Metroidvania Corner: Blasphemous - Article
by Paul Broussard , posted on 17 July 2023 / 4,216 Views
For quite a while, Blasphemous very much fit into the Mortal Kombat category of titles for me: games that looked interesting, but were off-putting due to the immense amounts of gore and disembodiment. I don’t consider myself particularly conservative when it comes to gore, but it’s not really something I seek out either, and gore for gore’s sake usually winds up discouraging me from buying a product if anything. At a friend’s advice, though, I gave Blasphemous another shot, because I do like good Metroidvanias and my friend assured me there was a point to the gore.
The latter, at least, is true. Blasphemous’ artstyle is heavily evocative of Spanish Catholicism, with imagery of flagellation and torture consistent throughout. It’s not a particularly pleasant sight, but it’s probably fitting for a game as unforgiving as Blasphemous, which is more than content to let you wander into some very dangerous areas from the start and has no problem letting you die until you figure out you’re not supposed to be there.
The plot is pretty close to indecipherable on a first playthrough, so I’m not going to try to explain it, beyond saying that you're a dude with a funny hat and you’re on some sort of religious pilgrimage that involves stabbing lots of things. Blasphemous leans very heavily into some of the worst tendencies of Dark Souls storytelling, and you can easily miss out on huge chunks of the narrative by not stumbling upon the right NPC, or, even worse, just failing to complete optional quests before arbitrary points in the main plot. I am glad it takes a more backseat approach to storytelling, but the main requirement of storytelling is actually letting the player hear or view it, whereas this just serves to punish them for something they couldn’t possibly predict.
Fortunately the core gameplay is much stronger, with a heavy emphasis on platforming and combat. The platforming works quite well and makes many of the vertical environments really fun to explore. The world itself does a good job of opening itself up, with lots of shortcuts to make navigating between previously explored areas easier. There’s a reasonable helping of warp points as well, to make the various regions of the map easier to traverse. I do wish it relied less on the lovely instant-death spikes to make the platforming dangerous, but the controls are tight enough so that this isn't a deal-breaker.
The combat is even better, ranking as some of the best I’ve seen in any 2D game. There’s not a huge amount of complexity — there's a standard sword combo, a parry, a dodge, and a magic attack — but it all works extremely well together, and enemies are designed to take advantage of the player’s moveset. Bosses are also a treat, with some incredibly creative designs that give even the best search-action titles out there a run for their money. Conquering these baddies never gets old and really made me wish for a boss rush of some kind, like Bloodstained had.
Even the art style, which admittedly turned me off playing it for years, is really engrossing and does a lot to pull you in. The pixel art is fantastic, and the designs the team dreamt up for both the game’s environments and creatures are incredibly unique and utterly repulsive. Better yet, it somehow mostly makes Blasphemous feel like it earns its sheer bloodiness, which is a lot more than can be said for most ultra-gory titles I can think of.
There’s only one real major problem with Blasphemous, and it’s unfortunately a huge one for a game featured in a series called “Metroidvania Corner”: Blasphemous isn’t really a Metroidvania. Yes, I know that’s what it calls itself on its Steam store page, but North Korea insists it’s a Democratic People’s Republic, and that doesn’t make it one, either. Metroidvanias are titles that define themselves by a sense of progression; starting off with a relatively small portion of a world to explore and slowly unlocking more of it by finding power-ups. Players are often required to use their memory to recall where to use newly obtained items in order to progress further. And Blasphemous just doesn’t do that. There are a few optional power-ups that allow for reaching optional items, and these are admittedly necessary towards the end if you want to obtain the “good” ending, but there’s no consistent sense of progression, nor a sense that the world is slowly opening up before you.
It’s weird, because one of the title's directors, Enrique Cabeza, even admitted in an interview that "Blasphemous is not actually a Metroidvania." Despite that, it advertises itself as such. It feels like the term Metroidvania is just being co-opted to mean any 2D game with platforming elements and exploration, but that just isn’t accurate to the titles that lent their name to the genre. Blasphemous is significantly closer to Dark Souls than it is either Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night, between the mechanic where dying resets all enemies and inflicts a penalty until you touch the spot where you died, to the obfuscated lore, villages that can become populated by NPCs you rescue, and the sense of progression that focuses less on item acquisition and more on resource management and skill in combat.
That isn’t to say that Blasphemous is a bad game — far from it. If you’re looking for a title with exploration, platforming, and some challenging combat, this is a great experience that adds to 2019’s absolutely incredible line-up of releases. The problem is it’s a bad Metroidvania, which is a shame because this is an article series about Metroidvanias. If I do a series on Souls-likes, expect Blasphemous to be at the top of the list, but as far as Metroidvanias go it rates pretty low because it hardly even attempts to be part of the genre.
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I have considered playing this for a while, and the article is good in the sense that it lets me know exactly what I would be going into. Nice read once again.
I really enjoyed the game, the title really says it all. That final boss was a real issue for me - so ridiculously hard and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Keen to see the sequel!
good article man!
See for me it wasn't Souls-like enough, and for that reason I couldn't really get into it. That and the pixel art (never been a fan of pixel art; it rarely looks good to me). I like a lot of the imagery but the pixel art turns it into a blurry mush in action.
