A couple of years ago, a close friend and trophy-hunting brother, recommended a game to me, knowing my love for Soulslikes and Metroidvanias. He was sure I’d enjoy “Blasphemous”—a brutal, beautifully grotesque world dripping with Catholic-inspired religious iconography and macabre artistry. And he was right; I loved it. Fast forward to late last year, when the developers released a sequel. I wish-listed “Blasphemous 2” and promptly forgot about it, getting wrapped other in other bigger releases, but recently, I felt the pull back to Custodia, eager to once again take up the title of the Penitent One and earn the Platinum trophy. So how challenging was my journey through sin, and how did it hold up to the original, let’s find out.
In “Blasphemous 2,” you reprise your role as the Penitent One, a silent warrior with an impressively, imposing pointy hat. Set millennia after the events of the first game, the Grievous Miracle—an unknowable, godlike force that plagued the first game—has returned, and it’s up to you to end it once again. True to Metroidvania form, you’ll be platforming, hunting secrets, and exsanguinating countless twisted creatures along the way.
When it comes to the massacring of your foes, Blasphemous 2 is a nice improvement on the first game. When you first start the game, and you awake from your coffin, you are given a choice of three weapons, a slow heavy-hitting ball on a chain called Veredicto, the lightning-fast but less impactful rapier and dagger combo of Sarmiento and Centella, or the sword that sits in between the two, Ruego Alba.
These weapons all have individual upgrade trees and different styles of play, and although you start with only the one you chose at the start of the game, you quickly unlock the remaining two as you progress through the game’s dungeons. This is one of the biggest improvements Blasphemous 2 has over its predecessor, and that is giving you more options. Once you have found the remaining weapons you can cycle between them with a press of a button. Although they don’t really combo together, the way something like Devil May Cry lets you, it does give you a lot of freedom in how you tackle a boss. If a boss is moving around a lot, then switching to the Veredicto with its increased range might be the way forward, switching between weapons to maximise your damage, between dodges and looking for opportunities to strike back feels really rewarding once you get the hang of it.
You also have spells that you can cast in battle two, and these fall into two categories. The first of these are chants, and they are longer spells that take a short time to cast and can be interrupted. These do more damage but often require a riskier approach, or waiting until the enemy has stood still for a second. The other type are Quick Verses, which are instant cast but offer less damaging effects in return. There are a ton of these in the game that do different things, and you can have one of each set at any time. It is a brilliant thing to offer these options, and they are fun to use, it is just a shame that I rarely felt incentivised to use the Chants over the Quick Verses. It always felt like the better option was to use the less costly and quicker spells and follow that up with weapon strikes. I did see when looking through a trophy guide that there used to be an easy way to kill some of the end-game bosses with a spell that stopped time for a while, and I wonder if the developers nerfing your mana, called Fervour, to combat this issue maybe went a bit too far in the opposite direction.
The last things the Penitent One has at their disposal are your equippables. Most of these are Rosary Beads, which you start only being able to have one equipped. You do unlock more as you progress, by finding hidden items. These beads all offer different defensive bonuses to the varying damage types the enemies can use and are fairly simple to understand. The other, more interesting option are the Altarpieces. These are small wooden statues you can equip that offer diverse small boosts. These effects include boosting damage to one of your weapons, increasing your healing flask potency, or boosting the damage from your prayers. By the end of the game, you can unlock 8 of these slots and they are the main kind of build crafting the game offers. What makes these so useful though, are the Resonance effects. The Altar these pieces are equipped to, when fully upgraded have 8 slots, split into 4 pairs, and when you equip specific statuettes in a pair, they will offer a bonus effect called a Resonance. These can be simple upgrades, like a stacking bonus to a particular weapon’s damage on top of the bonus you already get for the statue, too many more exciting offerings like creating small bolts of lightning around you when you dodge or massively boosting your damage if your Guilt level is high, but again despite there being so many combinations and resonances you could get, it felt like some were so good you definitely should use them, and others were so underwhelming they felt like trap options.
The feeling of having many options, but only one of them being the right one, was actually something that I started feeling pretty early on in the game. When I got to pick my weapon at the beginning, I picked the giant flail, Veredicto. This weapon was slow but did the most damage and had the longest reach. It can also be set on fire for extra damage and regenerates your Fervor when you hit things with it. It is very cool. After unlocking the other two weapons though, it felt like they were never quite good enough to keep up with my flaming flail, and when I was struggling with an enemy or boss using one of the other weapons, I would just switch back and the problem would go away. It wasn’t until much later in the upgrade trees that I started to feel the benefits of the other weapons. Ruego Alba is an aerial combo machine and actually overtook Veredicto as my go-to weapon for flying enemies. Sarmiento and Centella went from feeling weak and unhelpful to being my main weapon of choice against the slower enemies. Maybe I would have felt differently if I had started with one of the other weapons but I feel like maybe some of the upgrades should have been available straight away to make the other two weapons, particularly Sarmiento, feel better.
