#617: Lycanthorn trilogy
Doom meets Castlevania meets busty axe-wielding werewolf girl? I’m likin’ it
Initial release: I: October 10, 2020 /II: Rain of Beasts: December 5, 2020/III: October 22, 2022
Platform: PC/PC/PC
Developer: scumhead
In the Doom community there’s a small cottage industry centered around making content that in some way mimics the aesthetics of classic console games of yesteryear, namely the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super version of same. It probably started with the Super Mario secret in Action Doom (and that’s on top of Action Doom being basically a love letter to Contra!) but in recent years has expanded to whole mods such as Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch and GMOTA. Enter scumhead, already notorious for their body-horror-infused Shrine and Shrine II, with Lycanthorn, a love letter to the olden days of Castlevania, powered by GZDoom (version 4.3.3 in both the itch.io and Steam releases.)
Lycanthorn I and II were released within months of each other and it’s honestly easier to lump them together as a unit, not just because they’re basically identical in aesthetics and gameplay but also because when scumhead released Lycanthorn II for free onto Steam, they included an updated version of the original as a free bonus episode.
Progression differs in these games — the first one is extremely straightforward, even aggressively linear; the second one has a Zelda-like overworld where the individual levels must be reached first, often by finding some important key or other resource to unlock them. But beyond structural matters, the two games are markedly identical to each other: made up of largely simple, short levels, textured in bright, simple textures fitting a NES-style palette; all sprites including the player’s are equally NES-flavored. It’s a commitment to an aesthetic that I very much admire, even if the end result is a little sparse for me.
The third game, meanwhile, is a 2D search action game, more closely resembling the series’ primary inspiration, that can be completed in half an hour; it was originally going to be a more colorful 3D joint titled Super Lycanthorn III (an obvious reference to Super Castlevania IV being that series’ first 16-bit title) but scumhead ran out of inspiration and ultimately switched to the 2D format. While the resulting game, Lycanthorn III, just nails the aesthetic, there’s a layer of jank to it that kind of gets in the way of it being truly enjoyable.
Nevertheless, as an unrepentant pervert I must admit that while the big draw is the NES-era Castlevania aesthetic — complete with sinister castles looming in the distance — there’s also the novelty of playing a busty axe-wielding werewolf girl. You play as Rain, the aforementioned axewolf; she plays pretty much as you might expect a Belmont would translate to 3D, her weapon is devastating but has a brief wind-up, so you have to time your swings to slay enemies. In the original version of the first game, you get access to powerful throwing knives, powered by hearts you find by slashing candles — sound familiar? In the sequel’s updated version, her gameplay has been changed to match that of the second game, so you get a weaker holy water that all things considered just doesn’t translate well to the first game, but on the other hand you get her slide kick which, while weak, makes it easier to jump gaps — so, pros, cons, etc.
The second game draws from all over the place in terms of gameplay. Structurally it’s a lot more like Zelda, complete with an overworld that in purely 3D terms feels much smaller than it would if you were playing this as a top-down 2D game, with multiple biomes occupying an island roughly the size of downtown Cincinnati. You also get three new characters who join your party, Castlevania III style, and in terms of the game logic they’re functionally weapons that you scroll through, which is why everyone shares the same life bar. Each character has three attacks, which may or may not use hearts depending on the character. Aside from Rain, her slide kick and her holy water, you also will meet Cervantes the vampire; he is extremely useful early on, as his ranged fireballs makes for a lot safer play than Rain’s axe. Next is Cricket the engineer; he’s the only human on the team, but his flintlock rifle is devastating, and his ultimate special — a gatling gun that eats all of your hearts — will make boss fights much easier. His weaker special, a bomb, is difficult to use, and its only real value is unlocking the desert palace level. Finally is Wrath, an ancient werewolf knight awoken from eternal entombment whose powerful melee attacks use no hearts but can be difficult to time. Wrath will nevertheless be the MVP towards the late game as he hits hard and with a little fancy footwork can often just facetank a boss after Cricket deletes half its health.
For the third game you’re just Rain again, and you don’t even get any subweapons until you find Cricket, who sells them. Aside from buying new gear, money in Lycanthorn III also serves as lives — each death you get costs you a small amount of gold to resurrect. It’s not so bad as you can regain that amount of gold and more in a matter of seconds, which comes in handy when you consider how many of these deaths will be cheap bullshit, such as dropping into water from a screen above because you made a blind leap down and rather than matching your position at the top of the screen to where you were at the bottom of the last one, it spawns you right over a gap between platforms. The whole game is janky as hell; I would love for scumhead to go back to it and tighten it up, because aesthetically it’s perfect, up there with Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, but there’s just too much to it that’s broken or clunky.
While the games all adhere pretty closely to a cool NES aesthetic, scumhead definitely puts their body horror talents to use here, as many of the bosses are pretty gross-looking: the generic “vampire” miniboss enemy looks like a vampire squid with a penis for a head, and that’s just for starters. Wait’ll you see Carmilla’s final phase!
Another big selling point for the series is the music; all of it done by LucaMusics and it very much is in the vein of classic Castlevania — sometimes just straight up being lawyer-friendly versions of popular Castlevania songs like “Bloody Tears.” What’s amusing about it is that you can probably get through the games themselves in less time than it takes to listen to the soundtracks on YouTube!
Lycanthorn is adorable. I don’t think the execution across all three games is perfect (though the second game comes closer than the others) but I admire the series’ commitment to not just the aesthetic, but translating the idea of Castlevania into a new skin. Obviously the search action/“Metroidvania” genre owes much to the later Castlevania games, but there’s comparatively less for the older games. So while Lycanthorn isn’t perfect on a gameplay or technical level — as an example of the latter, the itch.io release of the first game spits out script errors on launch and even its save/load menus are missing textures (which thus fills the log with error messages upon displaying them) — if nothing else it shows that there is still love for classic Castlevania in the Doom community.
— june❤
Lycanthorn is available for free on itch.io or as part of the Lycanthorn II Steam release.
Lycanthorn II: Rain of Beasts is available for free on itch.io or Steam.
Lycanthorn III is available for free on itch.io.
