Pixel Penance

I’ve spent more cumulative hours dying in Dark Souls than finishing some entire games. There’s something specific about that kind of consistent destruction - you either come out of it fundamentally changed, or you quit. The saying goes what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is obviously bullshit most of the time, but Dark Souls actually proved it could be true.

The Game Kitchen, a studio in Seville, took that feeling and compressed it into a pixel game. Blasphemous shouldn’t work - pixel art and that kind of relentless punishment feel like they belong in completely different genres - but Cvstodia, the world you move through, carries all the dread. Dark, religious, soaked in ritual and blood. You’re the Penitent One, basically the only survivor of something unspeakable, moving through this nightmare looking for something that might not exist.

The game is brutal. The controls feel wrong, like the game is actively resisting your attempts to play it. And the writing is dense - medieval Catholic horror dumped on you in long text blocks while you’re trying not to die. It’s almost like the whole thing is designed to frustrate you into quitting.

If that hasn’t turned you away, you might be the right person for this. If it has, go play Mario instead. Blasphemous is the kind of game that stopped existing for a while - the kind where punishment is the point, where it doesn’t apologize or hold your hand. It’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox. This is what I’ve been missing from games.