Blasphemous

Sorrowful Be the Gamer
If you're like me—impatient, easily bored, historically bad at video games, and somehow still convinced you could enjoy them—Blasphemous is here to torment and ultimately convert you.
This game slapped me so hard with its spiked censer that I came out the other side a changed person. I now have patience (??), better timing (??), and an emotional attachment to a man in a pointy hat who never speaks but suffers so beautifully.
I died. A lot. So often it could’ve been its own achievement. I lost all my Tears of Atonement trying to retrieve my guilt, was impaled by every spike imaginable, and got relentlessly demolished by That Bull Thing™. I ragequit, came back, died again—and somehow loved every minute of it.
Graphics
Absolutely gorgeous. From bloodstained cathedrals to haunting pixel-lit skies, the art direction is visually divine. The Penitent One’s hat is a 10/10 fashion choice. There is drip in the penance.
Music
Dear god. The soundtrack drenched me in misery. Atmospheric and hauntingly beautiful, it drags you into the depths of Cvstodia with no hope of return.
Special shoutout to Miriam’s Challenge music—it genuinely made me lose my mind. I might be humming it in my grave someday.
Lore
Confusing at first, especially if you have memory issues or the attention span of a damp sponge (me). It’s all hidden in item descriptions, cryptic NPC dialogue, and the corpses of people who seem weirdly chill about being dead. But on my second run and NG+, it started to click—and I was hooked.
It’s twisted, tragic, and disturbingly beautiful.
“For twisted are, were, and will be, the paths of the Miracle.”
Trauma. Suffering. I love it.
Highlights
- Constant emotional damage
- Miserable, beautiful women (Laudes, I love you)
- The world hurts, but in a good way
- Actually improved my patience, somehow
- Killed by stairs. Repeatedly.
Verdict
10/10 would get spiritually destroyed again. (Which I will, time for my 3rd run.)
Sorrowful be the heart, penitent ones.

In the brotherhood of penitents. Straight up "blaspheming it". and by "it", haha, well, let's just say... Mea Culpa.

Great Game, the controls were a bit troublesome at first but I could get used to it rather quickly, also you can pet dogs.

🩸 Blasphemous — where even your conscience wants to press Alt+F4, but can't, because that's a sin
I didn’t play a game. I performed a ritual.
I didn’t beat a level — I overcame an inner demon named “timing that jump.”

You launch Blasphemous, and you hear… silence. Right away, you know: this won’t be fun.
No one smiles here. Not even the enemies. Especially not the enemies.
They look into your soul and whisper: “You didn’t come here for joy. You came here because you needed to suffer.”

🔪 Combat — a slap to your overconfidence

You thought you could play?
You thought a couple of sword swings and a dodge would fix everything?
You were wrong.
Here, you must feel your enemy like you're spiritually bound by mutual pain. One wrong move, and you're confessing before the loading screen.

🗺️ The map — a hellish mosaic of deliberate inconvenience

Custodia wasn’t designed for your comfort.
Doors don’t open where you expect. Checkpoints look at you with sarcasm.
Every path is a chance to fall, die, meet the unspeakable, and lose everything.
And yet you keep going. Because you want answers.
What you find instead… is another relic with a description like:

“A thorn from the crown of a martyr who suffered for those who did not suffer.”

📜 STORY AND LORE: “The Cursed Redemption”
In the world of Blasphemous, everything revolves around the Miracle (El Milagro) — a supernatural force that offers blessings… or curses. Sounds noble, but in reality, the Miracle is a cosmic power that judges everyone by its own twisted divine standards. Someone prays for healing — and turns into a tree. Another begs for forgiveness — and ends up sealed alive inside a bell. How touching.

🌒 You are The Penitent One:
A silent warrior in a spiked helmet-hood, the last survivor of the Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrow. Your mission is to undertake a pilgrimage through the mutilated sacred land of Custodia, slaying the sinful spawns of the Miracle and seeking meaning in an endless cycle of suffering.

🩸 Core Themes:

1. Guilt and Atonement — nearly every character has either committed a sin or suffers for someone else’s.

2. Sanctity and Flesh — many "relics" in the game are literal body parts of martyrs. Yes, you collect dried fingers, tongues, kneecaps, and mustaches. In Blasphemous, holiness is quite literally flesh.

