3.5/5 ★ – DanteSnowcone's review of Blasphemous.

Blasphemous is a lot of fun and has some of the best art direction I’ve ever seen, full stop. It’s a little clunky and a bit annoying to traverse the world, but the team should be commended for designing one of the coolest looking games out there. I bet the story makes at least a little more sense to someone playing in Spanish and familiar with classic Spanish Christianity, but I gotta say it feels like this game took all the wrong lessons from Dark Souls. “What if we make our story as obfuscated as possible?” The game starts with a pretty clear goal (opening the big door) but then after that your destination is hard to find. There were a couple times I had to look up what to do because I couldn’t figure out what item to bring to what NPC or where they were. I’m not sure which of these things were essential and which were side quests, because I was never really sure of what I was doing. Boss fights are a lot of fun, though. I would say only a couple of the ones I did were particularly difficult, but they all look like awesome biblical nightmares and require a different strategy to beat. I think the last two bosses were way too easy though, much easier than the first in the three-boss gauntlet, and that took away from the gravity I should have felt from beating the game. (If there’s another secret true final boss, I don’t know about it.) Basic enemy variety was fine, could be better, but I loved the execution animations. Always fun to do a badass finisher. World traversal is quite slow for most of the game. Much like Hollow Knight, there’s a significant distance between fast travel points, but unlike Hollow Knight, you move slowly and with very little aerial flow. You can equip an item to speed up, but after doing that I can’t imagine why you would ever go back — that should just be the normal playing speed. The platforming is never too challenging or innovative, but the overall world design is gorgeous and keeps you focused enough to forget about the so-so platforming. Yeah there are better metroidvanias out there, but this one is pretty good and worth exploring for the art alone as long as you like the genre. Will definitely be playing the second one, and I’m keeping an eye on this new Ninja Gaiden game that the team is supposedly developing. Time played: 19 hours Played on Nintendo Switch