The weapons are not just tools for punishing sinners however, oh no. They are also a core part of the way the game deals with traversal, and this was something I really enjoyed about Blasphemous 2. As you progress through the game, the Penitent one unlocks a handful of traversal upgrades, typical to Metroidvanias. A double jump, an aerial dash, the ability to cling to walls that sort of thing. And like Blasphemous 1, the sequel uses these abilities to great effect to provide platforming puzzles and challenges but the addition of obstacles that can only be breached by certain weapons adds a lot to these moments. These obstacles are met pretty early on too, and depending on the weapon you started with, can change certain things about the route you take through the game.
Obviously, main pathways are blocked by large gaps too far to jump over, or high walls with no way to climb them, to stop you from getting too far ahead of yourself, but you may find secrets you can get early if you had chosen Sarmiento, which lets you teleport a small distance when you strike statues of angels holding mirrors, instead of Veredicto. As you progress the game hides things behind combinations of these too. You may need to hit a bell with Veredicto which creates a platform for you to jump up to reach a teleporting mirror with Sarmiento and then switch to Ruego Alba to do a slam down destroying a cursed wall. The platforming in Blasphemous 2 never felt particularly challenging or punishing, often the cost of failure just being having to walk back to the start and try again rather than dying or something, but it was always fun when you had to combine all the abilities you had obtained to find a hidden Cherub or spell.
One of my favourite things about Blasphemous, and Blasphemous 2 is how it looks. The pixel art is gorgeous and the look and feel of the world you move through is so detailed and twisted. The locales are full of ruin and decay, and the enemies that stand in your way are monstrous and beautifully animated. The NPCs, especially the ones that offer you sidequests are grotesque twisted creatures, malformed by the blessings of the great Miracle, and the Bosses, oh the bosses range from the beautiful to the horrific. While I don’t think the bosses ever hit the highs of some of Blasphemous 1’s bosses, like Our Lady of Charred Visage, or Exposito, there are some incredible designs in this game. My favourites were Benedicta of the Endless Orison and Afilaor. These were not the fights I had the most trouble with, but they were the fights that I thought had the coolest mechanics or appearances.
Although I did struggle against some of the bosses, with some taking me a few hours to beat, the rest of the game felt, surprisingly forgiving. Unlike other souls likes, you don’t lose currency if you die. You gain guilt instead, dropping a small ghostly visage of the penitent one where you fell. This guilt reduces your Fervour bar, limiting your ability to cast Chants and Verses. You gain most of this back if you pick up your ghost, but like in any good catholic, some guilt remains. Die too often and your Fervour bar will shrink to an unusable degree. This can be cleared by a priest in the hub area, The City of the Blessed Name, and it can cost a lot of the game’s currency to clear but even with this detriment, it never really felt like it was getting in your way. If you are taking your time to search areas for the upgrades, and getting to grips with the different systems like the Altarpieces and beads, you can become quite powerful pretty early on, so a lack of Fervor for spells isn’t really a huge negative. It’s not a problem at all really but I think it’s worth mentioning. The penultimate boss was a pretty huge difficulty spike for me though, and took me a long time to learn to beat, so there is some challenge to be had.
The trophy list itself is also not that challenging. To earn the Platinum Trophy “The Penitent Two” you will have to search every nook and cranny of Cvstodia to find everything.
Obviously, you will need to fight every single boss, kill every regular enemy and get 100% exploration of the map. You will also need to fully upgrade every weapon.
As you explore and fight you will earn a currency called Marks of Martyrdom. To unlock every Altarpiece Slot and weapon upgrade, you will need to find all 116 Marks. 40 of these are earned from killing enemies, like little level-up rewards, and 25 are earned from boss fights. The remaining are hidden out in the world and are the most numerous of the collectables you need to find.
There are also a ton of other collectables to find. There are 33 cherubs. 10 hidden symbols, 5 sleeping girls and 7 Cobijadas. There are also 4 Rosary knots to find to increase your bead capacity, and the 27 Rosary Beads themselves. There are 36 Altarpieces to find, and 17 items that will upgrade your Health, Fervor, Healing Flasks and their potency. Lastly, there are 9 Chants and 8 Quick Verses.
