Blasphemous - Gory 2D Pixel Art game

Games
1

How do we not already have a thread for this?

Big thanks to @Papageno for being so generous in the Giveaway thread.

Now, I was a little apprehensive, because even though I generally have loved every game compared by people to the Soulsborne games, I wasn’t sure if 2D games have the same appeal. After all, I tried Salt & Sanctuary, which people have compared to Souls games, and I played it past the first boss, and I just didn’t care for it.

Well, I played this one past the first boss, and so far, I’m digging it. It’s been out for a while, so others can obviously talk more extensively about it than me. So have at it. Did you play all the way through it? What did you think?

The other reason I was nervous is that I generally hate Pixel Art games. But it doesn’t bother me as much in this game. I think it’s because it has little cutscenes which fill in for my lack of imagination. They show you closeup of what these characters look like in the cutscene, so when it switches back to the pixel art gameplay, my mind fills in those gapes. For example, the narrator is a guy with a coiled up rope for a face. I never would have figured that out in my weak imagination or from looking at the pixel art. But because they showed the detailed coiled rope face in a cutscene, when they switch back to gameplay, I can totally see the coiled rope face now in my mind. It’s a neat trick.

2

Here’s the roped face narrator within the game by the way.

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See why I never would have picked up on that within the game? You’d need an imagination like @Left_Empty’s to pick up on that. But once they show me the cutscene, I can see it really clearly.

3

I must confess I was very, very heavily disappointed the blood in the mask thing wasn’t the hero’s, in an iron maiden way, but him filling it with the blood of his enemies :(
Not catholic enough.

4

I mentioned it awhile back in one of the weekend threads or maybe a Game of the Month thread.

I like it a lot! The Spanish Inquisition vibe is well done (although eventually the Capitalized Terminology started to obscure whatever lore they wanted to convey). The platforming and combat is satisfying. There are some good surprises and some amazing bosses.

I think I got to the last or close-to-the-last boss and just ran out of steam. It felt impossible–though, granted, most of the bosses felt that way at first. I did the same thing with the kinda-similar game Sundered (also a Metroidvania with a grotesque theme–this one is futuro-Lovecraftian instead of medieval gothic, and it has a procedural generation element to it). Two games I just gave up minutes (I think) before the end…

But I got a lot out of both, and like them both a good deal! If you haven’t played Sundered, you might look it up too!

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The devs are Spanish, I believe, so they have that Catholic thing in their blood.

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Yeah, I loved the game, too, and played through it rapidly over the course of a week or so, until I hit a point that seemed much harsher/tougher than the rest and I eventually moved on to different games. I still plan to pick it up again at some point and try to finish it. (I don’t normally play Souls-like games.)

It’s definitely a game worth experiencing. Beautiful – and suitably creepy – art style.

7

Just started playing this. It’s pretty damn good… which I guess is faint praise with Bloodstained, Hollow Knight and Salt & Sanctuary as the competition. What an age we live in, when there’s fierce competition for great Metroidvanias with a dash of Dark Souls.

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How frequent are the save points? I just tried the demo for about 20 minutes, and they felt pretty sparse to me (I only found the first one). Are they pretty decently spaced, or is it going to be a lot of going over the same area to get back to where I died?

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The bonfires prie-dieu are mercifully right next to every boss room, but there are some areas where they’re pretty far off. I can definitely see it as an annoyance if that’s a concern for you.

EDIT: BTW, those are not even prie-dieu, they’re more like wayside shrines! A prie-dieu is basically a lectern with a spot to kneel on.

Christian terminology fail. :-/

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Some of them were more elaborate:

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Although the Blasphemous ones appear to be lacking the kneeler, which does seem disqualifying.

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I was mainly wondering about the save points for bosses, so that’s good to hear. I’ll give it a shot.

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So yeah, I’d give Blasphemous the score of 4 tabernacles out of 5. As I said, it’s really good, but the competition is fierce.

I doesn’t have nearly as many bosses as Hollow Knight, but every one is a showstopper in terms of presentation. Combat also somehow feels better than Hollow Knight, despite being pretty much the same. There’s an emphasis on parries and dodges, but I didn’t get much use out of that during bosses. Dodging through enemies is finicky, because it only works while enemies are attacking (or not attacking? I could never figure it out).

