Indie Game of the Week 225: Blasphemous

There aren't a whole lot of games about Catholicism. It's not like you see Super Mariology or World of Warcraft: Catechism lining the shelves, and what few religious games there are tend to be the soft, no-fun Protestant kind where Jesus gracefully carries you over all the obstacles if you fail a level too many times (in case you were wondering why there was only one pair of footprints leading away from the Thwomps). If you were to turn Catholicism into a game, you'd need to highlight two important themes: high difficulty as a form of punishment and penance for your sin of not gitting gud fast enough, and a whole lot of severe, messed up imagery concerning blood and heresy and burning people at the stake for whistling on a Tuesday. Fortunately, the Souls games came along and pretty much offered that exact template on a platter, and The Game Kitchen were wise enough to pick up on it to create the 2019 Catholicism-adjacent game Blasphemous.

As the sole surviving knight or priest (or priest-knight) of the Order of the Silent Sorrow known only as The Penitent One, who has taken a vow of silence as part of his penance, the player is expected to roam the lands of Custodia to complete their violent pilgrimage under the auspices of an entity called the Miracle, or sometimes the Grievous Miracle: a powerful divine being that brought the protagonist back to life for mysterious reasons but has also transformed most of the rest of Custodia's population into gruesome monsters or cursed undead. The game has been rather tight-lipped on the specifics of this crusade though, offering you vague directions on where to go next and letting you pick up tidbits of context from item descriptions and infrequent encounters with friendly NPCs. So, pretty much Souls's typically indirect approach to worldbuilding. Blasphemous is also a 2D game, which traditionally when combined with the Souls formula turns it into something closer to an explormer: Hollow Knight and Salt and Sanctuary being two other famous examples. As you pass through each region of Custodia there are items and exits that you simply won't be able to reach, either because you need to come back with the right relic or because it's a shortcut that only opens up if you approach it from the other direction.

What sets Blasphemous apart from its immediate peers is a certain pragmatism and deliberation to its approach. The former comes from a lack of inventory (in the sense of having a wide variety of consumables beyond a single Estus Flask equivalent) or RPG mechanics; you instead grow stronger by visiting shrines that upgrade your main (and only) weapon as well as intermittent health and mana upgrades, and acquiring useful items such as: rosaries, which provide small passive boosts; prayers, which act as spells and can be offensive or defensive; relics, which provide explormer-like traversal upgrades; and heart cores, which change the properties of your weapon but often come with downsides. The deliberation is found in the combat, which relies far more on reading your opponent and attacking during an opening than mashing through every encounter, as the latter approach is likely to kill you quick even with a stock of self-replenishing healing items. In addition to the usual parry and riposte techniques, you can evade roll and learn new weapon skills to turn the tide (my favorite so far is a powerful down-stab), but it's not the sort of game you can hope to brute force through grinding; your best bet is to head in another direction for a while to see if it eases up any.

That said, Blasphemous has not been insurmountably tough so far: shortcuts have been plentiful and though enemies hit hard they tend to telegraph early and often, with a few exceptions that you just have to learn to deal with quickly (a certain ghost enemy that likes to warp around and fire lasers is one such PITA). The bosses have been several degrees tougher but then I am making it harder for myself in my usual dogged pursuit of trophies, one of which involves never using healing items during a boss fight (which, incidentally, has been a really bad idea and I'm liable to drop this foolishness once I hit a progression brick wall). Often the platforming presents a bigger hurdle than the enemy encounters; there's a few gauntlets of traps and hazards that can offer their share of hardships and you'll always die immediately from spikes or bottomless pits. Still, there are rewards everywhere you look, so it's worth taking the time to check out every exit and poke every wall just in case it's illusionary. Another boon for the player is the game's generous map system - enhanced in a post-release patch - which allows you to place a seemingly endless number of map markers to indicate places of interest or treasures you cannot yet reach.

Blasphemous also has its distinctive spins on common traits of the Soulslike. The infamous corpse run, for instance, usually involves you losing all your soul currency upon death with a chance to recover it if you can make it back to where you died before death finds you once again. Blasphemous doesn't bother with all that, but will instill penalties of a different kind: you'll have a permanently smaller mana bar and gain less currency from monsters until you recover your corpse, so there's incentive to return to prior oopsie-daisies even if it won't make the game that much harder if you decide to leave them behind (there are other means of recovering it too, ideal for those occasions when your body gets trapped somewhere like in a bed of insta-kill spikes). Blasphemous is very much steeped in the inchoate traditions of this particular burgeoning format, but it's also finding its own path to some extent.

The most immediately striking aspect of Blasphemous is its imagery, influenced as it is by some of the more gnarly Biblical passages and apocrypha, with a special emphasis on the saints and their various woes. The saints of Custodia are, for the most part, still alive in some form due to the Miracle's influence and will either help or hinder you in your quest. Like in Souls, these gods among men are several times taller than your ostensibly human protagonist and strike an imposing figure whenever you meet them; though unless a health bar emerges as you get close, you can assume that they're here to assist in some way. A woman with six daggers poking her breast is the game's version of an E-Tank, permanently increasing your HP whenever you happen to find her, while a dude with a Kuato-like face on his chest offers a means to increase the potency of your healing items at the cost of their quantity. Not only do these guys look metal as hell, but they lend a certain surreal supernatural edge to this ecclesiastical realm of miracles and sin that almost transforms the Old Testament into a Lovecraftian nightmare factory; though again, I suppose that interpretation had always been there. Blasphemous doesn't skimp on the spectacle elsewhere either: every character, from the protagonist down to random crows and rats, is animated beautifully and in some cases this makes it easier to react to attacks in time because of all those extra frames of wind-up. Likewise, there are some breathtaking vistas and scenes to witness on your travels, from your initial resurrection atop a giant pile of your fellow monk-knights to the deeper regions of Custodia that have been rendered almost unrecognizable by the Miracle's eldritch touch.

Ultimately, Blasphemous doesn't do that much different from the Souls-inspired games that came before; even its repurposing of that game's structure as a 2D explormer is relatively old news. However, it is still expertly crafted from its mechanics to its art direction to its oodles of incidental lore and deserves to be canonized as one of the greats of this very specific sub-genre of a sub-genre. I'm looking forward to playing through its second half, and hoping I won't have to deal with too many more Father Gascoigne-tier bosses. That big face with the laser hands was really not pleasant to deal with.

Rating: 5 out of 5. (So far.)