Blasphemous Review

Martyring the player.

Side-scrolling, open-world adventures are flooding digital game stores across all platforms, giving fans of the so-called Metroidvania genre seemingly endless options. Blasphemous is the latest, following in the mud and blood-covered footsteps of Death’s Gambit, to combine Dark Souls-style combat and difficulty with classic 2D gameplay. Its hyper-critical religious themes certainly give it an air of distinction, though.

Blasphemous is a hilariously twisted game. The story of the Penitent One, a knight of the church, on a quest for vengeance or… well, something. Honestly, the story is so batshit crazy that it’s hard to say what’s going on. The land is overrun with monsters, people are dying, statues are talking, and this angry cone-headed guy is out for blood.

It’s hard to take the over-the-top grimdark gore and story seriously when the first boss battle (moments into the game) ends with our hero taking off his bizarre conehead helmet to fill it with the blood of his fallen enemy before sloshing the damn thing back onto his head. This is Dante’s Inferno come to Earth and somehow more bizarre and fever-pitched.

While the game never actually directly spells out its use of Christianity as the backdrop, it’s clearly keyed into the fact that the blood-obsessed nature of the religion makes perfect fodder for horror. Enemies include cross-bearing zombies, floating spear-thrusting bishops, very disorderly priests, and biblical giants. The first town you run across has a hospice where the holy members of its order practice the licking of wounds as a valid medical practice, which is definitely something modern medicine should consider.

And martyrs… so many sadomasochist martyrs to meet along the way to offer you help, upgrades, and insane dialogue. One, trapped in a tree for his sins, begs you to find anointed olive oil known for the exquisite burning pain it causes. Why? Because he wants to feel that suffering one more time. Honestly, if we rated games based entirely on the hilarious insanity of their plotlines, Blasphemous would get a perfect score. 

But, we don’t. Throughout the entire play experience, a pattern emerged. Swaths of enjoyment cut short by absurdly cheap deaths, overly-long trudges back to where we died, more cheap death, and then forward progression. So: fun, hate and loathing, exhaustion, fun, more hate. Blasphemous might very well be a metaphor for adult life, but the game is just a titch too into sadism to be wholly enjoyable.

Unseen death drops pepper the landscape. Save spots are frequently far and few between. Foreground obstacles sometimes cover up spawning enemies. Those enemies are frequently cheap and over-powered, and the game’s simple combat mechanics makes fighting multiple monsters a repetitive, frustrating chore.

The Penitent One has a mighty sword and likes to swing it, but even well into the game, his move set is limited. You can upgrade and find new abilities like all games in this genre, but the unforgiving combat assures that you never feel particularly powerful against the onslaught of horrors. Even something as simply as being able to interrupt your sword swings with a block or evade would have helped immensely.

Another issue is the complete obscurity of the over-complicated upgrade system. Ol’ Conehead has relics, a rosary with interchangeable beads, a modifiable sword, and other collections of objects, but there’s almost no explanation for how it all works. A lot of the game elements were just stumbled upon through trial, error, and chance, which is nearly as frustrating as the cheap deaths and overall high difficulty level. 

It’s hard to fault Blasphemous’ visual and audio design, though. The 16-bit styled pixel art is great, with a nice level of gory detail. Character designs are wonderfully extreme. The score is also excellent, adding to the thick ambiance. 

So, in the end, it’s easy to say if Blasphemous will appeal. Players who love intentionally difficult games will find a lot of value and horror fans who can muscle through will love the game’s visual and thematic design. Unfortunately, the game takes its masochistic themes of martyrdom too seriously, making the player feel like they’ve stepped into the retro gaming equivalent of a back alley S&M club they mistakenly took for an 80s video arcade.

[Reviewed on Switch]