There are those games I fondly remember from my school days, and then there are those games I remember being a problem from my school days. Castle Crashers, first released on the Xbox 360 in August 2008, was nearly one of the latter. It took over my college apartment for at least a month, with three or four of us constantly playing and replaying the cartoony co-op beat ’em up to grind XP and level up all of our characters enough to tackle its ludicrous Insane difficulty mode. If it hadn’t come out so early in the semester, we probably would’ve had a real bad time with midterms.

I am now 37 years old, haven’t played Castle Crashers in ages, and so closely associate it with that specific time in my life that I don’t know how to process the following information: 17 years later, there is new Castle Crashers DLC. This update didn’t actually come out of nowhere—the indie team at The Behemoth actually announced it in June 2024, but you can’t expect my brain to remember things that happened a year ago; it ran out of space back in 2008 after permanently filing the Castle Crashers deer that propelled itself across the screen by shitting.