Evil Empire and Konami Reveal How Castlevania: Belmont's Curse Was Made

A Decade Without Dracula

It has been a long time. According to an Xbox Wire feature published July 24, 2026, no brand-new Castlevania game has arrived in more than a decade. That is a long wait for one of gaming’s most enduring franchises, and Konami’s answer to it is, depending on your perspective, either unexpected or quietly obvious. The publisher is handing the keys to Evil Empire, the French studio that built its reputation on Dead Cells and, more pointedly, on the beloved Return to Castlevania DLC for that game.

To mark the announcement, members of the press were invited to a first hands-on session held at the Chapelle Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc in Paris’ 14th arrondissement. The venue was not chosen at random. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse opens in a dark, gothic reimagining of the French capital, so the gothic stonework made for a fittingly atmospheric backdrop. Following the preview, Xbox Wire France editor John Harry De Lara sat down with Tsutomu Taniguchi, producer at Konami, and Emmanuel Nouaille, creative director at Evil Empire, to discuss how the project came together.

The Résumé Was the Work

Taniguchi was direct about why Konami chose Evil Empire for a task this significant. He identified two reasons. “The first is Evil Empire’s passion for Castlevania,” he said, as reported by Xbox Wire. “The second is their expertise in action games. Castlevania has always been an action series, so it was essential that the controls, gameplay, and overall feel lived up to players’ expectations.”

That combination matters. Passion alone does not ship a good action game. Plenty of developers love a franchise without having the mechanical chops to express that love in motion and feel. Konami wanted a team that could honor the series’ history while meeting what Taniguchi called the demands of modern action game design. Evil Empire, fresh off years of refining Dead Cells into one of the genre’s best-feeling titles, had apparently demonstrated both.

Nouaille’s response to Taniguchi’s praise was notably understated. Smiling, according to the Xbox Wire writeup, he acknowledged it almost felt presumptuous to follow such compliments and then offered a simple summary: “Our best résumé was simply our work.”

That is a confident thing to say, and also probably accurate. Return to Castlevania was not a throwaway marketing collaboration. It was a carefully constructed DLC that showed Evil Empire understood the series’ gothic atmosphere, enemy design sensibilities, and the particular rhythm that makes Castlevania feel like Castlevania rather than any other action platformer.

From DLC to Full Entry

The path from that DLC to Belmont’s Curse was not a straight line. As Taniguchi noted, when Evil Empire first worked with Konami on the Return to Castlevania content, nothing suggested the collaboration would eventually grow into a full series entry. The Xbox Wire article notes that Evil Empire originally proposed something more limited before the scope expanded, though the full details of that original pitch were not disclosed in the source material available.

What is clear is that Konami saw enough in both the finished DLC product and the working relationship to take a bigger swing together. For fans who have spent the better part of a decade watching Castlevania exist primarily as a streaming anime property, this represents a meaningful shift. The franchise is returning to its roots as an action game, developed by a studio that has spent years proving it can make that genre sing.

The Paris setting is itself a notable departure from the series’ traditional Transylvanian castles and Eastern European gothic imagery. A dark, gothic Paris suggests Evil Empire is bringing something new to the visual vocabulary while presumably keeping the mechanical DNA intact. Whether the whip cracks as satisfyingly as it should is the question that will define this revival.