As its wild (and wildly successful) Kickstarter campaign comes to an end, Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has risen to the top of the pack as the most-funded video game of all time. Currently sitting at $4.7 million, the campaign proves that gamers still care deeply about Igarashi’s Metroidvania-style gothic castle crawlers. And Igarashi still has 13 hours to gather more pledges as the campaign isn’t scheduled to close until 11:00 PM (Eastern Time) tonight.
The developer has responded to this deluge of money by running one of the most bizarre campaigns in recent memory. He included “achievements” to “unlock” stretch goals, he asked for fan art for a game that barely exists (and which he received by the bucketful), and he created a series of whimsical videos to respond to fans. Igarashi also expanded the scope of Bloodstained considerably through a ridiculous number of stretch goals, including these recently funded features:
- Online Challenge Mode… FUNDED
- Third Playable Character… FUNDED
- Standalone Prequel for PC/Consoles… FUNDED
- Standalone Prequel for 3DS/Vita… ALMOST FUNDED
If the campaign reaches $5 million, Igarashi has promised to create a roguelike mode that reshapes the game into a series of procedurally-generated hallways. But for now, Bloodstained will definitely receive an Online Challenge Mode, a third playable character (details coming soon), and a retro-styled standalone prequel developed by Inti Creates for the PC, PS4, Wii U, and Xbox One. Igarashi and his team are also reasonably confident the standalone prequel will come to handhelds as they’re only a few thousand away.
And they’re not done. This morning, a new update revealed that Yacht Club’s Shovel Knight will be included in the game in some way. Is he friend? Is he foe? Igarashi isn’t saying, but his inclusion is sure to be interesting.
After all these reveals, it’s hard to believe we’ll have to wait until 2017 to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Hopefully, Igarashi can keep the crazy updates coming for the next two years.
