Anyway, I started playing Blasphemous and so far am enjoying it quite a bit. It's got a lovely Macabre 2d artstyle and some lovely music and the weird and disturbing world of Cvstodia AKA Fantasy Not-Spain is worth the price in itself. I do very much like their take on Evocative area names that games like Dark Souls helped either poplurize or establish. Even in the early game you get such interesting names as "Where the Olive Trees Wither", "The Wasteland of Buried Churches", "Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrow", Mountains of Endless Dusk" "Graveyard of the Peaks" and so on.
It's as a cryptic as a Souls game and it's all based around a fantastic, very dark version of Spanish Catholicism that's obsessed with Punishment, Penance and Martyrdom that feels like there's a lot of actual thought put into it. Basically at some point in the past the Grievous Miracle appeared in Cvstodia and made everyone's sins or virtues manifest physically on their bodies. For a lot of people this made them giants, monsters or both and what's worse is apparently most of them seem to feel they deserve this because of their sins. There's a big "God Works in Mysterious Ways" vibe here and thus, because God apparently did this(not said explicitly but heavily implied) they'd best be grateful for the punishment. As such, a lot of them seem to wallow in the misery of their altered and often monstrous conditions as just penance and punishment. Like if the world(or at least Cvstodia) became an eternal purgatory and everyone welcomed it.
It seems like it's not falling into the trap a lot of fantasy makes of "Oh, there's a Catholic Church like entity because it's a middle ages setting even though there's no fucking reason for this entity to exist and we don't' feel like worldbuilding how this would evolve in a world without christianity" or even worse, the NGE trap of "Use a lot of religious symbolism/words/phrases because it looks cool but none of it actually makes any sense if you think about it for more then 5 seconds". The game was made in Spain and is apparently heavily influenced by the local Andalusian culture and Catholicism and while I'm not Catholic, I know at least enough to feel like this is very much trying to evoke the same sense of mystery and ritual that IRL Catholicism does(as well as the theme of Guilt and Penance). I'm sure someone who knows more about it could tell me if and where I'm mistaken here. I did read some articles discussing the game from a religious POV and they were generally positive about it, somewhat to my suprise. One in particular more or less says "This is a world where religion rules all but there's no grace or forgiveness. No wonder it's akin to hell".
I'm also gonna point out I find it darkly amusing that when you die, instead of "You Died" you're presented with "EXEMPLARIS EXCOMVNICATIONIS". Especially in that, yes, in the context of a theocracy where being excommunicated is a very, very bad thing and being killed and excommunicated would be kicking you when you're down, to a modern day atheist outside of that context that's just "Oh no, I'm excommunicated. That sounds a bit less bad then getting murdered by freaky monsters". It's also a little bit more creative then "You Died".
It is fucking hard, both the combat, a sparsity of checkpoints/bonfires(in this game called Prie-dieu, a type of alter) and the fact there's a lot of platforming where it's easy to fall to your death or get knocked off a ledge by an attack. I've only made it the Snowy Peaks area and unlocked the first shortcut that goes back to the starting town and man I've died quite a few times just getting there. However, I've very much looking forward to following this weird and twisted path through a land where everyone is obsessed with their own misery and everything looks like sublime Renaissance artwork.