A mediocre masterpiece.
Blasphemous is a mediocre game that also happens to be an fantastic experience.
Without a doubt, it features one of the most captivating and original universes in this medium, wrapped in a powerful art direction steeped in historical symbolism surrounding the Catholic Church—particularly the Spanish one—and in the bleakest atmosphere one could expect from great dark fantasy titles.
It is easily the greatest heir to this style of obscure, granular, and non-intrusive storytelling popularized by FromSoftware's games—a style that so many other studios fail miserably to understand.
Blasphemous offers a path filled with twisted metaphors and references so deeply loaded that you will likely have to research them outside the game itself to fully understand them—something that seems inherent to any work with a strong sense of aesthetic identity.
It is a unique journey guided by the player's own active interest, while simultaneously conveying a genuine and thoughtfully crafted fictional depth.
No detail was implemented without purpose. And you can bet that none of those goyaesque gruesome designs are made just for the sake of it.
But as a metroidvania/soulslike—or "soulsvania," if you will —Blasphemous falls short by failing to deliver gameplay that matches the strength and creativity of its premise, instead offering something ordinary that would struggle to stand alongside even the most basic games on the genre.
The game's world showcases conceptually interesting areas, but filled with uninspired and largely forgettable layouts, consisting mostly of long generic corridors, repetitive rooms, and extremely basic gimmicks that would not challenge even formative titles like Symphony of the Night.
It seems like the most creative idea they've had was... collapsing platforms? Wow.
Its selection of abilities and upgrades is ridiculously limited and largely situational, resulting in a game that barely evolves its exploration dynamics or combat core in any meaningful way from beginning to end, causing the experience to grow stale rather quickly.
Exploration and progression on its own is just boring. And revisiting previously explored areas blatantly highlights just how weak the level design is.
They certainly make the inevitable backtracking process increasingly inconvenient as the world expands and becomes more "interconnected".
The game manages to be immersive through its atmosphere, but it ultimately fails to convey a sense of place and non-linearity.
Combat, in turn, constrained by the limitations of a 2D game, attempts to compensate for its lack of depth and its heavy, somewhat unresponsive controls with spectacles of graphic violence and grotesque enemy designs.
This quickly loses its appeal once you realize that regular enemies are rarely enjoyable to fight, while bosses feature such generic movesets that more than half of them rely on excessively long and annoying periods of invulnerability to pose any real threat.
That is without even mentioning attack patterns that often seem completely incompatible with your own moveset and speed, or the many flashy abilities you can unlock that never have any practical use.
You'll rarely find any arrangement that will lead to decent encounters. In most cases, bottomless pits and spikes will be your biggest enemies, if that.
The animations, at least, are impressive, especially for a pixel art game.
But for an quest full of despair, it's surprisingly friendly.
And as the novelty of the world gradually fades throughout the adventure, what remains is a rather bland game, supported by a presentation trying to carry the entire experience on its shoulders and almost not succeeding.
It feels more bureaucratic than well-structured and paced. The map is poorly done, the overreliance on slow combat and movement within such a limited framework weakens the experience as a whole, and even the placement of fast-travel points is poorly thought out.
Even so, i have completed the game multiple times because of how memorable the experience is. It overflows with so much personality that, from time to time, I simply cannot resist playing through it again.
It's a narrative that offers much food for thought. A lot to reflect on.
In a fresh and fun way, it takes an artistically flavorful dive into a range of dark and weird concepts about Christianity.
The work reveals a cult that celebrates communion and the transcendence, but is essentially based on the repression of life itself. It festers in misery and fear, glorifying suffering, punishment and guilt as virtues.
Such aspects seemingly go unnoticed nowdays, having undergone centuries of sanitization that have distanced modern consciousness and practices from the morbid meanings that accompany this faith.
But they are there, for anyone even slightly attentive.
It is a fairly short game. And once you already know what lies ahead, its flaws become much easier to tolerate. It is a deeply captivating world—grotesquely beautiful and very inviting to uncover—but one that falls short in nearly everything related to actually playing in it.
It's not a great metroidvania. It's not a great soulslike. But it's good enough art.
4 gamers found this review helpful