VIDEO GAME REVIEW: BLASPHEMOUS

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Since the ashen husks of video game company Konami's beloved -but criminally abused and neglected- franchises have begun to cool in the post-apocalyptic breeze, a number of independent video game developers have rushed in to fill the voids left in their wake.
 
Appetite for the likes of Castelvania, Contra/Probotector and, of course, Silent Hill (sob) is still acute, despite Konami's inablity or unwillingness to do anything with these franchises.
 
As such, independent video game creators (some of them partially formed from Konami's own much-abused ex-staff) have taken it upon themselves to feed that desire, creating numerous sub-genres within the market that Konami once monopolised.

 
Not least amongst these sub-genres is the so-called Metroidvania, the term a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, refering to that peculiar species of action-platformer begun with Castelvania: Symphony of the Night, which blends the gothic horror stylings and action platforming of the latter with the exploration and upgrade elements of the former.
 
Unambiguously successful, the sub-genre has spawned any number of sequels, immitators and entirely new franchises, but was, up until relatively recently, dominated by the Castelvania franchise.
 
That is, until Konami simply stopped producing the damn games.
 
As a result of that lack, the independent scene has exploded with the likes of Axiom Verge, a fantastic science fiction game that blends elements of the original Metroid with a much a more H.R. Giger-eseque, surreal horror aesthetic, Bloodstained, a game which is essentially Castelvania in all but name (even boasting one of Castelvania's lead creators) and Hollow Knight, a slightly more cartoony, innocent-looking adventure but which nevertheless retains all of the action and exploration characteristic of the genre.
 
Then, recently, a surprise entry; a Kickstarter campaign made good; a work that came out of nowhere, afflicting us with unexpected but welcome trauma:
 
The horrific, disturbing, painterly masterpiece that is Blasphemous.
 
Blasphemous is a game that distinguishes itself from its conemptoraries not in design or mechanics or composition; in all of those areas, it is entirely derivative. There is nothing here that we haven't seen from Metroidvania titles before. The basic game mechanics are old-fashioned platforming and combat; the player explores areas by navigating series of platforms and traps and monsters, learning how to deal with certain layouts and placements as they go, collecting various items and upgrades, acquiring new powers, spells (“songs,” in this instance) and everything, everything, everything that players of Metroidvania titles will be familiar with. No one playing this will be surprised by any particular mechanic or mode of play; the game is so utterly familiar, the player hardly even needs to read any kind of instructions, pay attention to on-screen hints or whatever. We already know; it's embedded in our muscle memory and has been since time out of mind.
 
This game is unabashedly, unashamedly, Super Metroid, Symphony of the Night, Harmony of Dissonance and the rest. It makes absolutely no bones about the fact. 

 
 
However, it also blends certain other influences that one might not necessarily expect:
 
The game is unforgiving. Vicious, at times, its enemy placement, its tricks and traps, the manner in which it forces the player to stop and consider how to approach certain situations, highly redolent of From Software's Dark Souls and Bloodborne, both titles that the game resembles in other key ways as well:
 
As in those games, lore and back mythology is not specifically communicated. There is very little exposition or clear communication in the post-apocalyptic, gothic fantasy setting of Custodia: rather, like Lordran, Drangleic, Lothric and Yharnam before it, the player must piece together particular interpretations of what might be occuring from implication and inference. There is a swathe of written lore in this game, largely centring on the various items and relics that the player can pick up, all of which come with their own oblique, often quite abstract tale that fleshes out the world, that hints at a rich and florrid back-history, but which is never specifically detailed or constricted by particular accounts.
 
Again, this is a form of storytelling that is particular to the Dark Souls and Bloodborne games, and one that I personally adore; it obliges the player to engage with the world in a manner that simply providing absolute background and mythology does not; players must immerse themselves to some degree in the sumptuous, blood-sodden richness of Custodia, they must come to understand the hideously masochistic, self-flagellating ethos of this setting in a way that players of many other Metroidvania titles simply don't. There is a sincere and extremely detailed story here; one that, as in Dark Souls, has largely already occurred when the player takes their first steps; this is the aftermath of world-shaking, epoch-making events. We, as the faceless, nameless Penitent One, may be the cypher for some new age, but the mechanisms have already begun turning without us. That is made very particular from our earliest steps: the world of Custodia is a broken and degenerate one, filled with the ruins of ancient temples and cities and shrines, with the lunatic, wandering remnants of ancient cults and communities that no longer have any kind of coherent philosophy or presence within the world. This is desolation in its sincerest form; the decay not only of physical civilisation, but of the ideologies that inform it.
 
