I started playing Blasphemous and I'm not jazzed about it. It is literally exactly what I expected when I bought it, but right from the get go I've found it grating. So this game's supposed to be a Metroidvania based on Spanish Catholic (like Goya and cathedral gargoyles and shit) art in the same way that Castlevania was boo-haunted-house Frankenstein-and-Dracula land or that Bloodborne was boo-haunted-houe Frankenstein-and-Dracula-and-also-Lovecraft land and so on.
The thing about it is I just cannot for the life of me get into its stupid fucking lore. It just feels like they took a bunch of Catholic-sounding babble and flung it at a wall. Part of me second guesses that maybe I'm a moron and this gibberish is actually meaningful, but all I really get from this is that there's this grimdark schlock bullshit where some bint was so g u i l t y from her s i n (what'd she do? eat a baby?) that everybody's sins turned into scary monsters. You use "tears" as currency (are these, like, literal tears?!?!).
I hate this. And I'll give you a specific example of why ripping symbolism from a source mindlessly doesn't pay off. The main dude wears a helmet that's a metal capirote (the pointy hats that look like dunce caps and inspired Klan hats) that has this crown of thorns wound around it. So tell me, Blasphemous, what does this crown of thorns represent? What deep, emotional meaning exists behind this? Because I'll tell you what the Crown of Thorns, one of my favorite symbols, is in Christianity.
This dude comes along claiming he's his people's prophesied messiah. But where the prophecy seemed to call for a political leader, a classical Bronze Age warlord Chad hero that clubs people to death, this dude claims that his liberation is of an internal nature. He can't overturn the political situation of their subjugation to the forces of empire, but he can overturn their internal subjugation to the forces of sin. When he gets scooped up by the authorities the foreign occupation governor asks him, are you a king? And he insists, I am a king, but my kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my people would fight, but my kingdom is something over and beyond this earthly life. It is something more important rooted in a reality that is more real than reality.
The governor doesn't want to hurt him, but while this man isn't a military threat, he is in fact an even more dangerous threat to the regime than he ever could be as a rebel, because his utter indifference to the ruling powers, and his ability to see straight through their hypocritical pieties, makes him an existential threat to their legitimacy. So they have him murdered as a traitor, but before they do, one of the humiliations they attempt to place on him is to place a robe about him and a crown woven of rose bush thorns, something that will painfully dig into his head-skin and says, "Lookee here, this is your great King of Heaven," like if you plopped a Burger King crown on the local hobo and called them King of England. A crummy, sham mockery of his pretensions. And yet, through bearing this like an absolute badass, the Crown becomes something resplendent. You see a Crown of Thorns now and you think, "Holy fuck, that's metal" because of how it combines this stark symbol that combines humility, the dignified bearing of suffering and regality in one package. That Crown of Thorns (it could be a crown of barbed wire nowadays, or a crown of possum tails*, or whatever) has become a prize beyond the fanciest gold and jewels and glass because of what the man who wore it made it represent through the force of his iron will.
So what is it in Blasphemous? I don't fucking know, as far as I can tell, it's just bondage gear. Everything in the game is drenched in that clearly-Christian-but-not-too-Christian-to-either-offend-anyone-or-actually-say-anything sadomasochist grotesquery. It's to Metroidvania what Far Cry 5 was, with America's history of cults, with Ubislop. Empty. But Far Cry 5 also let you jump canyons in muscle cars and have a pet bear named Cheeseburger. I do like the enemy design. Shame it's in service of such a gay story.
*Crown of possum tails was a real thing, was the Crown of Tannasssy.
TLDR I hate Blasphemous because it isn't actually about Catholicism but wears Catholicism like a Buffalo Bill skinsuit.
