Blasphemous

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Growing up embedded in the Roman Catholic faith, one thing you see quite quickly is that it has a fascination with the macabre. The suffering of the soul and the self, martyrdom, blood and wounds, death; all of these are intrinsic parts of the belief, rooted in the humanity of Christ and the frailties that come with that. That sounds morbid – and it is – but like many religions it’s held alongside an iron-clad belief that in the end our souls are saved and worth saving. It’s also a subset of Christianity that is often typified by how ornate and extravagant it is; after all, this is the faith that gave us the great cathedrals that populate Europe and inspired so many of our greatest works of art.

Perhaps one of the most iconic images of this is the Semana Santa, the Spanish Holy Week. It’s not uncommon for photos of this to flood the internet on a yearly basis, mainly due to the presence of the capirote, a pointed hood which conceals the face and was of course co-opted by racists in America but here is used in a benign way. It’s a remarkable sight; hordes of penitents in great, thick robes process through the streets, huge and ornately decorated statues of Christ and the Madonna on floats serve as the centrepieces in the midst of vast crowds of worshippers, and as the dark of night draws in, torches, flares, and fireworks are lit in celebration.

Why bring this up here, of all places, on a videogame blog? Well, it’s because today’s subject, Blasphemous, draws heavily from Spanish religious imagery, combining it with the grim futility of worlds like Dark Souls to build a brutal, oppressive, and bloody metroidvania.

Blasphemous

Android, iOS, Linux, Luna, macOS, PC [reviewed], Switch, PS4, Xbox One

Released Sep 2019 | Dev: The Game Kitchen | Pub: Team17

Genre: Metroidvania | HLTB: 20 hours

Catholic iconography is inseparable from Blasphemous’ identity. Its world is one defined by religiously motivated suffering, mutation, and pain. Its setting, the medieval fantasy land of Cvstodia, is a vicious, grim world; the lowlands are a sand-blasted wasteland, pockmarked by crumbling churches whose spires jut out to the sky like accusing fingers. Extensive tunnels and catacombs stretch beneath the surface, walls lined with grinning skulls and whose halls echo with the sonorous tolls of iron bells, while far away an olive grove clings to the mountainside, its dying throes obscured by bitter snows. In the distance, a vast stonework bridge stretches out to the impassable doorways of a monolithic cathedral. From its ramparts gargoyles cast a stony gaze across the horizon, the silent walls bearing witness to a decaying world locked in pitiless, whimpering prayer.

It’s into this bleak place our protagonist, the Penitent One, awakens. With shuddering breaths he heaves himself out from a massive pile of bodies, each one bearing the same metal mask and capirote as him, his entire brotherhood reduced to stinking corpses. Armed with the Mea Culpa, a sword willed into deadly existence by a flagellating woman and the power of the Miracle, he trudges through the corridors of his order’s chapel and out into the swamps of Cvstodia beyond. Before he can leave, however, he is confronted by the corpulent, monstrous form of the Warden of Silent Sorrows; cutting through its flesh, the Penitent One solemnly fills his hood with its viscous blood and affixes it back over his head, drenching his face in the ichor of the dead.

That’s the first ten minutes or so of Blasphemous summed up, more or less. It should clue you in as to what’s in store; a sombre, oppressive world that’s out to kill you and inhabited by broken, lonely souls. As much as comparing things to Dark Souls can be a bit passé, especially when done idly, I’d struggle to think of something more apt as a descriptor for Blasphemous. While many will connect the concept of a game being a Souls-like with a mechanical meaning – that is, playing like a Souls game – Blasphemous is one of those slightly rarer beasts in that it’s a Souls-like in terms of its setting, narrative, and general vibes. The Souls games are typified by very much the same kind of world as Blasphemous – one buckling under the weight of its own death-obsession. To combine that with Catholic-inspired imagery and verbiage is a fantastic angle, albeit one stripped of the cheer and celebration that comes with religion, replaced with endless saturnine scripture.

