Blasphemous - Review
Blasphemous was one of those games that came out with little fanfare from the general public but with much praise from my close circle of friends. I’ve played my share of Metroid games and the Castlevania games that merged with Metroid to make the unofficial genre known as MetroidVania. So, learning that Blasphemous would fall into this category certainly made it something on my list worth trying. As always, however, it just took me a while to find the time to do it.
The Short of It
What I Played
91% of map discovered
88% completed according to the game
Finished the story playthrough and saw credits
Pros
Smooth movement and traversal
Game length feels about right with the complexity of the combat and other mechanics
Art style is fantastic and graphically impressive with the PS1 era look to the 2-dimensional sprites
Music has a calming ethereal quality
Writing and voice-acting is great
Cons
Combat is relatively simple and gets pretty mashy at times; not fun fighting air opponents
Bosses are often more tedious than difficult
Finding upgrades for your character can be extremely obtuse
The writing, while great, does not make it easy to understand what is going on or where you need to go next
Occasional bugs
While smooth most of the time, controls did not always seem to work or feel as refined as they could have been
The Rest of It
Story
I’ll be honest. As much as I enjoyed the writing of this game, reading the lore of the different items, and listening to the different characters speak, I couldn’t really tell you what was going on in this game. You’d probably be better off looking at the synopsis on the Steam page if you want an idea of the plot.
The main thing to take note of is that it is a somewhat deranged world, which has taken a word like “miracle”—something normally synonymous with something good—and turned it into something slightly horrific, yet still awe-inspiring. The world is filled with religious zealots who worship this miraculous and horrific event, drawing their own conclusions about its purpose. Monsters and other bizarre things that have occurred also fill the halls that serve as further justification for believing in this bizarre religion. Your goal as The Penitent One, I believe, is to find the physical form of the one who experienced the miracle many years ago, and defeat him? I don’t know. Maybe if I spent time in a wiki, which I’m willing to do, I could tell you more. It’s an interesting world, to say the least.
I’ve often heard Blasphemous compared to Dark Souls multiple times, and while it’s far closer to Symphony of the Night with its gameplay, it does have a few mechanics that draw the comparison. The biggest similarity to Dark Souls, however, is in how you are supposed to experience the story through interactions with other characters and through the lore of the items you discover. Somehow, Blasphemous manages to out-obscure Dark Souls for me. I spent a lot of time running around because I didn’t know where to go next for one thing or another. I managed to beat the game, but there are plenty of spots on the map that I have no idea how to find or access, despite having looked all over for a solution. Sometimes, your writing, as good as it may be, can be a little too obscure for the average player like myself.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Blasphemous is pretty straightforward. It’s a 2-dimensional exploration game with some basic combat and traversal. As The Penitent One, you can swing your sword in four different directions, as well as use jump attacks, dodges, parries, and extra magical abilities that you accumulate along your journey to dish out the righteous punishment. There are some simple combos with a few extenders, along with a couple of special moves, but the skill list is pretty short.
Having a short move list is not a bad thing. Blasphemous’ combat worked just fine for me for most of the game. By the time I finished the game, I had begun to grow a bit bored with it, but the combat mostly managed to feel fresh and not annoying throughout the entirety of the game. The only spots where I didn’t enjoy the combat were with vertical stages and bosses. I was wishing for a combo I could do in the air, but you are far more limited in your abilities while air-born. One boss, in particular, required you to constantly jump up and swing for a weak spot. This wasn’t fun, or difficult, just tedious, especially in comparison to previous bosses in which you were not restricted to only one or two scaled hits at a time.
Like the combat, the platforming felt reasonable for the length of the game. While there were a few distinct instances in which the controls failed me, platforming in the game never felt unreasonable. It did however get tedious running around the map looking for the last few tools I needed to get to other areas. There were some tools that I found with relative ease. Then there were others that took me the entirety of my playthrough to find, due in some part to the writing being obscure, but also just in the placement of the items and how to obtain them.
There were a lot of things about the placement of upgrades and bosses that made me wonder about Blasphemous. Unlike Metroid, which is structured enough to a certain degree that you can’t just fight any boss out of order, Blasphemous gives you the Dark Souls freedom to go wherever you want and fight whichever boss you find first. Rather than restrict the paths to certain bosses with platforming upgrades, you are almost always able to reach a boss with your core skill set. All the upgrades that change your platforming abilities are pretty much optional. This means all the areas in which you need an upgrade to access it are optional.
This creates a bit of a problem for me with Blasphemous. Without the platforming sense of progression, I felt a bit lost as to how and where to go. Games like this often use your new platforming abilities to instinctively instruct you on where to go next. Blasphemous doesn’t do this and instead makes the platforming upgrades mostly unnecessary for the main playthrough. This may not sound so bad at first, but by making these power-ups optional, two things occur:
1. You lose the sense of ‘leveling up’
2. The backtracking becomes more tedious.
I could tell my character was somehow getting stronger without any level-up notifications based solely on the number of hits it would take to kill an enemy. However, my character would only get new abilities to traverse the world if I really searched for it. In fact, to get those types of upgrades, you often have to do a quest, and then bring it to a screen that isn’t even on the map before you can use it. While making the upgrades completely optional makes the game easier to speed-run, it doesn’t excite me with a desire to explore the world as much. Instead, it felt like a chore to look for an ability I was missing because it meant I would also have to backtrack to all these places I saw that I wasn’t able to access because I didn’t have the ability yet. It’s one thing to backtrack once you get the ability. It’s another thing to know that you’ll have to backtrack if you can even find the ability in the first place. The amount of backtracking I did because of the fact that I was looking for an ability to then have to backtrack again probably came out to about 20% of my time with Blasphemous.
Presentation
Blasphemous is an extremely stylish 2-dimensional game. The art style oozes over every pixel on the screen, especially during the cutscenes. The overall graphics feel like those that would be slightly better than a Playstation 1-era game. The movement that plays out on the swimming pixels is almost entrancing. It’s an old look that you don’t see nearly as much anymore.
Likewise, the background, character designs, and overall atmosphere work extremely well together. Everything about the world itself fits in some way or another. All of the different details down to the various things that might be in the background add to the overall presentation experience. Also, the bosses, while occasionally annoying to fight, look great, as they manage to have more detail than most enemies.
Sound and music is also pretty satisfying. The music itself rarely strays from a somewhat calming ambiance of medieval instruments and choir hymns. When a boss enters the ring, it gets a bit more dramatic, but I would otherwise listen to it as an album to play when you’re trying to focus on something.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Blasphemous is a gruesome and fun 2-dimensional platformer that is extremely creative and well-done. I had a few minor gripes with the gameplay at times, and I somewhat disagree with the design around leveling up. Nonetheless, the game didn’t entirely wear out its welcome by the time I was finished. For anyone looking for a simple platformer similar to all the other MetroidVania games, this isn’t a bad choice.