I cannot believe one of the best indie games of all time just got new DLC 17 years later

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.

Anyway, The Behemoth released the new Painter Boss Paradise DLC on Wednesday, which for just $4 adds the following:

• Make your own custom characters with our template, and share them with the world! CREATE!
• New official character: play as Paint Junior, use your imagination, and unleash powerful art to vanquish your foes!
• New art for all official playable characters and weapons!
• New main menu art with eight scenes celebrating the world of Castle Crashers!
• New map art for fancier adventuring!
• Endless knightly possibilities – choose from community characters or preloaded characters created by our team! Toggle them off or on at your whim!

So it's a huge rework of the classic art (which you can toggle back on if you want), adds the ability to easily import your own goofy creations into the game, and includes a new character who attacks in a sort of "drawn to life" school notebook style? That seems pretty rad to me for a 17-year-old game, though I would've loved to see a new stage added to the map, too.

If you were perhaps wondering if people still care about Castle Crashers, may I present to you the Steam Workshop of some 8,000 files, all of which have been added in the last 24 hours. Current trending character mods include ISAAC CLARKE - DEAD SPACE, DOOM FELLA, and A Bottle of Ranch, the description for which is simply "I'll put some ranch on that."

I'm suddenly feeling like Castle Crashers might become a problem again. Truly one of the sickest games of all time, and I'm not just saying that because it now has a bottle of ranch in it.

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