The souls-like metroidvania world of Blasphemous 2 dropped this week and it's already doing pretty dang well, with a peak player count of nearly 10,000 tripling the first game's top pop number. Blasphemous got a lot of praise for its twisted, dark-fantasy adaptation of the strange and fascinating world of Spanish Catholicism, with developers The Game Kitchen based as they are in Seville, Spain.
Blasphemous 2 builds on the prior game with a far larger, deeper, and richer to explore non-linear world. The combat is generally sharper, and the new weapons and skills to learn are more customizable to your personal likes. Early positive player reviews cite those reasons, though some rate the worldbuilding writing in this second game below the first. Either way as of press time it has 91% positive player reviews out of 1,163 reviews on Steam.
"The Heart in the sky heralded the return of The Miracle and foretold the birth of a new miracle child," is a hard pitch if you, like me, enjoy cryptic pseudo-fantasy nonsense.
PC Gamer's Robert Jones got his hands on Blasphemous 2 earlier this year, and his takeaway was pretty positive. "At no point during my gameplay session was I not, almost oppressively, assaulted by some sort of often corrupted Christian iconography or imagery, which The Game Kitchen has clearly had plenty of fun with when it comes round to designing levels, characters, and specifically bosses," he said, before noting that it was well on the way to being another cult classic of gaming.
https://www.pcgamer.com/freaky-visuals-and-pixel-perfect-metroidvania-gameplay-make-the-second-outing-of-the-penitent-one-a-cult-classic-in-the-making/
You can find more about Blasphemous 2 on Blasphemous2game.com. You can find it for sale on Epic, GOG, and Steam, where it retails for about $30. You can also get it in a discounted bundle with the first game.
