I'm not one who takes to Souls-like games very often, and yet I couldn't stop playing Blasphemous.
Sure, it suffers from typically Souls-like tropes, namely with it's painful vagueness in it's prose which can be legitimately frustrating if you want to get the "best" ending (something that gets locked off if you don't do specific things before one of the bosses). But in terms of gameplay, Blasphemous is incredible.
It's tight, responsive, and oh-so-satisfying. Unlocking new abilities is exciting and discovering places to upgrade Mea Culpa or your health genuinely made me gasp with delight. Exploring the world is fun and sufficiently rewards the player. Everything about it's map, enemies, and controls is done so well that I couldn't put the game down.
And I believe that it's handling death punishments is probably the best I've seen in this genre. It doesn't take away your Tears (this games equivalent of souls) upon death, instead capping your prayer gauge (another feature that is just genuinely very cool). This is incredibly smart, one of the more frustrating things about Souls games is death can be a major loss of progress if you're carrying a lot of souls. Here, death is a chance for you to level up, take the Tears you've gathered up until the point you died, get stronger, and try again.
This means that, even with the games difficulty, you always feel like you're making progress, you never feel stuck and it never gets frustrating, death isn't nearly as nerve wracking as it was and that's a good thing, it allows you to enter fights a little more fearlessly and really take some risks during Combat that you might not do if hours worth of progress was on the line.
On top of all of this, aesthetically Blasphemous is stunning, it's Spanish Gothic architecture is intricately detailed and simply wonderful to look at, character and boss designs are endlessly memorable, and the soundtrack is incredible at setting the tone for it's many variations of areas, and there are many.
Even if you haven't stuck to Souls games before, give Blasphemous a go, it seems to do almost everything right.
Sorrowful be the heart, Penitent One.
Sure, it suffers from typically Souls-like tropes, namely with it's painful vagueness in it's prose which can be legitimately frustrating if you want to get the "best" ending (something that gets locked off if you don't do specific things before one of the bosses). But in terms of gameplay, Blasphemous is incredible.
It's tight, responsive, and oh-so-satisfying. Unlocking new abilities is exciting and discovering places to upgrade Mea Culpa or your health genuinely made me gasp with delight. Exploring the world is fun and sufficiently rewards the player. Everything about it's map, enemies, and controls is done so well that I couldn't put the game down.
And I believe that it's handling death punishments is probably the best I've seen in this genre. It doesn't take away your Tears (this games equivalent of souls) upon death, instead capping your prayer gauge (another feature that is just genuinely very cool). This is incredibly smart, one of the more frustrating things about Souls games is death can be a major loss of progress if you're carrying a lot of souls. Here, death is a chance for you to level up, take the Tears you've gathered up until the point you died, get stronger, and try again.
This means that, even with the games difficulty, you always feel like you're making progress, you never feel stuck and it never gets frustrating, death isn't nearly as nerve wracking as it was and that's a good thing, it allows you to enter fights a little more fearlessly and really take some risks during Combat that you might not do if hours worth of progress was on the line.
On top of all of this, aesthetically Blasphemous is stunning, it's Spanish Gothic architecture is intricately detailed and simply wonderful to look at, character and boss designs are endlessly memorable, and the soundtrack is incredible at setting the tone for it's many variations of areas, and there are many.
Even if you haven't stuck to Souls games before, give Blasphemous a go, it seems to do almost everything right.
Sorrowful be the heart, Penitent One.