Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon | Ep. 1 – Into the Forbidden Forest With My Emotional Support Demon
🌲 Into the Forbidden Forest
A brand-new adventure begins, and apparently the sensible way to begin it is to wander into a forbidden magical forest with a stuffed cat, questionable directions, and absolutely no idea what is waiting between the trees.
On 6 August 2026, we finally cracked open Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon on the Switch. I bought this when I got the console for Christmas 2024, so naturally it spent nearly two years living untouched in my Switch bag before we actually played it.
My previous Bayonetta experience was the first game on the Xbox 360 many, many years ago — which I never finished — and this looked completely different. What I wasn’t expecting was for it to eventually reveal a control mechanic that immediately reminded me of one of my favourite puzzle adventures from years ago.
📖 A Very Different Bayonetta
Bayonetta Origins takes us back long before the legendary Bayonetta we know, following young Cereza as she trains to become an Umbra Witch while desperately searching for a way to rescue her mother.
Everything unfolds like a beautifully illustrated storybook, with Avalon Forest providing the perfect mixture of cosy fairy-tale scenery and the creeping suspicion that something horrible probably lives behind every bush.
Rather than the frantic action of the main Bayonetta games, this is much more of a platforming puzzler built around exploration, magic and, eventually, controlling Cereza and her demon companion Cheshire together.
🐺 Where We Are in the Journey
This is Episode 1, so we began right at the beginning — including a very lengthy tutorial.
A dream sequence established Cereza’s painful past and the loss of her parents, while her training under Morgana showed just how determined she is to become stronger. After some heroic witch duties involving water, vegetables and foul-smelling herbs, the story pointed us towards a mysterious white wolf somewhere inside Avalon Forest that might lead to the power needed to save her mother.
Ignoring the extremely reasonable warnings about entering the forest, Cereza headed straight in.
Obviously.
🔮 What Happens in This Episode
Our first proper journey into Avalon Forest starts deceptively quietly. After the storybook opening and Cereza’s rather extensive introduction to witchcraft — including the tremendously magical responsibilities of fetching water and gathering vegetables and herbs — we finally leave the safety of Morgana’s home behind.
Cereza has one thing on her mind: finding the mysterious white wolf from her dreams. Somehow, following it into a forest she has specifically been warned not to enter is supposed to lead her towards the power she needs to rescue her mother.
This is obviously an excellent plan.
The first stretch of Avalon is actually rather peaceful. We’re walking through this beautifully illustrated forest, getting used to Cereza’s magic and learning how she interacts with the world, when we encounter a giant plant blocking our path.
This is also where I become thoroughly confused.
The game teaches us how to bind the plant, so naturally I assume that once it is bound I’m supposed to press something else and attack it. I spend a while trying to work out exactly which button the game wants from me, only for the answer to eventually become apparent: we don’t need to fight the thing at all.
There’s a little side route.
EntertainJD eventually spots what becomes known as the sneaky path, allowing us to quietly slip around the problem while I contemplate all the time I have just spent attempting to solve something that was never actually a puzzle.
Avalon doesn’t remain peaceful for long.
Before long we’re confronted by our first proper enemies, and for reasons that probably made perfect sense during the stream, suspicious creatures in the forest rapidly become associated with Gary. The Gary Fairy — or possibly Gary Leprechaun — has entered the adventure.
More importantly, this is where Cereza finally manages something she previously failed spectacularly to achieve: summoning an infernal demon.
There is, however, a slight complication.
Rather than appearing as some enormous terrifying creature from the depths of Inferno, the demon possesses Cereza’s beloved stuffed cat, Cheshire.
At this point Bayonetta Origins suddenly becomes considerably more adorable than expected. We’ve entered a forbidden forest full of murderous magical creatures with an infernal demon, but our demon is also fluffy, cuddleable and apparently in need of regular emotional support.
Then the game reveals the mechanic that completely catches me off guard.
Cereza and Cheshire are controlled simultaneously, with opposite sides of the controller operating each character independently.
I genuinely hadn’t expected this. The game had been sitting in my Switch bag for nearly two years, and I hadn’t properly looked at a trailer in all that time. Suddenly I realise we’re playing something mechanically reminiscent of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, a game I absolutely loved.
In Brothers, each side of the controller operates one of the brothers. Bayonetta Origins takes that same wonderfully unusual idea and adds combat into the equation.
Cereza isn’t the one doing the smashing. Her job is to use her magic to bind enemies in place.
Cheshire’s job is considerably more straightforward.
Smashy smashy.
So our combat strategy quickly establishes itself: Cereza restrains the Gary Fairies and Cheshire introduces them to the business end of his demonic claws.
It’s a really satisfying partnership, and it immediately brings back memories of another slightly ridiculous thing I used to do with Portal 2 on the Xbox 360. I played its multiplayer levels solo, sometimes controlling both players at once and occasionally stacking the controllers on top of each other depending on what a puzzle required.
Apparently I’ve been training for Bayonetta Origins for years.
The dual-character mechanic isn’t restricted to combat either. As we push further into Avalon, the forest increasingly forces Cereza and Cheshire to separate and take different routes.
There are places Cereza can’t cross and obstacles Cheshire can’t pass, including patches of strange yellowish flowers. We have to manoeuvre both characters around these hazards independently while keeping them close enough to work together — because Cheshire also starts losing strength if he gets too far away from Cereza.
Cereza, meanwhile, has her own approach to environmental problem-solving.
This largely involves performing some rather suggestive magical dances at plants until they grow, twist or rearrange themselves into whatever shape we need.
Between the dancing witch and the stuffed emotional support demon, I’m beginning to understand why this game has been sitting patiently in my Switch bag waiting for us.
