Paris burns in Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse. When Rose Belmont, heir to an illustrious family of vampire hunters, arrives in the city, she’s greeted by artfully drawn flames that lick toward the sky, like tabs in a pop-up storybook. The pillars of fire bend in the wind, nudging Rose to the east, where the forces that have razed and infested Paris in the twilight of the Middle Ages conspire to resurrect their fallen master, Dracula.

Belmont’s Curse is of a piece with developer Evil Empire’s previous title, The Rogue Prince of Persia. The French studio has once again reimagined a largely dormant series with striking visual panache, kinetic side-scrolling action, and a wondrous, genre-twisting score by composer Danny Asadi, better known as ASADI. Where his work on The Rogue Prince of Persia laid Middle Eastern instrumentation over trap beats, the soundtrack here evokes a nightclub in the Transylvania of myth, with organs and choirs riding on pulsing waves of electronica. The result is beguiling enough to make you risk a bite to the neck.

Evil Empire also crafts a world as alluring as it is foreboding, despite a plot that devolves into a pulpy mess of historical fantasy played too straight. Across Belmont’s Curse, Rose explores diverse landscapes that brim with texture, as background details hint at puzzles and signpost the abundant secrets hidden behind cracked walls and beneath false floors. The map is ever-expanding, with regions that evolve as Rose gains access to their deeper reaches. Each of these zones feels less like a random sequence of rooms than like a coherent dungeon, from the catacombs filled with undead to a clock tower roaring with the din of pistons and steam.

Rose advances her crusade through such spaces with a bracing, deftly animated physicality. She streaks into battle like a hammer, striking enemies with bone-crunching blows, unleashing equally meaty spells, and parrying attacks with harsh flashes of light. She must bring her steadily growing skill set to bear in the game’s nearly uniformly satisfying boss fights, whose rigorous difficulty is tempered by finely readable move sets.

The heart of Rose’s arsenal is a grappling whip that can both pull her to foes and latch onto anchor points in the environment, sending her swinging over pitfalls in parabolic curves. Though the whip’s targeting suffers from occasional wonkiness, there’s immense pleasure to be had in the smoothness of the arc Rose traces in the air, and in the momentum she amasses in flight, smashing fiends in her path with the weight of a wrecking ball.

More than a decade may have passed since the last entry in the Castlevania series, and Belmont’s Curse certainly takes liberties in its interpretation of the material, but some things don’t change: Pity the demon who squares up to a Belmont.

This game was reviewed with a code provided by Burson.