Blasphemous 2
WHERE TO PLAY
A beautiful, dark, and atmospheric game set in one of the most alluring Souls-like game settings of recent years that hits too many of the same notes as its predecessor to have quite the same impact.Played on PC.
A saintly giant woman stands over me, requesting that I bring her glass shards, empty goblets, and empty flasks so that she may increase my health and vial supplies. But as with everything in this corrupted Catholic-adjacent world, there’s always a perverse trade-off. With each item I bring her and upgrade I procure, the little cherubs hovering around her peel back more and more of her flesh, ultimately leaving her looking like one of those grisly sinewy body exhibits, or like Pinhead and his cronies have just had their way with her.
This is just one of the many weird and worrisome ways in whichThe Miracle, the strange supernatural force that blighted the world in the first game, works. It’s a world where feelings of profound guilt get immortalized into twisted beings that are both monstrosities and saints, and just like in the first game, inBlasphemous 2you never get the feeling that you’re working towards some greater good here. Every character progression or narrative action of yours seems to lead to some violent and twisted reaction from dark divine forces beyond your understanding.
The thing is that I’ve been here before. Blasphemous 2 is visually stunning for sure, and it remains one of the purest games in the centre of the Venn diagram betweenDark Souls(consequential death, high difficulty, mysterious narrative in a ruined world) and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (2D exploration on a block-based map, finding upgrades to unlock previously inaccessible parts of the map). But the once-enigmatic thrust of the first game isn’t quite there any more, nor is the horrifying ‘wow’ factor of certain parts of the original—in particular the bosses. The Miracle doesn’t carry the mystique it once did.
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The story of Blasphemous 2 picks up right where the first game’s final DLC left off. A giant heart-like object has appeared in the sky, getting ready to pop with some kind of humanoid inside. You reprise your role as the Penitent One, who awakens this time in an unknown (but still very much corrupted and Catholic-inspired) land, and must stop the birth of whatever’s inside.
True to the original game, you explore the world non-linearly, uncovering the various strongly themed areas via little ‘blocks’ on a map, making notes of inaccessible areas to return to later once you’ve picked up the corresponding abilities, and of course fighting and chatting with all manner of Miracle-touched people and abominations on the way—from cycloptic nuns looking to be reunited with their sisters, to a giant pompous hand that increases your magic meter in exchange for hankies, while on the enemy side your have grunts ranging from slug-like fire-breathing deacons to very ‘vania-like evil paintings and little flea-men who jump around and nip at your ankles.
The game looks and feels wonderful. Combat is super-crunchy as you dash and parry through enemies, building up Fervour from performing executions, which in turn lets you unleash a variety of magical abilities (which you find in the various corners of the map, then swap in and out at will). It’s plenty challenging, though never overwhelmingly so. That Souls-like (or equally well Symphony-like) checkpointed design returns only allowing for saves at Prie Dieu shrines, while death slowly lops away at your maximum Fervour capacity (which you can replenish by paying a visit to the creepy confession dude in the game’s main town hub).
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There are some small but appreciated quality-of-life tweaks in this sequel. You can now move the camera with the right analog stick to see dangers lurking just off-screen, like spike pits. Some tough platforming segments, meanwhile, have also been made a bit less maddening by no longer auto-killing you if you fall to your death, and instead reviving you on the ledge with just a bit of your health missing. Along with generous parry windows, and enemies politely waiting as you carry out an execution on their comrades, Blasphemous 2 is challenging while not quite being punishing. It’s a good call, because these animations are lovely to behold, as you take oversized hammers off of armoured ogres to cave their heads in, or entwine smaller enemies in some kind of tree-like magic bestowed to you by the Miracle.
Even basic enemy deaths cram in a ton of character. One witch-type grunt you encounter in the grim forest known as the Choir of Thorns, for instance, gets swarmed and pecked to death by her own crows upon death, which shred her into a pile of guts in no more than two seconds. It’s a carnal delight.
