r/Bloodstained

Dominique haunts Celeste’s room of remembrance, practicing a ritual of summoning arts.

Though long the Master Carpenter’s study, attempts to commune with her mother’s spirit fail.

Two Red Demon paintings hang high in this space, each viewed from opposing chairs.

Between them a third painting - motherless kittens starting life among the skulls.

The previous painting posts:
The Alchemist's cliff the red demon is just off screen to the left.
The woman in the painting
Todd's studio
The Master Carpenters summoning school
*coming soon

Image slideshow of each chapter with music.

Guys, I'm desperate. I installed the game to revisit it and decided to add a few mods to speed up progression—just the ones to increase Miriam's movement speed and speed up mastery leveling. However, after closing the game and reopening it to continue playing, it simply refuses to load; it gets stuck forever on the splash screen and won't go any further. I've uninstalled the mods, deleted the save folders—even the Steam cloud saves—and nothing has worked. I think my game is permanently corrupted; can anyone help me with this?

The Master Carpenter is described as "A demon carpenter gifted at summoning."

During her exploration of the Castle, Dominique studied under a demon carpenter gifted at summoning. The Master Carpenter carves Ouija chests to commune with the dead and summon demons. A Red Demon painting adorns the bloodstained workshop where she practiced her new arts.

The previous painting posts:
The Alchemist's cliff the red demon is just off screen to the left.
The woman in the painting
Todd's studio

The short video set of the story thus far. (with music)

This is the 3rd Red Demon painting I have seen. The other 2 are in Dominique's shop. Why is there a painting of Dominique here?

Did Dominique become best friends with Todd before Miriam even got her first Hair Apparent?

The previous painting posts:
The Alchemist's cliff the red demon is just off screen to the left.
The woman in the painting

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/148371302

Just finished Nightmare mode on Casual and am now considering trying Veteran, but those are one of the enemies I have no idea how to deal it, as ducking/jumping doesn't work and you can't just kill them fast enough, what's the trick here?

Lately I had been on a Metroidvania vibe: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, Cave Story+, Astalon.
The latter also gave me an 8-bit vibe, so while I was waiting for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night to get into sale, I've noticed it had two prequels on sale, and decided to buy them.

...turns out that those prequels weren't Metroidvanias, but rather based on NESvanias, with some of the same issues, such as terrible clunky movement. Indeed it was quite the whiplash coming from the smooth and responsive movement from Astalon to now being stuck on a vertical jump if I didn't press forward on the same frame.
I felt a bit slighted when, after I finally lost all my lives on stage 2 to legally-not-medusa-heads knocking me back into pits, the game asked me if I wanted to put the difficulty from "Veteran" to "Casual" (I would later learn that those weren't the difficulty options, those would be Normal/Nightmare/Ultimate, that's just a setting if I want infinite continues and enemy knockbacks or not).

The game caused me no shortage of frustration with enemy attacks I had no idea how to dodge and with the hardest enemy being the controls themselves.
After dying several times to the last boss, I finally managed to beat it by swapping between various characters during the fight and abusing my subweapons... And that try, unlike all my other ones, felt oddly satisfying? Should I have been doing that all the game?

I had been playing with the mentality of "the game's likely balanced around not using subweapons and sticking to a single character, subweapons are, therefore, likely cheese strats", but I later learned that even on the mode that you choose to kill your companions rather than recruiting them, you actually gain extra skills to compensate for that.
I then went to look at some videos of people playing the game and... the way they played felt actively very fun?
Basically... that one Mario 64 GIF.

After beating the normal mode in 2.6 hours and not having touched the sequel, there's a high probability that I should be able to get a refund, since 14 days haven't yet passed, but I'm now considering if I should or not.
It really feels like a good/fun game when you're good at it.

They appear to be walking off a cliff.
You can almost see one taking a plunge if you look closely.

Could she be the artist? Do you think she is related to one of the characters?