Janky … but not unreasonably so.
Believe me, I have played some unreasonably janky games, and this one really ain’t even approaching the honorable mentions.
“Haunted Castle” is sometimes mistaken for being a harbinger or forefather of the Castlevania series, but the original Castlevania debuted on the NES (along with an arcade port) well before this sucker. So it really has no excuse for kind of sucking.
(It’s also not terribly important from a historical perspective.)
The suckiness comes through some of the hit detection and the cheap hits. The music and graphics are mostly fine, but decidedly different from what came before.
And it’s janky, with the protagonist kind of jerking around the screen like an extra from “Thriller,” but that actually fits the theme, so I’m not mad about it.
The trick here is memorization of enemy patterns, which with modern comforts like save states becomes a breeze.
There are absolutely worse spooky season games to engage with. It ain’t great, but it’s not quite the tire fire it’s been accused of being either.