The big mechanical upgrade in Blasphemous 2 is the ability to seamlessly switch between three weapons (you pick one of them at the start, but then quickly procure the other two as you play). Alongside a similar-but-different sword from the first game, you will also get to dual-wield a pair of speedy rapiers, as well as a slow but heavy-hitting gong mallet thingy-majig.
Each weapon comes with its own skill tree that you unlock using Marks of Martyrdom, as well as separate type of magic power that you charge up by attacking enemies. With different moves and magic powers, the weapons feel nice and distinct from each other, and there are use cases for each of them; yes, I ended up using the balanced main sword for about 75% of the game (nothing can beat it once you charge it up to unleash great big red swings, especially in boss fights), but I also had plenty of joy with the dual rapiers, which build up electrical charge if you deliver a bunch of successive hits without being hit yourself.
Crucially, the rapiers and mallet play a big part in the various platforming puzzles you’ll encounter, which often entail hitting teleporter mirrors with the rapiers, and using the mallet to hit bells whose reverberations to activate platforms that only appear for a short time.
These puzzles are quiet stars in Blasphemous 2, with the more forgiving penalty for falling to your death lets you get into more of a flow with these segments, which in turns means they’re more elaborate and enjoyably challenging in their design. And zipping precisely through a tough platforming segment then sliding through the door at the last half-second before it shuts like Indiana Jones never gets old.
The environments are beautiful, with the powerful Flamenco-style score shifting between dance-like and spooky depending on whether you’re ascending the majestic Crown of Towers, or dashing across the dread woods of the Choir of Thorns, where in the distant background you see a city reflected in the dusky purple lake, but with no actual city visible on the corresponding land above it (I’ll leave that for the lore buffs to decrypt). In some areas, giant statues stand in pained poses against distant mountains, while in another place you’ll suddenly come upon the disturbing sight of a giant man weeping and trying to feed the baby in his arms using a stitched-on breast. Suffice to say the results are… milky.
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So visually, Blasphemous 2 remains very powerful, though by the extremely high standards set by the first game, I’ve found myself a little underwhelmed in some areas. Some returning enemies are inevitable, but it’s the boss designs that are really lacking here. It’s no secret thatI loved the original game’s bosses, and this sequel doesn’t utilise the background and foreground planes in the same creative way, with most battles simply taking place on the same 2D platformer plane as you.
There are some great duels here, make no mistake, but visually the designs are a bit more cartoony, with the giant skeleton Rademes having nothing on the original game’s Exhumed Archbishop, and no design having the nightmarish quality of the giant blindfolded baby held by a wicker ‘mum.’ The animations feel cheaper somehow, with larger enemies having an almost cardboard cutout quality to them that means they don’t feel nearly as lifelike as, say Our Lady of the Charred Visage, whose glinty eyes would follow your menacingly around the screen.
This lack of texture is something that extends to the story too which, while still enigmatic in that classic FromSoft way where you mainly learn the lore from item descriptions and obscure side-quests that are way easier to outright fail than complete, didn’t grip me as much this time out. Igetthat the working of the Miracle are obscure and unkind, but seeing variations of its punishments meted out for another 18 hours while the simple, pious people of the world remain as unwavering to its ways as ever grows a tad repetitious where in the base game it was novel. While ostensibly taking place in a different land (though with some overlapping areas, it seems), it does feel largely similar, and given the original game’s dabblings with the afterlife and other dimensions, it’s a shame they didn’t opt to explore these further.
With that said, on a base mechanical and visual level Blasphemous 2 is still one of the most satisfying and faithful manifestations of that Symphony-style exploration (with a fair bit more challenge) that I adore. I remain hopeful that, like with the first game, free content updates over the coming couple of years will flesh out the story, and perhaps finally give us the answers we’ve been seeking ever since we first encountered the Miracle back in 2019.
Like the Miracle itself, Blasphemous 2 giveth and it taketh away, and while I may question some of its ways there’s enough mechanical meat and narrative mystery here that I’ll be part of its ongoing pilgrimage.
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