, jumps over obstacles and pits and thwarts whatever gets in his way.

Svaran handles, if you want the loosest analogy, like Arthur of Ghouls and Ghosts fame. A little clunky, defiant of jumping height in full armour, yet functional in a stilted way. What I mean by this is don’t expect any Prince of Persia acrobatics, this is as basic as it gets.

As is level progression: run the gauntlet of enemies, pitfalls and occasional breakable wall, reach the end of the level. Honestly, I’m just flying through this explanation, but it’s exactly what you’ll be doing in the levels. Hell, you don’t even need to kill everything. Rolling into them knocks bad guys over, as well as literally standing on them holds them in place.

Rock-Hard Determination

What sets Castle of Heart apart from other platformers is the timed-runner aspect I mentioned near the start. As pointed out, Svaran’s return to the realm of flexibility is one of limited time. What this means, if that if he doesn’t top up his life bar, by defeating enemies and/or collecting floating stone hearts, he’ll get hard.

The first life bar, when depleted, will see Svaran lose an arm. Whilst he shrugs it off as a mere scratch, the only disadvantage to us is that he’ll drop his secondary optional weapon. Whereas if the second bar, illustrated by the stone heart above depletes, he’ll crumble to dust.

Yet whilst this sounds like some sort of Dark Souls speedrun torment angle, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Hearts are plentiful, as are checkpoints and even enemies for a top up. Death is a mere inconvenience, rather than a punishment that sets you back to the beginning of the level.

And even then, there’s only twenty, each one about ten minutes or so in length. There’s no continual flow, the game will put players back to the level select on completion. As for extras: each level has four gems to find, that will extend Svaran’s maximum life. It’s a novel if unoriginal concept, but not vitally urgent (in the literal sense). There’s no real challenge, besides your own patience.

Two Lead Feet

Well, if the bored and deprecating tone this far didn’t makle it apparent, I’m not really gelling with Castle of Heart: Retold. It has an element of jank to it that doesn’t make it enjoyable, personally. The weird thing is, I think this suits the Switch fine. I’ve seen the older style on that version, and how it plays, and honestly I think it has that… for want of a better word, “endearing” charm to it.

Whereas on the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series, the cracks are obvious. The platforming, contrary to the core USP, feels slow and unwieldy. It relies on precision platforming too often, killing the flow by having Svaran miss and try again, or fall into a pit. The rope swinging, pictured above, seems to actually defy physics. Not because of the full armour, but it actually stops Svaran’s momentum between jumps. Figure that out.

There’s a few chase moments in the game too, like side-scrolling Crash Bandicoot sections. Whilst a nice little shake up from the standard gameplay, they’re still weirdly slow too. An early one had me going full Austin Powers steamroller, “Move out of the way!” to an enemy, instead of apparently taking it seriously. Which is not what you want in your serious game about a serious knight on a serious revenge quest.

Stonewashed

It seems odd to leave the presentation side of things this far down in a review, but it would unfair to not at least point out some positive aspects in a remaster.

As I say, having looked at the original Switch version, this is certainly the looker. The former is very muddied, as if made from early renders of Dark Souls assets. The remaster, on the hand, does look very presentable and clearly some attention has been made to make it worth it.

On the other hand, the music loop is so short and loud that within minutes I was cranking that down in the options. Is that a fair nitpick that it needed its own paragraph?

Normally no, but Castle of Heart is so insubstantial in both gameplay and extras that I had to fill out this review with some gripes that couldn’t be ignored.

A Statue To Mediocrity

To conclude, I don’t really come away from Castle of Heart: Retold with a positive recommendation. It’s a sum of bland parts, from the vastly over-used story cliches, to the lacklustre gameplay.

I was hoping, from the trailer, that it’d give me Ghouls and Ghosts vibes. Outside of deliberately difficult homage games, we don’t tend to get many that can replicate the old school vibe properly. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. It isn’t hard, per se, it’s just not enjoyable. The clunky handling of Svaran, the oft-used pitfall jumps and enemies that hold no real threat just don’t make it fun to play.

If I was given this on the Switch to review, I’d have marked it as potential shovelware. Whereas to apparently have “over 300,000 players” to somehow warrant a remaster, it just feels like it’s been hyped up slightly more than it needed to.

Instead, I’d rather leave Svaran in his place, rooted to the floor. A testament to blandness, encapsulated in stone as an example to try harder.

Castle of Heart: Retold is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.

Developer: 7Levels
Publisher: 7Levels

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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