Cvstodia is defined by the Grievous Miracle. Both a religious reshaping of its people and culture, and a weighty shackle locking the populace into a life of servitude and self-destruction, the Miracle co-opts everything that sits in the shadow of the great cathedral, the Mother of Mothers. In true Souls-like fashion, the Miracle is a curse more than it is a boon; its power distorts and reshapes the denizens of Cvstodia that fall prey to its whim, filling the land with monsters and mutants. Most of the people we meet in the game are victims of the Miracle in this way, with much of the imagery verging fully into gruesome body horror, such as a young man who has an elderly face bulging out of his chest, or three women fused together into one form, covered with matted, dank hair.

What’s particularly unnerving about the characters in Blasphemous is the way that they each accept this as part of their lives; to them, the presence and power of the Grievous Miracle is as innate and inescapable as gravity. It’s not just that suffering is a basic part of existence in Cvstodia, but that everyone revels in and reveres suffering. Of course, self-flagellation is a well-known image of especially devout fundamentalist Catholics, but here that act is taken to an inhuman extreme. That the people of this world willingly engage in it is unsettling in and of itself, but what makes it worse are the characters we meet that seem to realise that they are living in a kind of hell, but its one that they can neither escape from, not even imagine trying to do so. Guilt, pain, atonement; all of these are commodified and deified, held up as the way life spent in service to faith should be.

It makes Blasphemous a really compelling meditation on the nature of the interaction between self-sacrifice and belief, and on the all-encompassing control to the point of harming oneself that a tightly-wound cult-like religion can have over people. There’s an intriguing point of comparison to be made here between this and a game we reviewed last year, Silksong. In many ways, Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight sequel has much in common with this game. Both feature settings ruled by a harmful religious sect, with people utterly consumed by their devotion past the point of harm, and as a result their respective countries of Cvstodia and Pharloom are locked in a deathly spiral, slipping inexorably to decay, doom, and culture death.

They’re also both bloody tough games. When you play a bunch of Metroidvanias, you quickly come to realise they tend to fall into one of two camps: either they’re more weighted towards exploration and narrative, or they’re really into challenging combat loops. Blasphemous is definitely the latter, though obviously the storytelling isn’t left by the wayside either. What’s surprising is how simple the combat is in Blasphemous. The Penitent One can do a few swings with his sword, stringing them together in short combos, he can dodge roll (a proper dodge roll as well, with lots of useful i-frames), and he can parry. The latter is the key to unlocking Blasphemous’ difficulty, though pleasingly it’s actually a very generous window, the counter-attack that stems from it usually does a good chunk of damage, and, critically, most stuff can be parried. Enemy attacks come thick and fast so you do have to be careful in studying their patterns and judging when you have a chance to successfully deflect them; failure to do so results in fairly swift death because even basic enemies can rip through your health in this game.

As the game progresses the Penitent One winds up amassing a sizeable armoury of tools to help him fight through Cvstodia. By finding beads (or, more precisely, an increasingly stretched definition of “beads” including blobs of wax and animal skulls) the Penitent One can add them to his rosary, which confers incremental passive bonuses to him; these are roughly analogous to, say, Hollow Knight’s charms. There’s an impressive array of them to be found so they wind up forming the basis of most of your customisation of how the Penitent One plays; there’s enough freedom to angle your build in lots of different directions, including optimising for melee, spells, or speed.

