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Blasphemous review

written 2023-09-01

Blasphemous is 2D side-view Dark Souls. Look, I know I said in my Hollow Kight review that it was Dark Souls inspired and couldn't stop comparing it to Dark Souls, but Blasphemous is even closer. Not only does it have similar lore, tone, death system, and approach to storytelling, but also similar combat, aesthetics, and sound design. I mean heck, *this* is its death screen:

image of "EXEMPLARIS EXCOMMVNICATIONIS" written in red letters, just like the "YOU DIED" from Dark Souls

You *can't* tell me this isn't a Dark Souls wannabe.

With this much vice signaling, the only reason I played it at all is because I heard a Hollow Knight fan suggest it was good, which was before I saw all these Dark Souls-isms. I played in 2023/07 and ended up playing maybe 12 hours, but not finishing the game.

Combat

The combat and player movement feels a little slow and sluggish, but maybe I just think that because I was coming from Hollow Knight. Like Dark Souls, it has a block/roll/parry trifecta for your defensive options, where you're invincible while rolling (but it's shown as a slide-dash thingy in this game), and parry is this thing that's strictly better than other options, balanced only by being harder to execute. The way block works is different though: instead of costing stamina, your character blocks for a short time when you press the button and then un-blocks. And you can't block while moving.

Also like Dark Souls, the main problem with the combat is trial and error. Hitboxes and telegraphs are often unclear, and which defensive options work against which attacks is often unclear. See the boss Ten Piedad as an example:

video of someone fighting Ten Piedad

See how *sometimes* you can dash through the boss, but other times the boss is a wall? See how the floor spikes after its stomp attack come out with literally no telegraph? See how the number of spikes on some of these attacks increases the farther into the fight you get, so the game shows you the attack spawns 3 spikes, then next time you stand back from the first 3 but surprise there's more this time?

This is just an example - *most* bosses are like this.

Shitty enemy design

There are some really bad enemy designs, which unfortunately tend to overlap with the hardest enemies.

In many areas you find ghost-y-things that attack by charging into you. Their hitbox is really unclear, but the most annoying thing about them is that they can float out of bounds, making it impossible to attack them and you just have to wait.

In one area there's a type of ghost - enemies being themed as ghosts seems to be a bad sign - whose only behavior is to teleport between two fixed positions, firing instant lasers at you before teleporting again. If you hit them, they teleport immediately instead of attacking first. The only real strategy against these assholes is to hope their two positions happen to be close enough that you can stand in reach of both at once, or failing that, where you can stand in reach of one while covered from the other, and just hit it every time it appears and then wait for it to cycle back. It's mind-numbingly simplistic and tedious, but these are some of the most dangerous enemies in the game, so ignoring them or not prioritizing them all the time isn't an option.

Hidden information

Also... like... Dark... Souls... there's a huge problem of item descriptions being totally unclear about what they do. It's worse than Hollow Knight - at least Hollow Knight makes it clear what the charms do *qualitatively*. Mostly. In Blasphemous you'll find a bunch of tradeoff-equippable upgrade items that say things like "protects from magical damage". Which attacks deal magical damage??? Absolutely nothing in the game suggests what attacks deal what type of damage. You might think that'd be pretty clear from the visuals of the attack, but the game has fire, lighting, and magic damage, and I was often surprised when the wiki told me which one of those an attack counted as.

Also, the fan wiki in general is a lot less filled out than Hollow Knight's, making the trial and error worse. There were several times I went to the Blasphemous wiki to find out how an aspect of the game worked, and most of the time it didn't have the answer for me.

Communication failures

Something really just *bad* I'd like to rag on is the game being inconsistent about what its elements are *called*. In the beginning you're taught that your healing potions are called Biliary Flasks, then later they're referred to as "Bile Flasks" and "Biliary Vessels". I didn't realize those were the same thing.

Related to this, there are some major communication failures about *major* upgrades that can result in you not understanding the terms of the upgrade you're being offered, to disastrous results:

Throughout the world, you can find items called "Empty Bile Vessel" which don't seem to do anything (hence I forgot I'd picked up items called that). When you visit a certain special fountain, you're offered to "refill empty Biliary Vessels?" Assuming you even make the connection that flasks and vessels are the same thing, the use of the word "refill" makes it sound like this is talking about just refilling your... you know, your empty healing potions just like resting at a checkpoint does, and the only use is that these fountains are found in the field. But it costs a lot of money so it doesn't sound like a good trade. Hence I declined the first several of these I saw. Well little did I know, it's actually talking about turning those Empty Bile Vessels into usable Biliary Flasks! Again, the word refill doesn't make sense because these have never been filled before. And it also doesn't make sense that just "refilling" is all you need to convert them into usable Biliary Flasks, because resting at a checkpoint automatically refills your Biliary Flasks, but doesn't fill your Empty Bile Vessels! Agh, my brain hurts.

There's a point where you're offered to trade a special item and one of your healy-things-whatever-the-fuck-they're-called (I don't remember what name they used for it in this context) in return for strengthening the remaining healy-things-whatever-the-fuck-they're-called. But the game just isn't clear enough about the fact that this is going to *permanently take away* one of your healy-things-whatever-the-fuck-they're-called, so I agreed to this trade when it was super bad for me and then was shocked when it disappeared leaving me with only 1.

Misc

Another thing that put me off from finishing the game was disturbing imagery. There are people you walk past in some areas who are being tortured - I'm not gonna describe what the game shows in detail here - but the game treats them like background objects, no different from the breakable pots you find everywhere. The only thing you can do is kill them. Which the game treats just like breaking a pot. They're alive again if you come back. Super disturbing.