It’s probably the shortest of the games I named above, but I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing. Still, there was a DLC patch in August adding New Game +, so you actually get to use the endgame items.

The game gets extra kudos for reallly “feeling” Spanish, from the names, to the music, to the look of the game. Not everything needs to be Anglo-Saxon. Please, no mas.

The game is noticeably buggy, but it’s nothing too bad (an item description mismatch, some weird teleports, a failure to load twice).

The one real gripe I have about the game is that it doesn’t really do anything with the religion concept gameplay-wise. Don’t get me wrong, the game picks a theme and by, uh, God, it sticks by it! But despite some very thorough use of church jargon and some clever references to Renaissance art, it’s a pretty standard Metroidvaniasoulslike.

For example, there’s no class system that could leverage religious orders and whatnot (You are a Jesuit, +10 Intelligence. You follow the Rule of St Benedict, you, eh, have a strict schedule?). There’s no good or evil morality system. You are the “Penitent One”, but you don’t really make sacrifices or penance of any kind (a level where you need to temporarily “sacrifice” your senses would have been cool!). Basically, you just kill anything that moves that doesn’t have a talk prompt above its head and that’s it. It’s the ol’ Mega Man problem : you can make the robot masters talk all you like but it’s still a platformer. They have a health bar, you have a gun. Simple.

So the game is basically Castlevania except every level is the church level. Blasphemous has the religion of a metal album cover.

On the other hand, you could probably strip the “bug” theme out of Hollow Knight and it wouldn’t change that much either. Bloodstained’s “alchemy” theme is so transparent it’s barely worth mentioning. It’s not a game about vampires in a castle, I swear!

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I feel you on the theme. I appreciated that it really knew the tone and historical sources it wanted to draw from, and visually it did that perfectly. But after awhile I just tuned out the names and setting details because they never coalesced into anything coherent. Just a bunch of pseudo-gothic-catholic terminology sprinkled everywhere as if by aspergillum. (If I may.)

Still, great boss battles (although as I recall, I quit on the last boss and never finished… which oddly enough I think I did with at least a couple other games in this genre), cool tone, solid combat, beautiful artwork. It’s a great game.

14

Good one!

Still, I can’t believe every item in the game has a dedicated “Lore” button. I haven’t read any of it, but I sure respect their dedication to throwing walls of mumbo jumbo at the player!

15

The combat is really smooth and, for once, I actually am using parry a lot. I went for the not using health potions during any boss fight achievement and there were a number of times I ended with a tiny sliver of health. One fight I actually died right after I killed the boss due to a projectile.

I really appreciate that you don’t loose anything when you die. That is one aspect of a lot of these “soulslike” games that I just don’t enjoy at all.

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Yeah, I restarted the game to do the “no potion” trophy as well and I’m not bored or annoyed or anything. It’s one of the best compliments I can give a game that I want to start it again from scratch.

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After finishing this, I decided to load Hollow Knight and mess around again. It felt so slow, and without parry or the invulnerable dodge I was jumping around all over the place and it just felt horrible. I loved Hollow Knight (and spent way more time in it), but the combat is so different. I really like Blasphemous’ take more. Just feels like I have more tools.

Was looking for something similar to jump into. Vigil the Longest Night doesn’t save progress when you die, so that sounds horrible. Maybe Salt & Sanctuary. I refunded that game a long time ago, but I think I’m better at them and more willing to die frequently now. So I should probably give it another shot.

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Have you played Sundered? The levels are randomly generated, so that’s a big difference and it may not be your taste. But I didn’t think it was to my taste either, and then I played the game to the end. The art is incredible, the combat is very satisfying, the enemies are impressive, and the bosses are next-level mind-blowing. Similar to Blasphemous in that way, but hand-drawn full-resolution 2D art instead of pixel art.

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I just saw the tag ‘roguevania’. Oh no.

Thanks for the tip!

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I should say so, since I just saw you in the Ghostrunner thread.

S&S is still my favorite, mostly because I loved their old beat ‘em ups. It’s a popular game but not universally loved. Worth another shot.