Developer: The Game Kitchen
Publisher: Team17 Digital Ltd
Rrp: £19.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam)
Released: 10th September 2019
Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam
Played Using: An Xbox 360 Control Pad
Approximate game length: 16 Hours
It doesn’t matter how many times they kill me I’ll just keep coming back over and over and over. With each death I learn and with each life I take I grow richer. The end of my strife is inevitable, eventually I will prevail and then all this suffering, both my own and that of those around me will end.
Blasphemous is an metroidvania with brutal and punishing combat that renders its grisly and gory scenes in extremely detailed pixel art. You take on the role of The Penitent One (or The Penitent One in Silence among a couple of other names that crop up as you play) who hacks and slashes his way through hordes of horribly disfigured people and twisted creatures as he quests to defeat ‘The Miracle’. ‘The Miracle’ is a strange affliction that has effected the land of Cvstodia and become the source of much twisted worship… I can’t lie there are some extreme parallels with Catholicism especially the darker side of it.
Just a warning here, this game features extremely graphic scenes of gore as well as nudity sometimes both at the same time.
I wasn’t kidding when I said that the combat is punishing, your enemies can usually kill you in only a few strikes. You have a few health potions called biliary flasks that can restore some of your health but those take a moment to drink and in that time your enemies can perform a few more strikes. The levels of gore and viscera on display is… impressive especially when you perform an execution. The designs of the bosses are very imaginative and in some cases disturbing, the attacks are usually well choreographed so the player has time to react… note that I say usually. There are some boss battles where this really isn’t the case and its a bit of a crap shoot as to how well you’ll hold out.
As you attack and execute enemies you build up ‘fervor’ which is represented as a blue bar underneath your health. Fervor is used to cast prayers (special spells that hurt your enemies) and in some combat techniques.
You can increase the power of your attacks by visiting specific shrines called Mea Culpa Shrines and the more of these shrines you visit the more powerful (and expensive) the techniques become. Thankfully the enemies you defeat will give you the currency you require to make these purchases which is called Tears of Atonement.
When you die you leave behind a ‘Fragment of Guilt’. While this exists in the world the rate that you accumulate fervor and tears of atonement is reduced. You can collect the fragment of guilt to remove these effects or find a specific place where you can have them removed, for a price. However unlike games like Shovel Knight, Dark Souls and Hollow Knight you can have multiple fragments of guilt in the world at a time, which makes sense because guilt by its very nature is endless.
The pixel art on display is a sight to behold. There were moments where I would study the backgrounds because of the sheer detail on show. The music is also enjoyable… kind of haunting too, it has an almost Spanish feel to it.
Blasphemous is a great game that comes with a bit of a caveat, that caveat being that if you don’t enjoy a difficult game you will probably struggle to find much joy in this. If you do enjoy punishing difficulty though there is a lot of fun and challenge to be found here.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Hollow Knight
Axiom Verge
Timespinner
