Guilt! Ecstasy! Agony! The corruption and correction of the flesh!
Blasphemous is all of these things and m- no, wait. Blasphemous is only
these things: all else is heresy, fit to be thrown on the pyre. A
gruesome pixelart hybrid of Castlevania and Dark Souls, it casts you as
the Penitent One, a musclebound chap in a pointy helmet, who must
cleanse a fallen civilisation on behalf of a quasi-Catholic deity known
as the Miracle.
You
wake up on a charnelpile deep in a crumbling vault, immediately get
into an argument with an ogre wielding a candelabra and, well,
everything goes downhill from there. Right the way down, that is, to the
bottom of a church bell large enough to encompass an entire level, in
what feels like a nod to Soul Reaver's Silent Cathedral. Here you'll
encounter toxic mist, goblin folk who are annoyingly good at jumping
over your swings, and spectral fencers who vanish after every thrust.
And then all the way back up, through slippery chasms where both the
wind and the statuary are your enemies, to a convent where an undead
abbess has been taking lessons from bullet-hell shooters.
It
certainly covers some ground, does Blasphemous, and given a little
tolerance for spike pits and irredeemable squalor, there's fun to be had
massacring the denizens of this unholy world. Inspired by Francisco
Goya's torrid religious paintings and the Gothic monstrosities of the
developer's native Seville, Cvstodia is a place of twisted steeples,
bloodied gold and the unrelenting spectacle of bodies in pain. The
enemies live up to the spaces that contain them, their lavishly animated
sprites a mash of bone, chains and sacral cloth. Some can be taken down
with combos and evasive slides; others must be parried or jumped over
before you can land a blow; still others hang back off-screen,
activating terrain traps till vengefully quashed. Full to bursting with
wickedness, Cvstodia's inhabitants don't so much die as crescendo,
shredding themselves with a screech or erupting into oily flames.
One
consequence of the overpowering art direction is that it takes you a
while to notice that Blasphemous is a fairly straightforward specimen of
its type - even a laidback one, by the standards of the games it takes
inspiration from. Much as in Dark Souls, the opening half sees you
hunting bosses who reign over different regions, using the energies they
guard to open the gate to an endgame area where another gaggle of
bigwigs await. There are a few areas that require, or at least strongly
encourage, the acquisition of new abilities or gear, but for the most
part you can get in everywhere using the basic platforming moves,
leaping for ladders and ramming your sword into fissured surfaces to
serve as a handhold.
There's
a lot of toing and froing, whether between a respawn altar and a boss
chamber or between one region and the upgrade facilities at the world's
heart. Friendly NPCs also create plenty of optional legwork, badgering
you for stray artefacts that are typically found along a different
branch of the map. Fail to satisfy their demands before reaching certain
milestones and you'll lose them (and the associated reward) forever.
The back-and-forth gets wearisome when it comes to levels that are full
of collapsing platforms and deadfalls - and yes, garden-variety enemies
respawn when you do, though you can often hurry past them. The deeper
you delve, however, the easier it is to retrace your steps. You'll find
teleportation rooms at the extremities of the landscape, and a rattling
elevator shaft through the middle that is unlocked floor by floor. It's
an elegantly wrought slice of 'vania, though I'm not sure the layouts
quite deliver on the promise of the rucked, sun-stained vistas that yawn
behind them.
For all the emphasis on punishment in Blasphemous,
it has many ways of letting you off the hook. The frustrations of
jumping across those collapsing ledges, for examples, are softened by
the fact that most attacks don't knock you out of a leap. The parry
timing is generous, and you're invulnerable while the animation is
playing out. And then there are the surprisingly manageable drawbacks of
mortality. Rather than dropping all your accumulated XP (here known as
Tears of Atonement), as in Souls, you'll leave a shivering emblem of
guilt at the place of death. This causes thorns to sprout along your
Fervor bar, limiting your access to special moves like AOE spells until
you track down and expunge these marks of shame.
It
sounds aggravating, but it takes several deaths before the thorns
become an inconvenience, and in any case, you probably won't use special
moves that often - they're simply not that effective next to more
direct methods of chastising the opposition, such as sliding stabs and
groundpounds. Far from hurrying back devoutly to the site of my demise, I
found myself depositing little piles of regret everywhere, like an
incontinent dog. If scooping up guilt yourself is too much bother (there
are Consequences should thorns devour the entire Fervor bar), you can
always offer Tears at shrines to wipe the slate clean.
At such
times, Blasphemous feels like a game for those who crave the mystique
and grotesqueness of Souls, but aren't prepared to pay as dearly in
terms of blood and sweat. That feeling dissipates, however, when you run
into a boss, all of whom sport fat health reservoirs and attacks that
escalate wildly when they're on the ropes. Each boss is as much an
assault on the senses as a test of your reflexes. There is a giant,
blind-folded baby held aloft by a writhing stack of worms, which strikes
by means of a snake-headed tentacle. Elsewhere, a skeletal bishop
lounges on a bed of hands, as though crowd-surfing in the wake of an
especially rousing sermon. The battles follow age-old patterns - wait
for a break in the flow before attacking or healing, memorise which
moves can be parried or rolled through and which must be avoided - but
within those parameters, there's some decent variety. One encounter sees
you climbing a shaft while dodging or deflecting spears. Another,
human-sized boss scuttles along the ceiling, throwing and retrieving its
blade to conjure a wall of fire.
Nonetheless,
after 20 hours with it, I still think the best reason to play
Blasphemous is the art. The game's raucous personifications of sin and
punishment are hardly subtle, but they are always enthusiastic: I don't
doubt a scholar of Goya and Catholic ritual would find much to chew
over, providing they're dexterous enough to breach the inner sanctums.
Set against other descendants of Souls or Castlevania, Blasphemous never
stumbles but does fade into the shadow a little. It isn't as fluid and
balletic as Sundered, nor as haunting and vertiginous as Hollow Knight,
nor as brash and jammed with equipment variables as Dead Cells. Rather
than stretching you on the rack, it feels like an old rite faithfully
performed.
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