Castlevania: Spectral Interlude is a free-to-download homebrew Castlevania game for the ZX Spectrum, developed and published by Rewind (a Russian indie team) in 2015. The game is playable on 128K Spectrums only and is available digitally for Spectrum +3s as a disk-based game, and also as a TAP file. A limited number of physical copies were also produced for sale.

Spectral Interlude plays very much like the earlier 2D Castlevanias, in that it’s basically a platform game with a central character (Simon Belmont) who fights with a whip, although the game does contain some features of more modern Castlevania games as well. It also has an original story.

The aim of the game is to make your way through various areas, collecting money and souls from defeated enemies and eventually finding and defeating the boss in each section. Upon beating each boss you’re usually awarded with an additional skill, like double-jumps, water-freezing (which turns waterfalls into climbable platforms), and even teleportation (useful for getting to out-of-reach platforms). Your ultimate goal, though, is to summon and kill Dracula himself at the end of the game.

Like many classic 2D Castlevania games Belmont can also carry a secondary weapon, and how many times you can use it is dictated by how many hearts you are carrying. Belmont’s health is shown in the top left, and underneath that are chain links that extend the upgraded whip’s range. Health can be replenished at fountains, and there are shops in town that sell secondary weapons and other useful items like an amulet that allows you to warp back to town from healing fountains.

One thing Castlevania: Spectral Interlude does have is: extended pages of dialogue with NPCs, mostly explaining the plot or conferring information about your goals. Some might argue that there’s too much dialogue in the game, but thankfully the longer passages don’t occur very often. The English translation is also a little poor in places.

Spectral Interlude is a fairly long and involving game and it does require quite a lot of backtracking, which might irk some players. The gameplay is fairly standard ‘Metroidvania‘ fare and doesn’t really feature any situations that could be described as “spectacular”, like we saw in Super Castlevania IV or Symphony of the Night, but the game is definitely beautifully-presented, fun to play, and mostly rock-solid and bug-free. There are also plenty of secrets to find – usually uncoverable by either whipping certain wall stones or by walking through false walls.

Overall, Spectral Interlude is a slick and worthy play. It has some nice touches, like background colours changing in certain areas after defeating a nearby boss, and is playable in English, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese.

More: Official website at spectralinterlude.com