Blasphemous is hands down one of the best souls-like games I’ve played, and I’ve played almost all the major ones. The art style is absolutely stunning, and the soundtrack is incredible, my personal favorite track is "Strife and Ruin's OST." I know how notorious those challenges are, and trust me, the music sticks in your head after countless deaths.

The combat is among the best you’ll find, parrying is snappy, and everything feels tight and responsive. The amount of content you get for the price is overwhelming in the best way.

Blasphemous has quickly become one of my all-time favorite souls-like games. If you enjoy this genre as much as I do, you’ll definitely adore this series.

Questionable design choices. I can only assume that the designer(s) intent was to create a "skill" based game, but it quickly devolves into monotonous and tedious game play. Why? Because every interaction is carefully crafted, yet constricts as there is rarely anyway to approach the situation differently. This design philosophy is found through out all aspects of the game. Expressiveness in the combat is essentially non-existent. A player starts to grok the game play and can't but help put it down. Worse yet this isn't a game one can put down and revisit because the restrictive nature necessitates memorization to confront each of its challenges. I stopped playing for a week only to be met with what I can only describe as one of the most frustrating play experiences I have ever encountered in a game.

Artificial difficulty is incredibly frustrating. The game will sometimes, especially in the endgame areas, freeze the player's momentum midway through a jump. From my experience, this seems to be utterly random, and unpredictable. Quite often, what this resulted in was me having to jump, and be prepared to turn back to the ledge if my momentum stalled. However, when this happens in the Mother of Mothers, where the jumps are too precise to allow this, I could only hope that the game would allow me to make the jump. When it was over an instant-death spike pit or bottomless pit, this meant that I would just die when the game wanted me to.

A very good game, just a shame that it chose to artificially inflate the difficulty with an unbearably frustrating mechanic.