Blasphemous

Very good story, excellent gameplay, incredible soundtrack and made with love, recommended.

Sometimes is a weird hitbox. Sometimes is an enemy that disappears and you have nothing to do besides stand there waiting before attacking once or twice. I played almost all of it. Is beautiful and immersive. But after one too many of these moments I gave up. But you should give a try. Was worth it.

This is a an Castlevania-lite. There is almost NO Metroidvania-like abilities or ability-gating in this game. It's not really a souls-lite either. The player character stays roughly the same throughout the entire game and barely picks up any skills. Overall, I found Blasphemous to be more fun than most Castlevania games but less fun than most Metroidvanias. It's a very bleak world. There is almost no character-driven story, but the exploration and lore are very strong. In terms of difficulty, it's well-balanced and easier than most Castlevania/Metroidvania games. I beat most of the bosses on my first try.

Blasphemous is an amazing game, rough around the edges in terms of gameplay, but with stunning pixel art and amazing voice acting both in Spanish and English(as a native Spanish speaker I appreciate it, not all games have good voice acting in Spanish), truly appreciate the passion of the developers behind this game, even now(9/4/2021) there are plans of a future free DLC in December so is really a game you should pick up and have in your library. Looking forward to blasphemous 2, took me around 20 hours to complete it (on this platform) and there is still around 10-20 more hours of content I have to try, replayability is a huge deal for me and I really appreciate the devs invested time and effort to make this a thing. There's always room for improvement but as of now the state of the game is almost flawless, throughout constant updates and free DLC you can truly see how much this dev team cares for the game and the community (something rare these days). For below $10 this game is a steal, hope by reading this I can convince you to give it a try, I'm happy to see metroidvanias are still a thing in 2020-21 9/10 —gameplay could be improved —the souls genre mechanics is not necessary in my opinion, yet I'm nitpicking at this point.

No idea what is going on. Why do I have a pointy hat? Why do I not have the reflexes required for this? One false move and it turns into a pinball game as you bounce from enemy to enemy and die. From an art perspective...great job. From a "let's have fun slashing and exploring" perspective...nope.