I played the first Blasphemous a good dozen times from start to end, and each of the DLCs included. It’s a souls-like metroidvania, though more the former than the latter. The game focused a lot on hard combat and obscure lore, while the exploration portion came up a distant third. It was all but impossible to hit the “true” ending without some sort of guide, or blind luck, as you needed to take a specific step at the midpoint to unlock it.

Blasphemous 2 takes every barb thrown it’s way and pivots to something different.

First the setting. You’re in Cvstodia, a land that’s run by a religion that worships The Miracle, an event/host/god that both demands worship and randomly punishes its adherents. It’s a world of gruesome and constant suffering, where everything is attributed to the will of The Miracle. If the worst nightmares of the Spanish Inquisition + Old Testament + Void of 40k all merged into one. It’s an absolutely fascinating setting. More please!

Combat now has 3 weapons that focus on damage, speed, and balance. They each come with a unique method of exploring (the core of the Metroidvania aspect), and their own skill tree. The ball & chain is slow and powerful, the largest range, with some unlocks that triple the damage output. It cannot block, but you can cancel out of attacks. The sword & dagger hits quickly, but you need to be in their armpits to get there. It can potentially deal crazy damage, and block attacks. Multiple enemies make it very hard to use, and the range is an issue with bosses. The balanced sword offers a nice middle ground of decent damage and the ability to block. However, its “special mode” prevents blocking (which makes me think this will be patched) , and provides only marginal damage improvements. It’s a tremendous defensive weapon.

Enemy variety is better than the first game, though the latter portion of this game has quite a few reskins. You’ll be attacked from multiple angles, with delays, making some battles incredibly hectic. At multiple points you’ll be locked in a room, forced to attack waves of enemies. This is arguably the most fun part of the game, depending on what tool you have in the belt. At no point did I ever feel that victory was out of my grasp.

Bosses are a mixed bag. The highs are in the art department and move variety, though most of them are much too “human like” and lack the vertical or size of a true boss fight. Many of them can feel cheesy (the dual fight in particular), until you get very accustomed to the dodge / i-frame mechanic. The difficulty is un-even, with some acting as walls, others I took out on first try with barely a scratch. The penultimate boss packs a hell of a punch.

Movement is smoother all across the board, with multiple traversal options unlocked throughout. The first game felt a bit like molasses, but here there’s a good flow around the fights, and most of the time with multiple enemies to deal with. This part is important, as the map is much less linear than expected, and has a metric ton of backtracking when you unlock more abilities. You’ll unlock shortcuts after difficult stretches, and eventually unlock the ability to fast travel. Map markers become your best friends. Exploration feels much less random here that the first.

Customization is simplified, and this is a good thing. You still have a rosary with beads you can swap for passive bonuses (e.g. more resistance, more money, etc..). Spell variety is “less” though unlocked earlier, meaning you’ll actually use them here on a consistent basis. Fervour Statues are a new piece, with slightly more powerful bonuses than beads, but come with a pairing feature for resonance. Pairing a statue that increases damage for the ball + chain, and one that does fire damage, gives you major fire attacks as a result. I will state plainly that it’s dumb that you need to experiment to find them and there is no record to tell you which you’ve found. I expect this to be addressed in a QoL patch.

Quests bear mention. There’s still no quest tracker and the hints can still be obtuse. Finding the “floor of screams and purple petals” isn’t much to go on. However, most quests are straightforward enough and the lore of an item gives you an idea of who needs what. You will be traversing the map multiple times to complete them, and the tail end quests give some tremendously useful rewards. The quests are more straightforward in general, but that’s a bar to trip over, not high praise.

Which gets me to the lore portion. The text/voice work is much better than the first game, and has much more clarity. Reading the lore of every item adds flavor rather than clear direction, with few exceptions. It’s still full of catholic imagery, and a “god” that punishes as often as it aids. The grotesque nature of everything permeates the world and makes it interesting. The first game expanded tremendously on the lore with each DLC, I’d expect as much here.

Blasphemous 2 pivots from almost pure combat to a more dense metroidvania, and I think it comes together quite well as a result. Nearly all the friction from the first game is addressed, which is frankly astounding for a sequel these days. The first game was quite rough around the edges, and the (free!) DLC helped flesh it all out. Blasphemous 2 doesn’t have those edges to start, and it’s ridiculously easy to get engrossed in the fluidity of it all. Well worth it.