That’s not all though. I mentioned spells there, which here are presented in the form of prayers. Much like the rosary beads there’s a surprising range of prayers that can be learned across the course of the game, with many of them able to support a wide variety of playstyles. Some act as temporary buffs once cast, such as giving your attacks a drain effect or granting temporary invincibility, but many others are offensive in nature. Not to keep harping on about comparisons to Hollow Knight but, once again, the way these spells affected my playthroughs was very similar to my experience with that game. What I mean here is that because the core combat is extremely satisfying and fun, it’s easy to simply rely on that as you progress through the game and so spells become a distant tertiary tool in your arsenal. However, once you start digging into them and experimenting they wind up becoming (literally) game-changing. For example, for a while in Blasphemous I found myself turning to the prayer “Seguiriya to Your Eyes like Stars” (yeah all the spells are named like this and I bloody love it), which provides a boost to your attack speed, allowing me to tear through boss health at a frankly silly pace. Later on, however, I became a convert to “Debla to the Lights”, a vertical beam attack that, with the right rosary setup backing it up, absolutely decimated late-game encounters.

Blasphemous doesn’t stop there either. Hidden around Cvstodia are small shrines clearly modelled after real-world ones to Mother Mary; held in their hands are Mea Culpa Hearts, each of which gives you access to a different passive buff to your melee combat. However, most of these also come with a drawback, so in some ways they’re more analogous to, say, the Pantheon challenges in Bastion – they can give major and notable advantages to suit your playstyle, but equally the drawback might require you to adjust how you play. The sword itself can also be upgraded to unlock a bunch of new attacks, such as a powerful drop attack or a ranged attack where the Penitent One slices his hand open to fling razor sharp discs of his own blood at enemies.

It’s not all about the fighting, obviously; like any metroidvania, how you move about the world matters as well. When you play a lot of metroidvanias, one thing that becomes fairly apparent is that there are some basic options for upgrading movement that you just see all the time; I’m talking here about things like ground and air dashing, wall jumping or dashing. These are all perfectly reasonable upgrades, but it’s wonderfully refreshing when a game eschews those and opts for something a bit different. That’s Blasphemous’ jam for sure; while yes you can do a little dodge roll, the movement options that you get in this game are a bit more esoteric, like upgrading to be able to see blood-soaked hidden platforms or force-growing twisting roots to provide new climbable surfaces. There’s a bit of inventory management to this as the Penitent One can only equip 3 exploration relics at a time; I’m not sure I enjoy this all that much personally since I don’t think having to constantly swap them around depending on the area you’re in is a particularly intuitive or player-friendly mechanic, but it’s a minor blemish against an otherwise excellent and highly customisable game.

If you’ll excuse me another little grump as well, it’s a notably obtuse videogame. It’s no puzzle game obviously but working out what you’re supposed to do, especially for some of the side content, is definitely a bit of a stretch at times. I suppose this is part of the Souls influence, as those games also like to obscure information from the player in order to push you deeper into the exploration. Of course, this game expects you to keep a lot of information in your head and backtrack all over its map, and I’m not sure you’re that well-equipped to do so. I’d have liked maybe a slightly more populated map screen, or clearer and more useful map markers, or even just some fast travel points that were closer together, if only to mitigate the downtime you’ll spend trudging back and forth across Cvstodia.

These are the most minor of quibbles though. Blasphemous came to my attention already very highly recommended, and I’m pleased to say I wholeheartedly echo those sentiments. The simplicity and responsiveness of the parry kept combat moving at a fair pace, the environments were continually jaw-dropping, and the sheer level and detail of the customisation was consistently mind-blowing. It’s a challenging game as well, but I think it speaks to the quality on display here that I didn’t mind the difficulty; I tend to prefer casual, easy-going playthroughs of games but here I really managed to resonate with the mindset of picking myself up after a death and carrying on. Blasphemous is a gorgeous, grim, gore-soaked game, but it’s one with a uniquely compelling world and a thoroughly enjoyable gameplay loop. It was nearly 20 hours very well spent, but I already know I’ll be returning to do a second harrowing pilgrimage in Cvstodia before too long.

6/7 – EXCELLENT. Games with a touch of brilliance. It might only just miss out on being an absolute favourite, but you should definitely play this.

This review was entirely human-made. No generative AI of any kind was involved at any stage.