Given that the game is, at base, a 2D action adventure in a style that has been around for over two decades, to achieve this level of implied background, of aesthetic and atmospheric storytelling, is nothing short of miraculous (if you'll pardon the pun).
 
Key to that mythology is a nebulous and deliberately oblique notion known only as The Miracle. As to what The Miracle actually is, was or implies, that depends on who you talk to in Custodia, and even then, the notion remains ill-defined. What is known is that The Miracle occurred at some point in Custodia's past and redefined its every culture, its politics, its structure. In that, it's highly redolent of Gwyn's kindling of The First Flame in Dark Souls; a metaphysical event that is highly mysterious, that reorients reality itself with its profundity. Here, The Miracle is what inspires Custodia's obsession with suffering, pennance and self-mortification. Later in the game, the player is given the story of where The Miracle derives from, which then makes some of the imagery in the game even more profound and fascinating to interpret. 

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The game distinguishes itself not through how it plays or how it's structured, but by how it feels. Whilst it is wholly derivative in terms of mechanics, design etc, in terms of its ethos and atmosphere, it's a wonderfully bleak, cruel, desolate experience that drawers a world teetering on the edge of metaphysical collapse, a world that has been devolving and disintegrating for perhaps centuries when The Penitent One finally awakens and sets out on his journey.
 
From the first instance, the most striking element of the game is its art design. Deriving influences from sources as diverse as certain forms of Renaissance and medieval art, Catholic tradition, the Crusades, witch trials, The Spanish Inquisition, The Burning Times, horror art, cinema and literature, the game is aesthetically quite unlike anything that has ever been seen in the medium before. 

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Custodia is a world whose sincere metaphysics revolves around pain, the beauty of suffering and self-mortification. Its every culture, its every creed, its every inhabitant is built around certain notions of enshrined suffering: some churches, for example, are derived from “saints” or prophets who exhibited particular forms of mutilation (either self-inflicted or divinely administered), and so seek to emulate that mutilation in their own bodies (the wonderfully named “Convent of Our Lady of the Charred Visage” is a key example). Through pain, through pennance, the peoples of this world believe they can achieve a kind of cleanliness, but also a form of transcendence. Some, such as the Genuflectors, ensure that they are always half-crippled and bent double by binding their arms behind their backs and tying weights to their hair and beards, dragging their heads down towards the ground. Every enemy you'll encounter in the game are members of particular cults that have afflicted themselves with certain forms of suffering, from scarred and naked women who have bound themselves to great chunks of holy sepulchres that they drag around on their backs to men, women and children who have buried themselves in the earth, erupting only to claw and bite at The Penitent One as he passes. No species or form of suffering, humiliation or pennance has been ignored, here; the game designers have taken every pain (a-ha) to ensure that the denizens of Custodia exhibit suffering elaborate enough to make the likes of Francisco de Goya, Dante or Clive Barker baulk.
 
Many of these entities, certainly the larger and more elaborate ones, are derived from specific pieces of art or characters in particular paintings by the likes of Bosch, Goya and numerous others. It is quite spectacular to witness strange and elaborate entities that have only ever been static in paint and canvas suddenly brought to life. Disturbing imagery and wholly unpleasant scenes abound throughout; nothing here is about salvation from pain or avoiding humiliation, but accruing and emphasising it. The Penitent One is not some saviour intent on purging Custodia of its ills. If anything, he is a facilitator of them, slaughtering his way through the land, murdering great saints and divine entities until he finally makes his way to the one who presides over every church, every cult and mystery: Escribar, the Keeper of the Divine Miracle and the host of all suffering in Custodia.
 
Interestingly, as in so many of its influences, the game exercises a certain ambiguity in this regard: this isn't a tale of “good versus evil” or of salvation from damnation: Escribar is not an antagonist in the traditional sense. He does nothing vastly evil or untoward regarding The Penitent One or the rest of Custodia. Rather, it is suggested that The Penitent One might be the key to his final salvation; the means by which the man's ancient suffering might be undone and another set in his place. 

