Blasphemous

This is an excellent metroidvania and is one of my favorites within the genre. The uniqueness of Blasphemous lies with its story and art style taken from the Catholic tradition; I thought this was an excellent choice in art direction as there is a deep well of breath taking art, music, and lore from which to craft a video game. My Gripes: As is tradition, Blasphemous oozes guilt, sin and suffering at themes in the storyline. It does get a little bit tired as every character is focal point of near pornographic proportions of self-flagellation, and fatalism. Second, the visuals of this game suffer from undue pixilation--a frequent grip of mine. However, Blasphemous has roughly 1300 years/4 periods of visual art styles to emulate and seeing the visuals truncated circa SNES graphics was disappointing. It would have been top shelf to have played Blasphemous as Baroque/Renaissance painting for example. Lastly, the game play is fairly analogous with others of this genre with the exception of the “air impulse” which requires simultaneous button press midair with a timing and angle that is uncharacteristically unforgiving given Blasphemous’ source material. I definitely recommend this game. Overall, it is well and lovingly crafted. There are also free DLC that come with this game which provide additional game play which I enjoyed. 8/10

I haven't had this kind of fun in a metroid-like in a long long time (I think the last time was Hollow Knight, since it was suggested earlier by someone else) It's a brilliant game with very cool mechanics. The mechanic of guilt for example or the whole level in Jondo is nicely crafted. In terms of gameplay, it's all very fluid with a few rough edges. The lack of recovery time is, at times, aggravating but, in a way, I understand it's a part of the gameplay. The artistic direction is simply gorgeous, the character, the enemies, the levels, everything feels very cohesive and so so beautiful to look at. The music are absolutely breathtaking and again, it feels very cohesive with the rest of the game, it all fits very perfectly. I have however a few gripes which I hope, can be corrected in a patch. For example, you constantly see the mouse on the screen and it can get very distracting, even tucked in a corner, and, I think that's the sore point in the game, you have no way to mark interesting spots in the game. I don't mean necessarily make a written note but just a dot or something to mark down the merchants, the angels and whatnot. The map is so vast and there are so much things to remember to look at when you do have the element to access that you end up losing track of what to check. Overall, it's a stellar game and it deserves all the praise it's gotten so far.

As a game developer, I usually look at games differently... Immediately I see the questions, the difficulties, and the decisions. As I start playing, I look for the reasons, the whys and the hows... But Blasphemous has achieved that, besides admiring its thoughtfulness and complexity, I simply just enjoy (almost) every second of it. Fantastic, haunting world and story, awesome boss design, hard but fair combat, challenging but not frustrating platforming and most importantly: plenty of hidden secrets and extras and a complex, huge map to explore... The pixel art is jaw-dropping (although I could have imagined more moving elements on the background layers) and the music and sound design are phenomenal. I just finished the game, but I will go back to get the true ending! (Regardless of the fact that I shouldn't be playing but developing my own game right now...) It's clearly a 9.5/10. Almost perfect.

Well, Blasphemous is visually stunning, I'll give them that. Pixel art is gorgeous, music is great and voice over with sound is good. Nice Souls-vania gameplay, but with many many infuriatingly frustrating spikes and pit falls. I think it plays better than Death's Gambit, another pixel art 2D souls-vania, but Game Kitchen could borrow a few things from it (some weapon variety, bosses respawn in powered-up versions). What I really didn't like is huge amount of bugs. Nothing game breaking, but still, I can't remember the last time I've seen so many in one game. But most important question is: was it fun to play Blasphemous? Yes, yes it was. Finished it in a couple of days and I can't bring myself to finish Iconoclasts for months.

This one of those games that makes you feel good when playing it. The game in itself is not difficult, but its challenging, and very little grinding for items compared to that other game alredy know...Anyways the game is very satisfiying because it made me play it for several hours, and I was able to do 100% of the achivements and I'm still doing the extra unlockables. This is the real definition of entertaiment when it comes to videogames.