Blasphemous

Dark Souls is one of the most influential games of its generation, becoming not just a genre (Souls-like) but also lending elements of its design, such as its minimalist storytelling and slow-paced combat, to numerous other games. Blasphemous is certainly one of them, since it shamelessly borrows everything it can from Dark Souls – from its narrative structure and mechanics to its sound design – and puts these elements in a 2D Metroidvania that has a strong and unique aesthetic. The game may often fail at adapting parts of the Dark Souls’ formula, but it’s an impressive effort nonetheless.

Blasphemous’ world is one in which the Christian notion of guilt and penance was taken to extremes. Abominations “with only faith in their hearts and only rage in the guts” prowl the lands, butchering the living. The man who made it all happen did it because he prayed for punishment: “He prayed for pain, so he could ease the guilt that sharply pierced his soul. Then the Miracle manifested itself,” one of the characters explains to the protagonist. But what did that man do to deserve such punishment? He… was born. The guilt that he so deeply felt was actually inherent to his human condition: he believed in the idea that every person is born guilty and that is only through pain, suffering, and penance that they can cleanse their sinful souls. The monsters, then, are the fruit of a so-called “miracle”; the divine punishment that finally came after being so fervently desired by the pious. Blasphemous, therefore, is in direct conversation with Christianity, presenting cruel and twisted versions of some of its basic notions to expose their cruel and twisted side – it’s not a coincidence that the player will find several crucified people in the course of the adventure.

The characters in the game, then, are always suffering. And, most of the time, they are the ones that bring this suffering unto themselves, such as the Pilgrim who wants to traverse that thorny land alone… and barefoot. But we also meet a religious man who keeps watching a woman being tortured in front of him, feeling deeply sad for her. Blasphemous is filled with religious people that look at pain and suffering and see something sacred.

The endings, without going into detail, are pessimistic ones, as they don’t seem to change the ideology that rules that world. Blasphemous shows that faith is a powerful abstract force that you cannot easily kill and destroy with a sword. Therefore, if faith becomes twisted and cruel, it turns into a highly transmissible and almost incurable disease, infecting the minds of the people, planting roots so strong that can easily resist the blows of fact, logic, and reason.

The imagery here is striking: for a game called Blasphemous, it’s fitting that amidst all the religious symbols, and all the gore, there are so many phallic symbols and objects. There’s the constant presence of the protagonist’s pointed capirote-like helmet, adorned with thorns, and there’s the sword he carries, called Mea Culpa, whose blade appears penetrating a woman’s body during the opening cutscene, and then being slowly removed, being passed through several hands while the blood makes the weapon’s veins stick out and harden.

Regarding its design, Blasphemous clearly looks at Dark Souls as a role model, copying, with varying degrees of success, a lot of its elements. As in Dark Souls, the worldbuilding here is developed through item descriptions – which are unsubtly labeled “lore”. As in Dark Souls, characters here often speak in cryptic terms and some of them even end their lines with a sardonic laugh. As in Dark Souls, the world presented is one in ruins, rife with nightmarish creatures. The combat is also slow-paced, based on parrying and dodging. The protagonist heals with Estus Flasks – or Biliary Flasks as they’re called here –, which are then refilled by resting at Bonfires – or praying at Shrines as they’re called here –, an act that also respawns enemies. When the protagonist dies, they don’t leave experience points behind – thank God – but part of their magical bar, which must be recovered. The similarities never seem to end.

The game, however, suffers from some very obvious problems. Traps that can instakill the protagonist, for example, work better in a 3D game, like Dark Souls, than in a 2D Metroidvania, since there we are given more space to spot the traps and maneuver around them: we can move the camera down from the ledge you are standing on, for example, and see that there is a sea of bloody spikes waiting for the protagonist below. Now, in a 2D game like Blasphemous, we simply can’t see the spikes below what the screen shows, making some jumps a random leap of faith. Besides that, in a Metroidvania, the player is constantly wanting to get from one place of the map to the other very quickly to get items that are finally in their reach, but that is rendered difficult and frustrating by all the traps they always have to look out for.

