While initially I bounced off Blasphemous due to its focus on the “Dark Souls inspired challenge”, I did end up liking it a lot when playing the final version of the game a year ago. The title remained a bit too cryptic with some of its design and there still were some rude moments, but overall it was redesigned to be much more fun and welcoming. Its visual style and soundtrack were phenomenal as well.
I was very cautious about Blasphemous 2 as I couldn’t predict what direction a sequel could take. I could bounce off it even harder, after all, depending on what the focus of the game would be. In the end, I loved playing it. Yet I feel like some die hard fans of the original might get disappointed.
Just like the original, Blasphemous 2 is a hack and slash heavy metroidvania with “thoughtful” combat. You can’t just rush into danger or mash buttons and expect not to die majority of time and despite being full of surreal and twisted bible-inspire imagery, there’s an aspect of “realism” to how the game feels that is absent from a typical IGA-vania. However, in a huge change from the original title, the sequel is faster and focuses much more on quick and responsive movement, including giving you more supernatural movement abilities – something that the original game did not do.
You get a couple of permanent upgrade abilities that unlock new paths, instead of having to manage relics, some of which used to give you access to new areas in the original. Wall jumping is now faster and easier to pull off, you get a double jump and an air dash. On top of that, some of the special puzzle items that are present on the levels are tied to different weapons you have and their special moves. That’s right – several weapons, not just one big sword. In an interesting twist, you can select just one at the start and that slightly changes what possible paths you could take in the world, before you find the rest of the weapons you didn’t pick. I really liked this mechanic, even though an explanation for one of the puzzle items was given to me after hours of seeing those items around and not knowing that I can do that. Which, unlike two other weapon abilities, was not intuitive and this hint delay felt almost like a bug.
This switch in how the game emphasizes movement and different approaches with different weapons also means that the general flow and design of the levels has changed. The levels in the original game were almost always designed as non stop gauntlets of traps and enemies, where you had to jump over insta-kill spikes and pits. In Blasphemous 2 the game rarely does this gauntlet-like design, focusing more on just fun encounters with enemies and more sparse trap placement. Additionally, pits and spikes (with few exceptions) are no longer instant death and deal damage to you instead. I personally prefer this, as it doesn’t make the game easy and you still have to be careful, but you’re no longer under constant stress of instantly dying to something. But I can see if some people would actually prefer the constant tension of the first game instead.
Same goes for the cryptic nature of the original. The stories of both games are… not super deep and hardly properly explained, focusing more on visuals and tone than a conventional storyline. But the original had the Dark Souls 1 approach of keeping most things extremely vague on purpose and having weird poorly explained mechanics and easily missable important interactions. Whereas Blasphemous 2 feels a lot more streamlined in this regard. It’s far easier to understand what does what, why and how in most cases. And while there are some hidden and super extra hidden things you might miss, a lot of the secret aspects of the game are more dependant now on your desire to explore, rather than just going to a specific place at a specific time in a specific way for reasons.
Overall, the game plays extremely well and I feel like this experience is going to be far more welcoming to people than the first game was even in its latest version. That said, it’s not without a couple of weird decisions either. One side story, for example, decides to end on an auto-scrolling precision platformer level that is frustrating for all the wrong reasons. It’s quite easy, but paced so poorly that it’s very hard to die up until the very last jumps where the game times things so badly that dying is almost guaranteed. The pre-final boss fight is poorly thought out. Its first phase is slow and easy to go through, but its second phase can kill you in a couple of seconds not just due to complicated combos you must react to, but more so due to the fact that the visuals of the arena are so cluttered that it’s hard to read where you are and where the boss is. So you die because you don’t see what you’re supposed to react to. That said, these two situations are almost an exception as most of the game is extremely well balanced.
I loved my time with Blasphemous 2. It was one of those rare games where I had to force myself to stop playing because I wanted to see what’s in the location or the next room. For me, the game stroke the right balance of being challenging enough to plan my routes and actions to stay alive, while not being so hard that I would start hitting a wall. Yet, I can see if some hardcore fans of the original game, who loved the mystique of the world and the plot and who preferred to be under constant tension due to the more gauntlet-like design of locations, will be disappointed to see this sequel moving away from that. So, consider what you liked about the first game before playing this one. Definitely check the wonderful soundtrack, though, as it’s as incredible as it was in the previous game or The Last Door.