Blasphemous 2 is about suffering. Taking place directly after the first game’s DLC, you are confronted with a world yet again under the grip of the Miracle, an unknowab♒le force that changes the very laws of life, externalising guilt and sin, weaponising ironic punishments, and feeding on the misery it creates. Taking the form of a✱ gigantic heart-shaped womb floating high in the sky, it’s about to give birth. And so, the Penitent One is awakened from his slumber and tasked with preventing this nascent threat from being born.
I found the first game﷽ to be a bit disappointing, lamenting the frustrating difficulty level and the repetitive gameplay, but there were enough details that I found compelling to tempt me into the sequel, most notably the art style. You’ll only need one look at Blasphemous 2 to see that it’s an artistic triumph. It takes the first game’s retro stylings and gives it a sorely-needed upgrade. The backgrounds are painterly, the environments detailed, and the characters deliberate and striking. The massive NPCs you often come across show off the Miracle’s cruel punishments with sickening detail.
💖The man with his wife’s breast sewn into🍷 his chest, the lady whose skin gets pulled off gradually as she helps you, and the man falling to pieces as his insides turn to honey - every pixel that makes up these poor people is designed to disgust and intrigue. More than once did I tell my partner to look at my screen, and more than once, he just looked at the vividly gruesome scenes before me with disgust of his own. Everyone is suffering; even you, dear player, who must look at this crying, lactating man.
From the Penitent One’s capirote to the cherubs and rosary beads, Blasphemous 2 drips with Catholic imagery. Fitting, as its world is suffused with guilt. As in the first game, religion is not wielded as a gimmick or propped up as an aesthetic; there’s a conscious effort ♉to build a world and a narrative that ebbs and flows around Catholic themes of penance, faith, and miracles. While there is obvious care to make these aspects of the game ring true, there is nothing preachy here. Blasphemous 2 turns collective faith into an undoer and uses its deeper wel🐽l of religious understanding to fantastic narrative effect.
While it’s yet another side-scrolling Metroidvania with Soulslike mechanics, everything feels elevated, as if it’s saying, “Hey, look, we made things better than the last one”. The controls are smooth, the platforming is satisfying, and the difficulty is balanced. Exploration is on the harder side, but it’s fair - when you **** up🐈, you know exactly why. It felt great filling out the map and picking up all the items I’d later use for quests or to boost my health, and the platforming itself has received the biggest glow-up of the improved areas. Movement is slick, the Penitent One is reactive, and by the time you’ve unlocked the double jump and air dashes, once-tricky areas are a total breeze.
Combat is another massive step up from the previous game. You get three different weapons to work with here, and after picki🧸ng your first one Pokemon-style, you’ll have to collect the others within the first third of the game. Each has its own pros and cons, along with a special ability that you can’t ignore if you don’t want to spend the entire game button-mashing. Take the sword, for example - attacking with the sword builds up a meter, and once it’s full, you’ll gain a shortlived powerup that improves your standard combo and unlocks special attacks. This encourages a deeper mastery of the combat system early on before it becomes all but required in the later stages of the game.
Thanks to their stunning designs and flashy attack patterns, the boss fights make for some of the most memorable moments in the game. They are also some of the most frustrating. The bosses range from the tough but fair to the few abs𝓀olutely bullshit sections of Blasphemous 2, with frenetic attacks that require the most precise timing and openings that barely deserve to be called as such. The keenly balanced difficulty of the rest of the game is thrown out the window. It’s a shame, as the set pieces they inhabit are striking and compelling, and the scraps of lore you can collect about their lives before the Miracle presumably turned them into monsters are wonderful reading. This is an area where The Game Kitchen has stagnated - the bosses in the ღfirst game weren’t any better.
While the numerous side-quests you can find throughout the world are thankfully simple enough to understand, there’s very little variation in what you’re expected to do. Each and every quest boils down to finding a certain item (or sometimes, up to five or six items), often hidden all over the map with no rhyme or reason, and returning it to the NPC in question. The few quests that diverge from this formula are similarly uninspired, consisting of sadistic arena battles and a monotonous auto-scrolling sequence. The꧒re was one standout quest, which involved riddles and required a deeper knowledge of the game world, but it was so compelling it made every other quest seem even more boring in comparison.
I enjoyed my time with Blasphemous 2. I’ve unlocked both endings, scoured and pillaged the entire map, and completed every quest I could find, and, where I found the first game severely wanting in the fun factor, the sequel delivered ꦕin spades. Despite this, it’s held back by simplistic quests and bosses so unfair as to taint the whole experience. At certain points, thematic suffering bleeds through the cracks in the fourth wall and becomes 🌳part of the gameplay.
Score: 3.5/5. A review code was provided by the publisher.