This Week in Games: Castlevania Turns 40 With Belmont's Curse, Plus Hellraiser, Ratatan, Valor Mortis and More

LAS VEGAS

Sometimes a release week is just a week. And sometimes it’s the week Castlevania comes back, Hellraiser gets a new game, Valor Mortis brings the swordplay, and Ratatan revives the Patapon spirit. This week in games is the second kind, and it’s one of the most stacked lineups of the year — headlined by Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, the first true 2D metroidvania Castlevania since 2008’s Order of Ecclesia, landing exactly in time for the series’ 40th anniversary and Halloween. Eighteen years. I’ve been waiting on this like it’s a long-lost family member.

Let’s get the obvious context out of the way first. The Castlevania series is literally half of the word “metroidvania” — the genre is named for it — and we haven’t had a proper new 2D entry in the style since the DS era. This one hands the whip from veteran vampire hunter Trevor Belmont to his daughter, Rose Belmont, and Konami has handed development to Evil Empire, the studio that proved its monster-slaying credentials with the Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania DLC. That’s an inspired hire: Evil Empire understands Castlevania’s DNA from the inside.

RPGFan’s crew has already gone hands-on — one of their writers played an extensive demo of the game at Tokyo Game Show 2026 and came away impressed by the visuals and the smooth-flowing platforming and combat. The screenshots speak to that: crisp, hand-drawn-feeling animation, a burning city behind a castle wall, a Medusa fight that looks appropriately miserable. It launches on PS5, Switch, Xbox and PC, and Tech-Gaming lists the PC version at $29.99 — a generous price for a proper series entry.

And this isn’t a demo story, to be clear. We covered the demo when it dropped — this is launch week. The difference between tasting the menu and sitting down to dinner.

The horror shelf: Hellraiser and Valor Mortis

October is horror’s month, and this week’s lineup knows it. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival arrives at $39.99 — and if you’re a Barker fan, that name alone does the selling. There’s a real hunger right now for horror games that lean into atmosphere and dread instead of just louder, more action-heavy spectacle, and the Cenobites’ domain seems like exactly the right place for that. As a Barker devotee myself, this is the week’s second must-watch after Castlevania.

Then there’s Valor Mortis ($39.99), the first-person combat game steeped in supernatural horror. Per Tech-Gaming’s rundown, it mixes swordplay with firearms and magic across plague-ravaged European environments, and at its core it’s a roguelike — so expect to die a lot while figuring out which weapon your enemies hate most. The melee looks genuinely visceral. If you wanted Thief VR’s swordplay with more demons, this is your game.

And if you want your retro shooting with a Warhammer price tag, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 lands at just $22.49 digital — a budget price for the sequel to one of the best boomer shooters of the decade. There’s a certain moral clarity to Boltgun: you are a Space Marine, they are heretics, and the solution involves a chainsword. Valor Mortis is also on our radar for next week, and we flagged the Hellraiser release window earlier.

The indies are stacked this week

The smaller games this week could honestly headline a quieter week on their own. Ratatan is the one to know — it’s from the creators of Patapon, and it’s bringing rhythm-infused strategy and chaotic action to Switch 2 (physical $39.99, digital $31.49 per Tech-Gaming’s listings). If you loved Patapon — and if you played a PSP, you loved Patapon — this is the spiritual successor you’ve been waiting a decade and a half for. The early console-release buzz has been encouraging.

Deep Dish Dungeon (October 13, Xbox and PC) is the friendslop pick: a multiplayer dungeon crawler where gathering ingredients and cooking food is as important as the combat, with proximity chat and darkness that forces real communication. Think of the energy of this year’s co-op hits, but with campfires and hunk of meat management. And The Witch’s Bakery (October 14, nearly everything) is the cozy counterpoint — a narrative adventure with visual-novel elements about Lunne, a witch who can see into people’s hearts and heal them through magic, with hand-drawn Ghibli-evoking art and an opening theme by Cécile Corbel of Arrietty fame. Yes, really. Day one.

The heavy hitters: Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Planet Zoo 2

Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is out now at $49.99 across PS5, Xbox, PC and Switch 2 — the expansion that turns Capcom’s sprawling action-RPG into the definitive version. If you bounced off the base game at launch, Dark Arisen is traditionally the “now it’s actually finished” edition, and pawns remain the best AI companions in the business. Don’t @ me.

Planet Zoo 2 ($49.99) closes out the premium tier, and I’ll say this: we are living in a golden age of management sims, and Frontier knows its lane. If you’re the kind of person who has ever cried because a virtual red panda’s habitat welfare dropped to 72%, your weekend is already planned.

And one more for the RPG crowd, per RPGFan: Tales of Eternia Remastered drops October 16 with visible map markers, combat speed-up and toggleable original/remastered visuals — the classic Tales entry (originally localized here as Tales of Destiny II) finally on modern platforms.

Stack it all up and this is genuinely one of the best weeks of the year — a proper Castlevania return, a Hellraiser game, a Patapon successor, and a zoo sim, all in the same seven days. Last week’s releases are here if you missed them. Me? I’m clearing the weekend.

More from the newsroom: our Belmont’s Curse demo impressions · what’s coming next week · last week’s releases