Its a lot of things to find but that is usually a good sign of a Metroidvania, and nothing in Blasphemous 2 is actually missable. All of these items come from a combination of exploration and finding them in the world, buying them from shops, or completing NPC quest lines. The only unusual one is the hidden symbols. These 10 symbols are usually built into the scenery and look like the angular figure 8 symbol that Blasphemous uses as an autosave icon. If you see one of these in the background you will need to equip and use the Chant, Chime of the Twisted one. This will make the symbol glow and become active. Finding all 10 will not only get you the trophy but a ton of the in-game currency to help you buy all of the items you will need from the various shops, and clear your Guilt if you die too much.
There are some miscellaneous trophies to look out for on your travels like Twisted is the Path of the Miracle, where you need to find the warped tree in the Mother of Mothers area and listen to its whispering by standing in front of it until the trophy pops. You also have to ring a bell with Veredicto 12 times. These can be any of the bells that the flail can activate just has to be the same one 12 times. There is also a quite lengthy sidequest to lift a curse that gets put on you, for the trophy A Leap of Faith. You start this by finding a letter in a hidden room in the Streets of Wake, reading the letter curses you, but gives you clues to follow the author’s journey. Each clue leads to another letter, with another hint inside. Follow these to the end and you will earn of the game’s more powerful Chants.
There are a few combat-related trophies too, killing 300 enemies with each weapon and performing executions on 50 enemies being the simplest ones. The sleeping women you can find throughout the game, unlock combat challenges in a room within the Streets of Wake, and you need to complete all of these.
There are two trophies that are particularly challenging, however. The first is a speed run trophy, for reaching the Sentinel of the Emery boss within 30 minutes called A Sharp Rendevous. There is a knack to this, where you rush straight to the boss room only fighting the first boss and utilising tactical dying to teleport back to the hub area. You essentially just sprint through the first main three areas, picking up the first power-up, wall climbing, and the two weapons you didn’t pick initially. Then rushing straight down to the Emery Boss. I thought this was going to be a lot harder than it was but I got it on my first attempt.
The second, and the one that took me the longest to earn, is Flawless Penance. This is for beating any boss in the game, except the first one, without taking any damage. This trophy took me hours of practising and so many deaths. I think the boss you choose to do it on will be down to personal preference and your own playstyle. I chose to attempt it with the boss Svsona. This boss moves slowly and mostly with ranged lasers or lightning balls, so it seemed like one of the easier ones to go for and it was also the one recommended in a couple of trophy guides due to its relative ease. It took me hours of attempts before I finally managed it but it was a fun experience learning a boss’s moveset so completely. The trophy guide I read had some suggestions about using a specific chant, that stops time for a short period. This was one of the chants that has been nerfed by the developers though, so although it is useful, it is not boss-breaking and makes the challenge a fair bit harder than the trophy guide makes out.
The actual best boss to try it on, however, is the last one. When you have beaten him the first time, you are put back outside the boss room at the save point and can infinitely retry the boss. He is also, surprisingly easy compared to the monster that was the boss directly before him. If I had known how simple the final boss was, I probably would have tried to get the trophy on him instead.
The last trophies to be aware of, are the fact that Blasphemous 2 has multiple endings. One of these is the default, but the other requires solving a puzzle and some work. As you go around exploring and completing sidequests, you will find 4 of the Altarpieces that look a little bit different, in that they have gold on them instead of being all wood. These 4 need to be slotted in specific places in your Altar and then taken to the Chapel of the 5 Doves, to a door leading right that has been locked previously, opposite the door to the last area. When you open this door, there will be an option to sacrifice the altarpieces to a small bonfire. Doing this will get you a key item, and when you return to the last boss room and go to fight the final boss, you are given the option to use it. Use the item and you will get the true ending.
There are a ton of secrets to find in Blasphemous 2, but despite this, even with all my attempts to beat the boss without getting hit, it still only took me 34 hours to get the Platinum Trophy, and it was 34 hours I had a lot of fun with. When comparing it with the original though, it feels like there was a small design shift in between the games. Blasphemous was an action-platformer, that leaned more on the soul’s formula, punishing gameplay and combat being the main focus. Blasphemous 2, heads more in the other direction, focusing more on the platforming, more Metroidvania than Souls-like, and its not to say its a bad thing by any stretch, just a difference in design choice, and it honestly leaves me unsure of which one I prefer, so my advice would be, play them both. I did feel however, like there was a step down from the first one in the atmosphere and lore, feeling less bleak and macabre.
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