Blasphemous

The good. Art style is fantastic, with heavy inspiration from multiple sources yet unique and reconizable. Animations are gory and beautiful to look at, they don't get old thanks to how well they are made as well as how they don't get in the way. All the good things you'd expect from a metroidvania are there: exploration is mostly rewarding, the game provides a fair amount of puzzles and collectibles. Locations are varied and are not too large. Bosses are varied, well balanced and feel like a proper challenge. Beating every one of them was a delight and felt properly rewarding. Combat is mostly fair and predictable. If you fail, it is your mistake. The meh. Map is surprisingly useless for a modern metroidvania. Collectibles are not marked at all. I don't know why they keep doing it, looking for that one collectible you somehow missed is tedious. Platforming is mostly serviceable, but the camera does not provide enough ability to look around, falling down to your death because you haven't seen the pit can happen. The way they implemented the DarkSouls-like 'collect your corpse' mechanic is kinda cool, kinda bizarre. It provides a benefit, but as for the punishment, not so much. The bad. Combat is very much a mixed bag. It is fair, yes, but dodging does not always work as expected: some attacks cannot be dodged and it is never obvious which ones. Enabled an item that prevents collision damage? Nah, you're still getting it, but slightly less often. Most of the stuff you find are collectibles. It doesn't feel rewarding enough. Large map is really suffering from the lack of means to fast travel. Navigating can and will be tedious if you aim for the 100% completion. Quests. Dark Souls is a good game, but can we please not borrow bad things from it?.. Quests should be more obvious and better explained. Occasional bugs. I had to restart the game a couple of times because of getting stuck or losing most of the control over the character.

The game is gorgeous and the presentation is great all around, but I *hate* this gameplay, because even just a couple of hours in it *really* enjoys causing the player suffering. The game has a fondness for cheap, obnoxious enemies placed in such a way that you will struggle to be able to hit them at all as they tag team you, plus very clunky combat, in addition to the player taking damage on contact (a mechanic that I am not sure has *ever* been anything other than trash and bad design) often means that you will have to die and re-tread the same few screens over, and over, and over again. The parry doesn't feel good or very consistent -- it often felt almost *too* generous with some attacks, but with some others it felt like I was doing everything correctly and still getting hit. The dodge only *sometimes* seems to give you immunity frames, which means when you need to use it to get to the other side of an enemy you will randomly take damage from contact and go nowhere instead. But the biggest thing that I absolutely *despise* is the platforming. This game doesn't feel very precise at all, and yet you *have* to platform precisely. Whoever designed the Grave of the Peaks should never be allowed to design a level ever again and owes me the money I spent on this game. Randomly shifting wind that pushes you back and forth, with enemies that can attack you from any angle with a dash that starts too far away from you to hit them (assuming they're not doing it from below you, where you can do *nothing* about it) while you have to move between narrow platforms, including crumbling platforms that you can't clamber onto and will *literally* fall through if you don't land *exactly* in the center -- that area is a travesty of horrible and deliberately cruel design that was so not fun I wanted to hurl my controller through the wall and is the biggest reason I uninstalled the game and will never touch it again.

To start, I can't speak for the PC controls since I opted for the Switch version, but my review focuses more on the general gameplay than anything else. The game is competent enough, but it feels rushed. It sets the bar pretty high to start with. There's a very high level of detail found in the pixel art. The animated cutscenes are great. It does a great job setting up the atmosphere and gets you excited to dive in, but it just feels so lackluster after a while. It's the small things that just accumulate over time. You'll gradually notice that the attention to detail put into the art didn't quite transfer over to a lot of the level designs. You'll notice that the variety of enemies isn't as varied as you'd have hoped, seeing certain ones used over again in other areas where they just don't thematically fit in. You'll discover that, yeah, if you read the tips, that floating jump attack is kinda nice, but it'd sure be nifty if you could slash downward when certain mobs make a habit of hovering below your reach. You'll collect a number of rosary knots, wonder what to do with them and wonder why the NPC you need to interact with to make them functional wasn't somewhere you could find them earlier considering you've already found five or six bike vessels by this point. You'll be near the end of the game, finishing up a side quest where you're rewarded with the ability to run through mud and wonder why did they wait so long to give me this skill and why do I have to constantly juggle relics when they just seem like they perform functions that should just stay on at all times after you acquire them. You'll even wonder why they opted to do what they did with the map where sections go dark unless you highlight them with your cursor, you can't zoom in and you just wish you could drop some pins on important areas. That's my review basically: lot of small gripes for a game I was expecting to be an overly polished masterpiece. 2 instead of 3 because I'm bitter.

This is a flawed but fun metroidvania-like game. It is hard, but unlike the great games like Hollow Knight this game can also be unfair. You can get hit by enemies that are off-screen, causing you to fall onto instant-death spikes for example. The upgrades and collectables are alright, but many of them didn't seem all that useful while others that are well hidden are extremely useful. The final flaw that is exclusive to the GOG-version is that there sadly is no Linux version. When I found out I had to refund and buy it on Steam, which is a shame.

First...the good. Up until a few days ago I WAS LOVING this game. I enjoyed the world and mythology, and even the long winded, and overly verbose story plot given by NPCs. The music (EASILY THE BEST OST of 2019), the atmosphere...basically a Side scrolling Dark Souls game. The bad...far outweighs the good, unfortunately. I returned the other night to play the game after a long day at work....ONLY to find all my save data gone. Just VANISHED. So I had to play through GoG...and my game was partially saved...? I'm not tech savvy, but what I do know is that I shouldn't have to try and find a work around to play a game on a PC that, up until a few days, ago, played just fine. To add insult to injury, on my reluctant second playthrough...I FOUND I COULD NOT UPGRADE my CHARACTER. Mea Culpa stayed at ONE. I perused forums and found nothing that helped. The technical issues are too much, removing me from what was hoping would be an amazingly fun and dark story for me to immerse myself in. Such was not the case, and I wound up uninstalling this game from my PC. Maybe, when the Devs learn their "masterpiece" is broken and flawed in a very important and fundamental way, I'll reinstall it. Right now...it's not even syncing right with my PC. 2/5 G