A bus is a service that transports lots of things efficiently. For most, we think of public transport in a city. Engineers see this in designs. You can also consider a sea port where ships deliver products as a bus (though more like a logistics hub). Production games “succeed” on the concept of buses, as no logistical chain can scale without a bus.

The basics of a production chain are production –> distribution –> production. If you want iron bars, you need iron ore. If you’re going directly to the supplier, you are limited by their own production rate. If you need 500 ore per minute, and each miner creates 100 ore per minute, you need 5x distribution lanes. Everytime you increase production rates, then you need to create the entire distribution chain again. That doesn’t work at scale. What you’ll find instead are distribution centers that change it to production –> distribution –> storage –> distribution –> production, effectively turning the multiple branches into a sort of hourglass figure.

A production bus focuses on simplifying the distribution –> production portion, so that the same materials can be used in multiple production steps without adding more distribution. DSP has 9 items that can be crafted from stone, iron bars, iron cogs, circuit boards, and magnetic coils. I could run 45 (9×5) connections to build these items, or I could simply run 5 lanes and collect the material for 9 production stations. Clearly the latter is the better option. Add 3 more base items and you can produce another 15 or so items, making a slightly more complex bus of 8 items. This main bus allows you to produce almost every basic item (except motors) and get to the mid-game rather easily. My first playthrough I did not use a bus. It was pure spaghetti, with belts and machines running everywhere.

It bears note that production ratios matter at the initial stages of the game. 2 miners per node cluster, 6 smelters per line, and then the various bits and bobs (cogs, circuit boards, magnetic coils) to get the basic production bus going. Ratios do not matter at all past the mid-game, as you have ample storage options and tools to measure consumption.

Early to mid-game has a drone system that allows you to move items between locations without belts. This allows for quick injections of materials for unique production chains, like titanium alloy. Planetary logistics allow you to quickly ship across the planet in larger volumes, effectively allowing for “harvesting hubs”.

The mid-game moves from planetary construction, to solar system construction in that you need to distribute things between planets. The only way to do so is with planetary logistic centers, which are massive towers that take a ton of power to operate (and cargo ships). You’ll still need the production hub for basic materials, but scale starts to be a problem. When you need 3000 iron bars per minute, well, you’re going to need a production hub dedicated to that sole purpose. One planetary logistics takes in ore, sends it out to 50 smelters, who send the bars back to the tower. You can add more smelters and scale up as need be. You’ll eventually have a single planet crafting everything from dozens of towers, and hundreds of drones shipping things between them. It will look like a beehive, which is simply fascinating to just watch.

The late-game focuses on the actual Dyson Sphere, which requires a massive amount of material/power to produce. This creates multiple production chain roadblocks and scaling issues, and you end up with power issues. A single carrier rocket takes ~700 raw material to create, and you need thousands of them. Isolating bottlenecks, and then expanding production to get back onto the bus is the name of the game.

The end-game focuses on interstellar production, where entire planets are dedicated to single production chains. Entirely reasonable to have a planet with a few hundred smelters just making iron bars, which in turn will require a planet as a distribution hub collecting from the galaxy. The goal is to produce as much white science blocks as possible, which is required to unlock the infinite upgrades. Hitting even 100 white science per minute is a solid achievement, and aiming for 1000 is at another level.

It is entirely possible to get to the end game (4000 white science created) without leaving your starting planet, and running massive spaghetti monster belts. That was certainly my first playthrough. If you’re aiming for a “complete” Dyson Sphere, you can also stay on the starting planet, but you’ll end up terraforming a ton of it to get there. In both cases, a production bus is the only way you’ll get to that point. Putting it on a different planet, same system, has more to do with a blank canvas than anything else. If you want to run end-game, well, you’re in for a galactic level bus, with at least a dozen planets required to get the complete scale in order. I’ve only dipped my toe into that…wildly crazy space to be in.

My recent playthrough is just a tad over 60 hours, and that’s shy under 400 white science per hour. To get to 1000, I’d need to move towards dedicated planetary hubs (the current production planet is simply full), and that would need about double my current harvesting power, and a much different energy relay system. The good news is that blueprints allow MASSIVE time savings. If I did it the original way, that’s close to 10 hours of work to lay it out. With blueprints, which can be planet-sized, it would be closer to 2. Recall that setting up a nuclear power plant in Satisfactory was 20+ hours of effort and it still wasn’t working.

At some point I’ll get to true end game, but there’s Baldur’s Gate 3 calling me, as well as Blasphemous 2.