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Whether the player succeeds in this largely depends on which ending they achieve; there are two endings to the game, both of which are entirely bleak, but one of which -the secret “good” ending- suggests a potential continuation of the story, another cycle in the mythology (and, of course, a sequel somewhere in the future).
 
This is something that characterises the game quite distinctily: unusually for a Metroidvania title, there are certain story arcs that are possible to miss, permanently unravel or not achieve in time. There's also a vast swell of secrets within Custodia, hidden characters and relics, recesses and chambers, that can only be accessed under certain esoteric conditions, but that reveal certain elements of the game and its background that help to enhance the experience even further.
 
It's a genuine, sprawling adventure that oblgies the player to explore every nook and cranny, to listen to suggestions and oblique scraps of communication that might metaphorically or tangentially hint at what they have to do or where they have to go.
 
As a result of that obliqueness, there are times when it's very easy to hit a wall and flail around directionless, which can be extremely frustrating, especially if the player is forced to navigate the same gauntlets multiple times, dying again and again to traps, enemies etc.
 
However, the world of Custodia and its many highly inventive environs are so painterly in their beauty, so suffused with atmosphere, that, for the most part, navigating it is an absolute joy. There are numerous times throughout the game in which the player will stop in awe at the jaw-dropping beauty the designers have managed to render in what is, essentially, an extremely limited graphical style. By aping the art traditions from which they derive inspiration, the creators have managed to make every screen a painting in and of itself.
 
Take, for example, a scene towards the end of the game, in which The Penitent One emerges on the battlements of a great cathedral that dominates much of the landscape. Here, the game suddenly switches to subdued silhouettes and dusky shadings, the sky and horizon marked in the most exquisite detail whilst the foreground and creatures upon it are rendered entirely in shadow. The sequence lasts for only a couple of screens but is utterly breathtaking in its brilliance.
 
A similar instance occurs when the player arrives on the edges of a realm known as Jondo, which is an entire plain that consists of a gigantic, inverted bell driven into the heart of a mountain range. As the player approaches Jondo, they can see the inverse curve of the great bell in the background like the bizarrely curving sides of some great valley. Traversing the area provides the player a perspective on the great bell which spans several screens and plunges down to become its own subterranean arena. The sheer sense of scale elicited, the visual design of the area, is nothing short of incredible, echoing some of the more elaborate architectural designs of the game's influences Dark Souls and Bloodborne (doubly remarkable, given that this game lacks an entire third dimension that those two franchises boast). 

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I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the imagery in this game is wholly and unambiguously disturbing. Deriving from a small, independent video game company, the game has no compunctions about offending or upsetting with its imagery, the result being depictions of pain, mortification, mutilation and outright suffering that are often highly distressing -and rather grotesque- to behold. The atmosphere of the game is extremely dour, its expanse eliciting an almost depressive quality, its metaphysics based entirely upon the notion of self abuse and mortification to achieve a degree of enlightenment. Thus, the game does incorporate images of profound and elaborate torture, bodily mutilation, self-harm, humiliation and abuse which some players may find problematic.
 
In terms of its technical faults, being a Metroidvania title, it incorporates all of the failings innate to that sub-genre, including a great deal of back-tracking through previously explored areas (not a fault in my perceptions, but one that other players have certainly commented on), occasional difficulty in path-finding and numerous timing-errors, platforming problems, issues with enemy placement and character responsiveness etc. Certainly some of the more elaborate platforming gauntlets feel somewhat out of place in Custodia, and also given that The Penitent One is functionally different from other protagonists in the sub-genre: whereas the likes of Symphony of the Night's Alucard is floaty and extremely light to play, The Penitent One is deliberately awkward and heavy, which makes some of the more precise platforming moments irritating. There are also certain sections of the game that are rife with glitches, most notably certain boss encounters that perhaps incorporate too many gimmicks and unusual mechanics than is good for the game engine.
 
The game is also extremely hard for a game of its type, perhaps one of the longest and most difficult on the market thus far, its difficulty level aping some of the Dark Souls titles, which may be off-putting to players seeking a more casual or mainstream experience.
 
But, for those who find themselves drawn by atmosphere, compelled by rich back-mythology and elaborately painted worlds, there is more than enough to bleakly enchant here, sufficiently so that a sequel is now inevitable, Blasphemous perhaps rising to fill the hollow where Castlevania itself once sat.