3. Religious Allusion — distorted versions of Catholic rites, cults, miracles, and iconography. It’s not a direct critique of religion, but rather an artistic reimagining of religious archetypes through the lens of suffering.

🔮 Lore Through Items:
Like in Dark Souls, the game’s lore is hidden in item descriptions, NPC dialogue, and environmental design. Reading the description of a saint’s nasal blood will show you: every detail matters. Every item is a line from some ancient apocrypha.

🧙‍♂️ Characters — saints, sinners, and those who’ve lost the line between:

1. Deogracias — the narrator, like a monastic Shakespeare. Constantly appears to whisper something cryptic and stare into the void.

2. The Red Mother — a resident of the puppet temple, a symbol of infertility and sacrifice.

3. Esdras, of the Anointed Legion — a knight-brother, walking toward his own agony with a prayer in his eyes.

🎼 Sound — organ, whispers, clashing metal, and your nerves at their limit

This isn’t music. It’s a prayer in the void, sung by walls.

🧎 At the end, you don’t win. You… understand.

You didn’t save the world.
You’re not a hero.
You simply accepted the Miracle. And it accepted you.

🕳️ Score: 10/10.
I don’t know why I did this. But I know it was the right thing to do.

This was my first platformer and i gotta say i was never too interested in the genre, but the visuals alone in this made me wanna give it a try. And let me just say, the art is absolutely stunning, i mean this is probably one of the most gorgeous and stylistic games i've ever seen, i have a love for pixel art, so this game just had me in awe. The animations, enemy designs, map designs, boss aesthetics. its such a visually striking game and i honestly cant praise the visuals enough.
As for gameplay, I enjoyed it for the most part. Some bosses were ridiculously difficult though, might be partly my fault for being kinda ass, but i felt the mechanics for some to be slightly unfair n cheap tbh. i.e the massive uncontrollable knock backs, enemy attacks mixed w unblockable projectiles, enemies attacking while flying off the screen etc. Overall this game is FRUSTRATING, like hair pulling levels of frustration sometimes, almost as if the devs purposefully made it to be as annoying and non forgiving as possible, whoever decided to add insta-killing spikes, i literally dispise u with all my heart lol.
One of my biggest gripes tho was how the game handles optional content. I’m someone who prefers 100%ing games, and trying to perfect this was an absolute nightmare. There were so many moments where I couldn’t obtain an item or missed a key moment, because I either did something unknowingly that conflicted with it or waited too long. You don’t need these to progress, but missing out on them was super annoying. For example, I spent nearly two hours fighting two bosses and got a left and right eye as my reward, only to find out I was too late to trade them in. So all that effort felt so wasted.
Another downside was how much I had to look up stuff. Figuring out certain quests was a borderline chore at times because of how cryptic n vague some of them were, plus the many obscure secrets and hidden areas that felt impossible to find on your own unless you got super lucky — like hitting a random blank wall to unlock a hidden room. It just isnt realistic and many will miss out on cool items.
I also found it quite strange how dummy linear the game wants you to go in order for you to achieve a "good" ending, it feels nearly impossible to get this ending w/o looking it up. On top of that, the "bad" ending was pretty disappointing imo. Checked out the good ending on yt and it looks 100x better, which sucks even more knowing that like 90% of the players will probably only ever see the bad one in their first run. It just doesn't make sense to me at all.
I still had a fun time overall tho. Despite the frustrating parts, many of the boss fights were still enjoyable, navigating around the map while finding new items n areas was fun, story was a bit confusing at times, but it was still extremely cool and intriguing, music was also surprisingly good aswell, and I’ll honestly never forget how gorgeous the art is. This game definitely has its issues tho, and i honestly just wish they didn't make this game so purposefully frustrating and punishing for the average player, but ig that's just the way it is 7.5/10