As in Dark Souls, exploration is a key part of the experience of a common Metroidvania like Blasphemous, but, unlike Dark Souls, Metroidvanias requires constant backtracking as the player revisits areas to find secret paths and hidden power-ups with their newly acquired items. There is backtracking in Dark Souls, but not nearly as much as in a common Metroidvania. Therefore, all the insta-kill traps in Blasphemous work against its structure, discouraging exploration by making the act of retreading old paths, which are filled with them, a daunting and exhausting quest.

Blasphemous commits a lot of sins regarding its own genre. In a usual Metroid game, for example, all the things that we collect are useful to our character, being power-ups that increase their health and ammo or a new piece of equipment that opens new areas to exploration. Here, most of the things we find in secret spots or difficult-to-reach platforms are “bones” from deceased characters that you have never heard of before. There are more than sixty of them spread throughout the map, and they serve no function whatsoever: they are not power-ups, but just random collectibles.

If we are unwise enough to go out of our way to find each and every one of the bones, the reward is just… not worth it, having no impact whatsoever on the gameplay. To make matters worse, the game hints that the reward is actually something great, putting a huge treasure box in the background of the area where you deposit the bones, which makes the actual reveal very anticlimactic. And to make matters even worse, everything you collect in the game has the same appearance, so you don’t know if you’re going through all the trouble to just get a bone until it’s too late.

But some of the actual power-ups don’t fare much better. One kind of power-up, for example, is a heart that we can equip on our sword, but the hearts’ drawbacks usually far outweigh their benefits. One of them increases the damage the protagonist takes but also the one they do to enemies, but the damage they take from them increases to a ridiculous level, rendering the heart, as well as the time we took to find it, completely useless.

And the game’s problems don’t stop there. Combat is good, but very slow-paced, which encourages us to avoid enemies instead of fighting them when exploring. The act of exploring is usually a chore, since fast travel is limited to just a few far-away spots on the map, making us retread the same areas a lot. The shrines where we save are also a bit problematic, as the protagonist recovers health with them, but not magic. However, we can trade health for magic at any time by making the protagonist cut themselves. That means we will have to waste our time, cutting the character until their magic bar is full, and then saving again to recover all the health that was lost.

The map is also an abomination, being far from useful: it’s dark and small, with very few things marked on it. The player found a shop? Good luck remembering where it was when you finally get the souls – sorry, tears – to use on it. You saw an item out of reach? Good luck remembering where it was amidst all the hundreds of collectibles in the game – and pray it’s not just a random bone. And the worse sin of all, which is most probably a bug: sometimes the map shows areas you have never visited, and there’s no way to tell the difference between them and the places you actually passed through.

Some sidequests are also cryptic to a fault. There is one, for instance, where after delivering three items to a character, you must not visit a certain room before speaking to a random man at the other end of the map, otherwise, you will fail the quest and not get a powerful spell. Is there any indication of that? No, not at all. In the same fashion, the true ending of the game is also only unlocked if the player died three times with a random item equipped. If they never bothered to use it – and there is no indication in the story that they should – they will finish the game without a clue of what they could have done differently.

Presentation-wise, Blasphemous boasts a striking look, with a lot of disturbing images, but has a weak soundtrack to complement it. Most areas have a subtle sound playing in the background that leaves no impression at all. The sound design sometimes also fails at mimicking Dark Souls: when you enter any area a very brief, but ominous tune will play, but Blasphemous is a Metroidvania, so you better like that tune, because you’re going to hear it a lot as you constantly move between areas.

Blasphemous is a 2D Metroidvania that is heavily inspired by Dark Souls, but one that fails to realize that not all of that game’s elements translate well to its genre. It has a striking aesthetic, a decent narrative, and some good ideas, but it could have been much more than just a Souls-clone with only a unique theme to call its own.

February 12, 2020.