Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon is a prequel that swaps the guns, heels and spectacle of the Bayonetta series for a forest, a stuffed cat and a girl who has not yet grown into her name. PlatinumGames developed it. Nintendo published it. It came to the Nintendo Switch in 2023, and it is, by some distance, the strangest thing the series has ever asked players to hold in two hands at once.
It works. That is the surprise, and it is worth stating plainly before the details. Bayonetta Origins takes a franchise built on speed and flourish and slows it to a walking pace, then makes that pace feel deliberate rather than defanged. The result is a puzzle-adventure that earns its place in the series instead of borrowing from it.
Trailer, via Nintendo of America.
Cereza, Morgana and the Avalon Forest
The story sits six hundred years before the events of the first Bayonetta. Cereza is a young witch in training, timid and eager to prove herself, living under the strict care of her stoic teacher Morgana. She is the child of a forbidden union — the Lumen Sage Balder and the Umbra Witch Rosa — and she carries the cost of it. Her father was banished. Her mother was imprisoned.
That is the engine of the whole game. Cereza wants to free her mother, and she wants to be seen as capable, and neither is going well. A mysterious boy appears in her dreams and draws her into the forbidden Avalon Forest, where faeries attack and she performs a desperate demon-summoning ritual. The ritual binds a demon to her stuffed cat, letting the creature survive outside Inferno. She names it Cheshire.
The White Wolf and the Four Elemental Cores
From there, Bayonetta Origins is a journey through the forest in search of the power to save Cereza’s mother and to send Cheshire back to Inferno. The pair follow the tracks of a white wolf, fight hostile creatures, and destroy the four Elemental Cores hidden in the thicket. Cereza grows more confident. Cheshire grows more protective of her.
The bond is tested when a faerie disguises itself as Cereza’s mother, which starts an argument and briefly splits the two apart. Cheshire gets captured. Cereza goes into the faeries’ castle with the wolf’s help, rescues him, and the reunited pair beat the faerie ruler, Púca. Deeper in the forest, the boy from the dreams turns out to be Lukaon, a half-blood born of a faerie and a witch, cursed for his heritage. Cereza agrees to help him until he reveals that breaking the curse means sacrificing Cheshire. She refuses.
Two Characters, Two Sticks, One Pair of Hands
The gameplay is the reason Bayonetta Origins is not just a story with a controller attached. The player controls Cereza and Cheshire at the same time using a twin-stick control scheme. Cheshire toggles between two modes. In Unleashed mode he grows large and can attack enemies or obstacles. In Hug mode he shrinks to his toy form so Cereza can carry him and use him for other purposes.
Combat splits the labor cleanly. Cereza binds enemies with spells while Cheshire attacks them. Cheshire cannot die in combat, but he can run out of magic, and when that happens Cereza has to pick him up in plush form to restore him before he is useful again. Certain power-ups let Cheshire attack while in plush form. Elemental Cores scattered through the world can be destroyed to upgrade his abilities, strengthening the duo and opening areas that were previously out of reach.
The twin-stick scheme is the whole design in one sentence: two characters, two hands, one problem. The environmental puzzles and the fights both ask the player to think about the pair as a single unit rather than a lead and a helper.
Where the Game Sits in the Bayonetta Timeline
The game is a prequel to Sega’s Bayonetta series, set six hundred years before the first entry. The table below sets the main beats of that timeline in order.
| Point in the story | What happens |
|---|---|
| Six hundred years before Bayonetta | Cereza trains under Morgana, then enters Avalon Forest |
| The summoning ritual | A demon is bound to Cereza’s stuffed cat and named Cheshire |
| The forest journey | The pair follow the white wolf and destroy the four Elemental Cores |
| The faerie’s trick | A faerie poses as Cereza’s mother; the pair argue and split |
| The faeries’ castle | Cheshire is captured; Cereza rescues him with the wolf’s help |
| Púca | The reunited pair defeat the faerie ruler |
| Lukaon | The dream boy’s curse demands Cheshire’s sacrifice; Cereza refuses |
What the Forest Asks of You
The design leans on a small set of ideas, and they repeat in different combinations rather than arriving in a fixed order. The pieces the player works with are these:
- Cereza’s binding spells, which hold enemies in place
- Cheshire’s Unleashed mode, which turns him into a large attacker
- Cheshire’s Hug mode, which shrinks him so Cereza can carry him
- Cheshire’s magic meter, which drains in combat and has to be restored
- Elemental Cores, which upgrade Cheshire and open blocked routes
- The white wolf’s tracks, which mark the way through the thicket
That set is not complicated. It is also not forgiving in the way it demands attention. A player who treats Cheshire as a second character to be parked and forgotten will find the fights drag and the puzzles stall. The game is built around the assumption that both halves are always doing something.
The Art Direction Does the Heavy Lifting
Bayonetta Origins looks like a storybook and moves like one. The art direction and atmosphere were among the things critics singled out when the game launched, along with the gameplay and the narrative, and the relationship between Cereza and Cheshire in particular. The game drew generally positive reviews.
The forest is not a set of corridors dressed in green. It reads as a place with rules, and the game keeps to them. Avalon Forest is forbidden for a reason, and the game treats that prohibition as a real thing rather than a label on a map. The faeries are hostile in a way that feels earned. Púca is a ruler worth the trip to the castle.
The narrative does something the series has not done before, which is to slow down and let a relationship carry the weight. Cereza and Cheshire do not like each other at the start. The demon is unruly. The girl is unsure. The game spends its whole length turning that into something else, and the turn is the part critics kept coming back to.
Where the Game Slips
The twin-stick control is the game’s best idea and its most demanding one. It asks for a kind of divided attention that some players will find exhilarating and others will find exhausting, and the game does not offer much of a middle path. When Cheshire runs out of magic, the fight stops being a fight and becomes a retrieval errand. That happens often enough to notice.
The story has a structural problem too, though it is a small one. The game’s central question — whether Cereza will sacrifice Cheshire to free Lukaon from his curse — arrives late, and the answer is never really in doubt. Cereza refuses, and the refusal is correct for the character the game has spent hours building. It is the right ending. It is also the safe one.
None of this sinks the game. It just means Bayonetta Origins is a prequel that knows exactly what it is and does not reach past it.
The Score on Cereza and the Lost Demon
Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon is the rare prequel that justifies its own existence rather than filling a gap in a timeline. It takes a series defined by excess and finds something worth saying in restraint. The twin-stick design is genuinely novel, and the relationship between Cereza and Cheshire carries a story that could easily have been a footnote.
The score is 8.7/10, the published critical aggregate across five outlets. That number feels right for a game this specific.
What matters most here is the control scheme. The art direction and the Cereza-Cheshire bond are what critics praised, and they are real, but the twin-stick idea is the thing no other game in this series has tried, and it is the reason Bayonetta Origins is worth a look rather than a skip. The faerie trick and the Lukaon reveal are competent storytelling; the two hands, two characters setup is the actual invention. That is the part worth watching.
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