Eventually we reach our first sanctuary.
This seems like an entirely reasonable place to finish for the evening. We’ve made progress, we’ve discovered the central mechanic, we’ve acquired our demon and we’ve successfully established that saving is apparently “over rated.”
I genuinely consider wrapping things up there.
But I’m enjoying the game too much.
So instead, we press deeper into Avalon, continuing the constant back-and-forth between Cereza’s binding magic, Cheshire’s considerably less subtle approach to combat and the increasingly elaborate puzzles requiring both characters to work together.
That’s when the forest becomes even stranger.
We enter an area that, in my head, immediately becomes the mirror dimension from Doctor Strange.
The world distorts around us and we’re dropped into a much more compact challenge area, filled with gates, enemies and puzzles. Everything we’ve just learned suddenly has to work together.
Cereza and Cheshire need to move independently around the environment, opening routes for one another and navigating different sections of the level. Combat works the same way: Cereza controls and binds the threat while Cheshire delivers the damage.
There are several moments where we’re moving one character into position before swapping our attention to the other, gradually threading both of them through the area.
Eventually, all that coordination pays off.
We destroy our first elemental core and open the route deeper into Avalon Forest.
By the time we emerge from that strange realm, we’ve reached Chapter Three and another sanctuary — and this new area immediately gets my exploration instincts going.
From what we can see, it looks as though this sanctuary could become some kind of hub. There appear to be four elemental powers or objectives connected to the wider forest, suggesting we’re going to be venturing out, acquiring new abilities and eventually returning to places we couldn’t previously access.
Naturally, I immediately test this theory by going down the first passageway available.
We get frozen.
So I try again.
We get frozen again.
Apparently repeatedly walking into the thing that freezes you does not eventually convince it to stop freezing you.
My assumption is that we’re missing an ability — possibly something fire-related — and we’ll eventually return here with the power necessary to get through. If that’s how the wider forest is structured, there’s potentially going to be quite a bit of backtracking and discovering new routes as our abilities expand.
That immediately reminds me of Ori and the Blind Forest, another absolutely beautiful game that we played on stream years ago when I first started streaming. The combination of exploration, unlocking abilities and returning to previously inaccessible areas feels like it could scratch a very similar itch here.
Of course, while Cereza and Cheshire are attempting to survive Avalon, chat is running an entirely separate adventure alongside us.
Gary becomes the immediate suspect whenever anything questionable appears in the bushes. Our mysterious white wolf is repeatedly downgraded to an “oddly shaved sheep.” There is considerable debate over how long the game actually is after AIDA confidently suggests four chapters, only for Gary’s investigation to uncover something closer to thirteen.
EntertainJD not only rescues us from the sneaky-path incident but also goes two-for-two on Pokémon hunting contracts. Stryker has to clarify that he is absolutely not texting while driving, and Cheshire’s identity becomes increasingly unstable as the evening progresses.
Our fearsome infernal demon becomes Mr. Snuggles.
Then asmith501 improves matters considerably by introducing:
Mr. Flibbles.
I’m sure Inferno is terrified.
Eventually we reach the point where sensible people have to acknowledge that a stream cannot continue indefinitely. We’re sitting at roughly 10% progress, the first elemental core has been defeated, Chapter Three has begun, and Cereza and Cheshire are finally starting to feel like a proper team.
Before we finish, there is also time for a brief demonstration of the gloriously ridiculous Bomb Chicken, because apparently one game for the evening wasn’t quite enough.
Then we save at the sanctuary and bring our first journey into Avalon Forest to an end.
The white wolf — shaved sheep, whatever we’re calling it — is still somewhere ahead. There are more elemental cores waiting for us, at least one frozen passage demanding a future return, and an enormous amount of forest we’ve barely begun to explore.
And considering how quickly the Cereza-and-Cheshire control system won me over, I’m definitely looking forward to getting back into it.
We finished the night the proper Twitch way by sending everyone onwards in a raid to ArtsyCatsyBee, bringing our first Bayonetta Origins stream to a close.
One elemental core down.
One emotional support demon acquired.
And apparently a lot more Gary Fairies still to smash.
🎬 Watch the Episode
If you missed the stream, you can watch the entire forbidden-forest expedition here:
Watch Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon Episode 1
You can also follow the adventure through the Bayonetta Origins playlist and visit Dr Ravenholm on YouTube.
If you enjoy the episode, give it a like, let me know in the comments what you made of our first trip into Avalon, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next chapter.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The forest is still open, the white wolf — or suspiciously shaved sheep — is still somewhere ahead, and Mr. Flibbles has only just begun smashing things.
Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. Chat is very much part of these adventures, whether you’re spotting sneaky paths, naming demons, questioning my decisions or joining us when we raid another creator at the end of the night.
Our schedule has also suffered another encounter with the apparently cursed Wet. The storm forced that stream to move, so Red Dead Redemption 2 is being sacrificed while we make another attempt at playing Wet — assuming the curse doesn’t strike again.
🕯️ Community & Links
The adventure doesn’t end when the stream goes offline. There are plenty of paths leading out from Avalon into the wider Dr Ravenholm community.
Live — Follow the signal when the next expedition begins:
Twitch | YouTube
Community — Pull up a chair and join the crew between streams:
Join the Discord
Socials — Follow the trail across the wider internet:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Support — If you’d like to help keep the expeditions going:
Merchandise | Streamlabs
More — Venture beyond the gaming side of the network:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🌌 Until Next Time
The first elemental core is down, Chapter Three is waiting, and somewhere deeper in Avalon there’s still a white wolf leading us towards whatever comes next.
Until then, keep your emotional support demon close. We’re going back into the forest.
— Dr Ravenholm
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