A Solid Metroidvania With Souslike Elements
This review is from the perspective of someone who 100%s games on Steam
Blasphemous is by all means a good game. It has a great interconnected world that opens up as you upgrade, a solid combat system, a decent story, and some of the most metal enemy designs I have ever seen in a video game. Simply put… there is no one area of Blasphemous I would say is bad or falling behind. Unfortunately though, this game also has a lot of areas that I feel are so close to greatness, but find themselves falling a little bit short. As a certified yapper I will be breaking down all of it. The good and the bad.
Again, I would like to highlight that I think this game is good and worth your time. While my review will be fairly balanced between good parts and bad parts, I would give this game overall an 8.5 / 10. Anyways… I will now go in-depth on several different aspects of the game including Story, Gameplay, MISC, and the Completion Experience. There will be minor spoilers for what the game contains, but I will not go into any specifics that would ruin your experience.
Story
I think the story and lore of Blasphemous is something that could be quite polarizing. There is a lot of lore to the world of Custoida, but unfortunately so much of it is hidden behind cryptic dialogue and item descriptions. I don’t like to make comparisons, but I think saying it is similar to Dark Souls 1 is probably the best way to help you understand what you are getting into. At the same time though, I honestly felt Dark Souls 1 had an easier plot to follow, at least on the surface level.
So yeah, the story is a bit of a mixed bag for me. After beating the game I felt like I knew little of the overall lore and I personally did not enjoy that. After watching some lore videos though I can confidently say there is a rich world here, it just requires a bit more brain power then most games. Thankfully, this is probably something you already know if you personally find it to be a dealbreaker or not. My last point is that this game can easily be enjoyed without knowing the lore.
Gameplay
There are two elements of gameplay I want to touch upon in this review; those being combat and world design. Let's start with combat.
Combat in Blasphemous is a good time. You only have one weapon throughout the game, but you do slowly unlock new skills and “prayers”, which allow you to customize a couple of your moves. For the most part I think this system works. The one weapon is well designed and feels good to use, and the couple of things you can unlock / customize allow for some slight build variety. I do think there could have been more here though. Maybe having different weapons you could choose from or a more fleshed out skill tree is the solution, but as of right now, I just feel that your combat options don’t grow as much as they could.
The other part of combat though is what you are fighting. Enemy variety is strong, with each enemy feeling unique and well-designed. The boss roster is solid, but I also think the game doesn’t have anything that really blew my socks off. The final boss is also, in my opinion, the worst boss in the game. There is one thing going for all the enemies / bosses in the game though, and that is their art design. Like damn did this team cook. I won’t go into too much detail so as to not spoil, but if you are into some messed up designs then this is the game for you.
Moving onto world design.. It's great and I think I would deem this Blasphemous’ strongest trait. The world is fun to explore and it is interconnected in ways that you don’t seem often in video games. Smashing through a wall or dropping down a ladder to reach somewhere you’ve already been is a special feeling, and this game is full of moments like those. You can also access most of the map right away if you know where to go. This makes repeat playthrus a joy as you mess around with ways to sequence break. I do have one complaint though and that is with the relic system. Relics are what allow you to reach areas you couldn’t previously reach. Since this game doesn’t have anything that changes your movement mechanics, the game instead had you equip these relics to shift the world around you and open up new paths. It's a cool system, but unfortunately it has one issue, which is that you can only equip 3 of these relics at a time. I understand what they were going for, but all this results in is having you have to go into the menu to shift around which relics you have equipped whenever you reach a certain puzzle or area. It just is not engaging. For the most part though, the world design slaps.
MISC
I can not emphasis how much the art direction here slaps. Yes, I used slaps two sentences in a row, but simply put… some parts of this game do slap. The soundtrack is also worth mentioning. Its good!
Completion Perspective
It took me around 25 hours to get 100% achievements. This game does require a fair amount to earn that blue badge including: at least 2 playthrus, collecting 100% of various different collectible items, exploring the entire map, completing some pretty complex npc questlines which can be failed, and 2 “challenge run” type achievements.
Most of these are pretty doable, though I would recommend looking up a guide on your second playthru to ensure you progress the npc quests right. The two challenge runs require you to beat the first half of the game in less than 3 hours and beat all the original (no dlc) bosses without healing. I would recommend going for the no healing one first, as it is good prep for the speedrun one when you pursue that. I will say that the speedrun time is fairly forgiving.
Overall, not a bad completion unless you refuse to use a guide.
Final Thoughts
Blasphemous is a solid metroidvania. It gets so much right for a first game and if the sequel can just improve a little bit on this solid foundation, I might view it as one of the all-time greats. Anyways, I hope you enjoy your journey with Blasphemous!
P.S Feel free to friend request me on Steam if you want to keep up on my completionist journey!

This game is hard but it's doable! You will get lost multiple times on the map and of course you will die, like a lot of times! Boss fight in this game can be quite bizarre but they are fun and challenging. This game is also visually beautiful. Idk I just love the overall aesthetics.