izigame.me

I originally tried to play Blasphemous in late 2023, but gave up about 2 1/2 hours because of some frustrating game design issues and because I just wasn't having much fun. Fast forward to mid 2025, and I finally tried the game again. I ended up enjoying it more this time around, giving the game more of a chance and spending some time on it. However, after having completed it now and finishing most of the map, I still can't really recommend Blasphemous, mostly because it still isn't really all that fun and has some game design flaws.
Here is what I will say about Blasphemous: it drips with style. The pixel art is gorgeous, the soundtrack is haunting and the game isn't afraid to toss around gore like confetti at a kid's birthday party. It has a theme and sticks to it very well, and it makes you want to learn more about the world. Sadly, games are meant to be played (for the most part), not just looked at, but Blasphemous would win just based on style if that was the case.
It's kind of a mixture of a souls-like and a metroidvania. You have a limited amount of flasks you regenerate at certain shrines, and if you die, you respawn at those shrines and have to walk back to your corpse to regenerate some of your stats. It's fairly standard, and mostly unproblematic, because Blasphemous isn't all that hard in terms of gameplay. Most bosses can be spam-attacked to death and outhealed easily, aside from very few that spike the difficulty randomly (a true souls-like indeed) and most of your deaths will come from environmental hazards or enemies that knock you off of tiny platforms and into spikes. Overall, it doesn't really reinvent the wheel and the souls-like aspect is fine, if a bit unnecessary and just serves to lengthen an already short-ish game.
What caused me not to recommend it is the metroidvania aspect of it. Even being done with the game, and with most of the map uncovered (over 90 %) I still have not found quite a few objects and rooms because the things I need to reach them (presumably), I still have not found. I looked it up and it turns out you need to do a series of fetch quests that you can easily miss, for NPCs you will not remember the moment you leave the room because you have other things to do and that are not marked on the map, with items you will not find until hours later. It's incredibly unsatisfying and so the main draw of a metroidvania was not happening in my playthrough, because the items needed for that are obscurely tucked away behind layers of brick, and only god knows where the sledgehammer is. It's bafflingly annoying and I would go as far as to say it's barely even a metroidvania at all, despite those small rooms and areas being shoved into your face so often during your playthrough, only for you to likely never reach them unless you're lucky or follow a guide. It's the antithesis of what makes a metroidvania fun.
Many items are barely explained and only used for quests, the map is absolutely terrible for a metroidvania (NPCs not marked, blood fountains that are already used for new flasks aren't marked as complete and still look like they can be used on the map, etc. etc. etc.) It's like the convoluted lore for a souls game, but transferred into the gameplay - not that the lore and story for Blasphemous aren't convoluted, because they are about as nonsensical as you would expect, though they provide a cool background for your gameplay.
I guess that would be the last aspect to take a look at - how does the game play? You attack with a sword, and you only get very few attacks over the course of the game. There are a few powers that use your fervor gauge, and your combo may expand at some point, and you get a sliding attack, but the gameplay remains fairly one-dimensional, causing boredom long before you reach the end of the game. Many attacks beyond just a simple sword swing lock you into long animations, which is a problem - you never need to use them outside of bosses, but they kill you when used with most bosses. I wish there were more weapons, or more attack styles.
I played quite a few souls-likes and metroidvanias that I really enjoyed over the years, and even recently. Blasphemous just doesn't do either well, in my opinion. The map is too big, the game is too repetitive, the metroidvania aspect is badly implemented with a hard-to-read and uninformative map, and it doesn't reach the satisfaction a souls-like should. When it was over, I was just glad more than anything, but not really satisfied. On a huge sale, it might be worth a look if just for the style and some of the cool areas and bosses, but if you want to have fun playing, there are far better games of its genres available.