Blasphemous (2019)

Beautiful pixel-art, fun metroidvania. Simple mechanics, very confusing lore. A fun time killer.

Blasphemous is a metroidvania action-adventure game taking place in the fictional region of Cvstodia. Players assume control of the Penitent One, a silent knight wielding a sword named Mea Culpa, as he travels the land in a pilgrimage.

Review

Setup

Version: PlayStation 5

Difficulty: -

Total playing time: 15 hours (based on PS5 save stats)

Comments

At no point during my gameplay did I ever understand “who” I was, “what” I was, or “why” I was. Admittedly, I did not put enough effort into reading the lore from each item, and perhaps some details could have been revealed there. NPC conversations usually made me more confused than enlightened.

At the beginning of the game, multiple items start to pile up and different NPCs and locations seem to offer you different rewards for completing some sort of tasks, but these did not seem to be detailed in a quest log anywhere, so I could not really distinguish between the different things I had to do.

Mostly, I just gathered everything for a while and then went to each place I remembered offering rewards and just tried to hand over things randomly. At no point was I ever confident that specific items would be clearly useful for specific NPCs, it was all random to me. The worst case being the Blessed Lord of Salty Shores statue, within some fountain in Albero, which tells you it will bless any item you bring that can be blessed. At no point in the game, except for the first item that was given right before I noticed the fountain, did I ever find any item that this statue would consider “able to be blessed”. I finalized the game without ever succeeding in blessing another item.

Throughout my whole gameplay, I was mostly intrigued and anxiously waiting for the moment where all of this new and curious universe would click and make sense. Awaiting drops of lore that would connect the invisible dots in my head. This never happened, though, and while the feeling of discovery and exploration never really went away, I also did not have the climatic moment of understanding why I was doing all of that. I still liked the atmosphere of the game and the craziness that comes with it, and all the possibilities of new aberrations, and partially hold myself responsible for not really putting much effort into understanding the lore. However, whether intentional or not, I also blame the game for not doing a better job and allowing the player a better welcoming into its own universe.

Story

As stated above, I could not really grasp or understand what was really happening at any point. For contextualization, I will paste a version of the wikipedia’s plot section summarized through the journey as experienced on my gameplay:

Blasphemous begins in the Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrow, a religious order opposed to His Holiness Escribar’s authority, after all its members have been massacred. The last of their kind, the Penitent One, is resurrected by the Miracle and departs on a pilgrimage. He finds Deogracias, who tells him about the Cradle of Affliction, a sacred relic that the Penitent One seeks, and the Three Humiliations he must perform to be deemed worthy to reach it.

The Penitent One travels to different locations in Cvstodia, completing the Three Humiliations, and gaining access to the Mother of Mothers, the massive cathedral where Escribar and the Cradle of Affliction reside.

Throughout the journey, Escribar’s voice is heard, telling his backstory: A long time before the Penitent One began his pilgrimage, His Holiness Escribar had turned his throne away from his congregation, believing that the Miracle had forsaken them. Gradually, the Miracle transformed Escribar into a massive tree which suddenly ignited one day, leaving behind a massive pile of ash, atop which stood Escribar’s throne. The Miracle drove countless people to attempt climbing the mountain, but all of them failed, swallowed by the ash. As punishment, they re-emerged from the ash as mindless beasts (the game’s enemies) cursed to carry out the Miracle’s will. This included Escribar, who was reborn as the Last Son of the Miracle.

Proceeding to the top of the Mother of Mothers, the Penitent One battles and defeats His Holiness Escribar. The latter engages once more, revealing his true form as the Last Son of the Miracle, but is once again defeated. The Penitent One then finds the mountain of ash, where Deogracias encourages him to climb it and reach the Cradle of Affliction. If the player did not complete all the optional dungeons, the Penitent One fails to reach the top and sinks into the ash, leaving behind nothing but his mask – which Deogracias picks up and deposits next to a pile of countless identical masks, declaring the protagonist’s penitence over.

Characters

There is not really a range of characters to discuss. The Penitent One is a silent character, and other than great physical abilities, there is not much for me to note. Some NPCs appear but are usually bosses you defeat immediately.

There are some supporting characters that randomly appear before a boss and offer help in the fight, but can not be interacted with further than this, and are not found at other points in the map.

Difficulty

The game has no difficulty setting, and is pretty straightforward in terms of gameplay. You mostly need to learn enemies abilities, which are not complex and are limited to one or two per creature, making it a trivial task. Funny enough, the simplest patterns were usually the ones giving me the most trouble, probably due to my lack of patience with handling them.

There were multiple places where I went through an internal fight of trying to reason if secret parts of the map were not accessible yet due to my lack of itemization/relic/skills, or if I was just missing the hidden triggers to open a path to them. In general, bosses were the main cause of a relative spike in difficulty. Although, even then, probably only 2 or 3 bosses took multiple tries, while the rest I defeated in my first try, so the challenge was not very high throughout the whole game.

Graphics

As a lover of pixel art, the game had amazing landscapes and scenery, as well as gross but intriguing creatures with very gruesome “fatality” like abilities to get rid of them, which made it quite fun. Scenery at dusk on top of the cathedral was very beautiful, as well as some snowy mountains. The animation as a whole was very good.

The game also had different areas with a range of “themes”, like a library, a sewer, some underground mines, the cathedral, etc. Each had distinct visuals, all very beautiful in their own ways.

The minimap looked very nostalgic for me, visually similar to that of Symphony of the Night, but improved. It had different colors for each of the areas, and different symbols indicating some key locations. It also allowed you to place markers to remind or check for later, so it was overall a nostalgic concept made better in every way.

The menu was straightforward, but had so many tabs available since the beginning that it also made me feel a bit overwhelmed. As the game progressed, it became less so, but still felt like quite a lot from the start.

Sound & Music

I liked the voice work for all the major NPCs. It was well done. The sound effects for most attacks and abilities were also good, and boss fights were interesting in this regard as well. The music was not bad, but also did not stand out to me. Each area had some variations, which made it also good for a change in pace when exploring for a while, but no track was remarkable for me.

Pros

It is quite fun
Exploring the map was very exciting, many hidden places spread throughout the different areas, with a few ways of reaching them
The visuals are amazing
I needed a somewhat mindless time waster, and this fit in perfectly. I could go through the areas figuring out mechanics for enemies, but apart from the lore, there was not much thought needed as the difficulty was not that high
The map is actually quite big, with many distinct areas to explore. I finished the game and still did not have everything mapped out. It also has many secrets, so I could always be on the lookout for some short term map goal to achieve.

Cons

The lore went completely lost on me. Each NPC conversation felt, to me, convoluted and added more complexity than explanations. I felt like the game universe was very interesting, but I could not easily find a way in
The difficulty was rather low. There were not many hard fights, so most of the challenge for me came from trying to figure out what was needed to reach specific areas of the map