Blasphemous gets so much right, but also creates its own identity with its stellar art style, tight gameplay and platforming, and unique cast of characters.
Blasphemous is an admirable piece of art. It does the whole metroidvania thing in a much less tedious way than most indie games do these days, and is bolstered by its distinct flavour and style. While fans who adore the character-building gameplay of most soulslikes will be found wanting, anyone who is nostalgic for Simon's Quest is going to find respite in finally playing what could be best described as the latter's best outcome. Maybe with a couple of tweaks and minor adjustments, and with a patch or two, this could be perfect. In its current state with slightly annoying quibbles, players are still going to be floored by its insane imagery and the penitent one's crusade for purification.
It’s probably one of the best looking indie games of the year, accompanied by incredibly effective notes of religious horror. More importantly, minus a few small gripes, it’s still a very enjoyable game to play through. Definitely one to sink into when the clocks go back in time for the dawn of All Hallows Eve.
Blasphemous is sadomasochism at its best, both in setting and gameplay. It is a spicy platformer in the metroidvania genre, which also faithfully follows the traditions of Dark Souls. That sounds great, but at one point Blasphemous suddenly becomes weirdly unforgivable.
Unfortunately the game is too bogged down with a high difficulty level that is more tedious than challenging, dragging the entire experience down into something I can hardly bring myself to play. Blasphemous is a beautiful game that I wish I could enjoy more, but the extremely high difficulty of combat and platforming simply does not mesh well with the amount of exploration and backtracking needed from a world as expansive as this one.
What a game. What a deeply flawed, yet absolutely breathtaking game: From the graphics to the atmosphere to the boss fights, this is absolutely incredible and I'm lucky to have found it so late, as it has a bunch more content, is way more polished and the sequel is right on the way!
This game is great. I enjoyed many aspects of the exploration and adventure. The combat is awkward and cheap at times. It could be very punishing if you start at the “snow” level. The plataforming is not so good. I didn’t enjoyed it . You simply can’t jump accurately sometimes. The music and graphics are excellent. The art and backgrounds are beautiful. The story is interesting and dark. This was definitely a work of love with a couple of execution issues: plataforming, combat.
Update: In the DLC is almost impossible to kill the bosses and you have to do NG+ and do a specific quest order to see the true ending even if you killed the DLC’s bosses. I’m not playing again just for that . That really was very disappointing
The story is to religious, to pretencious and full of meanigless, hard to understand, enigmatic words in old english, however the design of the world and gory art style do the job.
This game took like the worst aspects of metroidvania/platformer games and souls-like titles and slapped it together lol.
Controls are clunky, one shot spikes deaths are annoying, there's certain lack of check points and portals, so the playthrough is artificially longer since you have to rerun the whole thing often because of that random off-screen-pushed-to-pit death, or you have to backtrack A LOT just because... why not?
Some enemies are hella annoying, and most of them are just hit sponges, there's nothing hard about them really it just takes 5-10 shots to kill them. Some enemies don't care if you block or dodge their attacks, or even pass through them, they damage you anyway.
There are barely any RPG elements though, compared to idk Dead Cells let's say, these songs or w/e they are called don't have any significant impact, and you have to swap them constantly in inventory menus. Like, wtf?
I like the aesthetics and graphics though, story-telling is... weird I guess.
Game looks fun at first, but more you're playing more you're getting bored because of the same actions over and over again. Not the best Metroidvania nor Souls game to be honest, and that mixture makes sense only for die-hard fans of both genres.
This game looks and sounds great it's like a heavy metal album cover come to life. Unfortunately, it's also a compilation of the worst parts of NES-era Castlevania platforming and level design. If you enjoy gameplay that consists largely of jumping from one platform to another with no air control, to find an enemy appear on the ledge you're jumping on and hit you backwards into an instant death pit or spikes, then this is the game for you. Otherwise, I'd look into the many other better Metroidvanias out there. The combat and boss design is also nothing to write home about.
Summary Blasphemous is a punishing action-platformer that combines the fast-paced, skilled combat of a hack-n-slash game with a deep and evocative narrative core, delivered through exploration of a huge universe comprised of non-linear levels.