Castle Crashers is a beat 'em up video game developed and published by The Behemoth for the Xbox 360.

[2] The game is set in a fictional medieval universe in which a dark wizard steals a mystical crystal and captures four princesses.

On June 15, 2015, The Behemoth announced Castle Crashers Remastered for Xbox One, while the Steam version received it in the form of a free update.

Castle Crashers is a side-scrolling beat 'em up that incorporates a small number of role-playing video game elements.

The map also displays shops where the player character can buy items and weapons using coins gained from defeated foes, bosses, and chests.

The Xbox 360, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows versions feature a minigame called "All You Can Quaff," a button-mashing contest to attempt to eat as much food as possible.

[6] The remastered version features a board game-like minigame called "Back Off Barbarian" where up to four players must avoid enemies and try to survive for as long as possible.

The king sends the non-player-character “grey knights” and the player to retrieve the gem, rescue his daughters, and defeat the wizard in battle.

As the player progress, they succeed in rescuing the princesses, and ultimately the journey culminates in a final showdown with the evil wizard.

The player emerges victorious from the confrontation, having defeated the dark wizard, rescued all of the king's daughters, and recovered the mystical gem.

At the castle the king brings one of his daughters for one of the player(s) to kiss, her face is hidden throughout the entire game in the form of various visual gags.

[9] Though the original Comic-Con 2005 demo was shown running on a GameCube, no mention has been made of a release on a Nintendo-based platform.

[13] Paladin cited River City Ransom as his primary inspiration for the game's art style, noting the character's expressions when damaged as a particular point of influence.

[13] Fulp added that several beat 'em ups from the 1980s and 90s influenced the game, such as Guardian Heroes, Final Fight, Golden Axe and Double Dragon.

On January 14, 2009, the King Pack downloadable content was released and added two characters, another animal orb and three weapons.

Writing on their blog, the developers explained "we are going to attempt what is the most fair and make the logical assumption that by this point everyone has the PS2 Alien Hominid, right?

The remastered version features higher quality textures, uncapped frame-rate, multiplayer performance improvements, and an additional mini-game.

[20] However, on March 14, 2019, The Behemoth teased a picture via both their Twitter & Facebook accounts depicting four Nintendo Switch Joy-Con in the color of the four original Knights.

On March 19, 2019, during PAX East, The Behemoth announced that Castle Crashers Remastered would come to both Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 due to popular demand, and there were demos during the event.

[35] IGN editor Cam Shea ranked it third on his top 10 list of Xbox Live Arcade games.

[36] Additionally in a September 2010 ranking, IGN listed Castle Crashers fifth in their top twenty-five Xbox Live Arcade titles of all time.

"[42] By August 2019, ahead of release of the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch version, the Behemoth reported that Castle Crashers had sold more than 20 million copies.

"[28] Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer stated the game's art was more detailed and polished than The Behemoth's previous title, Alien Hominid.

"[48] In addition to multiplayer problems, the game could also occasionally suffer from corrupted save files, causing players to lose character progress.

In an interview with Joystiq, Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin of the Behemoth stated that they were working with Microsoft to get a patch released as soon as possible in order to fix the issues.