Beat the game today, I really enjoyed it. Mood and ambient is god-level, the world of Custodia feels magical, distorted and menacing at the same time. As a spaniard, I love how the devs have adapted many local mythos and turned it into something really cool. Gameplay is very good; the combat system is simple but engaging but I feel like it's a bit underused. For example, in the fights against humanoid bosses your counterattack would miss many times due to range, or the boss would recover from your combo before you could deliver the combo finisher. The execution system seems a bit random and could've been used more by providing additional effects, maybe through powerups. The "air-impulse" could've been part of some fight in a much more protagonist way, though that would've required reqorking this skill a bit as you don't have a lot of control when you use it. Contact damage shouldn't be a thing either, IMO it made combat worse and even the powerup to not take damage still locks you in the hit animation.
The world is amazing but there is too much backtracking. Even after unlocking bonfire teleportation moving through the same rooms for the nth time becomes tiring. Other Metroidvanias solve this by giving you movement upgrades through the game, so each time you go through an area you may have new tools you can use to move faster or in a completely different way. Or they just have a much more engaging movement system, like Dead Cells where blasting through a level is really fun by mixing double jumps, rolls, jump-rolls, wall-runs...Blasphemous only has the relics to upgrade your traversal but even those are completely situational and used only in one-time events to find a secret or get a collectible. BTW, you should be able to equip all relics at once, I see no benefits to not being able to and it completely kills the pace. Just holding dash could give you a sprint to cross faster the many straight empty rooms there are in the game.
Level design is good-to-great, everything warps on itself in many ways and I love how each area has its' own gameplay mechanics tied to the theme/location. I felt a bit disappointed at the end because I went first to the inverted bell and I absolutely loved the area: It felt very distinct, tetric, original and the bell theme was used masterfully in puzzles, enemies and even in a big dungeon-wide puzzle. However, the rest of the areas fell short in comparison and repeated too much the "take a detour to unlock the way forward/shortcut" approach. I wish there had been more dungeon-wide differentiated mechanics in each area, like hunting/being hunted by a special enemy through the ful dungeon or maybe stuff that changed the dungeons in ways beyond unlocking a door or an elevator: Rotating rooms or the full dungeon, turning rooms upside down, altering gravity, alternate dimensions (light/dark, past/present, fire/ice...)...In the end I always just proceeded forward until I hit a roadblock, backtrack, take another path and repeat until I reached the boss.
Overall even with these problems I enjoyed the game a lot and hope that the devs keep on releasing more content or develop a sequel or spin-off. The characters, sceneries, enemies, locations, lore...are all amazing and the whole game feels like it could be the basics for a really impactful game.
BTW, if you like this game take a look at
Unworthy, it's like Blasphemous but developed by just one guy: It's a much simpler game but if you liked Blasphemous I'm sure you'll love it.
www.resetera.com
blasphemous.fandom.com
