Toziuha Night: OotA

It starts with a whip, a grudge, and the kind of cult that definitely isn’t hosting bake sales. Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists throws you into a haunted, sprawling cathedral of misery, and it’s kind of glorious. What begins as a personal quest for petty vengeance quickly escalates into something much bigger, darker, and, surprise!, ends with you saving the world. Again.

Inspired by Castlevania but far from a carbon copy, Toziuha Night transforms its predecessor’s linear formula into a full-blown, open-ended Metroidvania RPG. The result? Seven-plus hours of map-wandering, whip-slinging, stat-tweaking chaos, now with added anime flair and elemental alloys. Your chain whip can be infused with fire, ice, lightning, and more, but the system’s balance feels a bit like alchemy gone wrong. Most of the time, basic steel gets the job done better than your carefully crafted concoctions.

That said, what Toziuha Night gets right, it really gets right. Exploration is constantly rewarding, with secret paths and skill-gated doors teasing you at every turn. Picking up new abilities feels like unlocking cheat codes from an alternate timeline, one where you earn your double jumps and air dashes through sheer suffering. The pixel art pays loving tribute to the 32-bit era, the symphonic soundtrack absolutely slaps, and the boss fights manage to be punishing without slipping into full masochism.

It’s not perfect, some systems need a chemistry tutor, but when it clicks, Toziuha Night becomes a whip-cracking, spell-slinging power fantasy that’s hard to put down.

If Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had a weird anime cousin who went through an alchemy phase, it’d be this game, and yes, that’s a compliment.