Firstly, the hours played is wrong because I've been playing offline on the SteamDeck and it messes up time recording on Steam for a lot of games. Really enjoyed the game right up to the battle with Benedicta of the Endless Orison where I hit a bug that broke the game.

Benedicta is supposed to drop a key that allows you to progress into the next part of the game after you beat her. I beat her with a tiny bit of health left. The screen turned to the blood silhouette that shows every time you beat a boss, and the game saved my progress. Then the blood silhouette disappeared, a projectile that Benedicta had launched before dying killed me and I was shown the death screen. When I respawned at the nearest altar the death screen was stuck constantly in the foreground making the game unplayable and forcing me to exit and restart. That has allowed me to play again, but I never got the key to enable me to progress. Benedicta is gone leaving me with no way to get it. As far as I can see that means I just have to start again from the beginning and I'm just not willing to do that, I spent a lot of time trawling the map looking for a way forward and getting collectibles. I really liked the game up to this point, but come on, this just shouldn't happen.

I'm also past the refund window of 2 hours, but I'm going to try anyway seeing as this is a technical problem.

It really feels like they lost what made the original Blasphemous a good game and just tried every single lame trick in the "Metroidvania Souls-like" book and just thought they could get away with being lazy. There's a major lack of consistency throughout the entire game, and many things feel like a massive downgrade from the first game.

-Nothing really has changed about the combat except for the fact that you now have 3 different weapons to choose from, all of which have different upgrade trees. They're fairly impactful when they want to be, but there's times where the numbers seem majorly scuffed. Like, suddenly you feel like you're doing absolutely no damage whatsoever no matter what you do. This has led to some frustratingly annoying sections where I've just had to walk away to avoid throwing my monitor out the window.

-Building on the damage numbers, I don't know what it is, but for some reason, these weapons feel great for the first 10 seconds of combat and then suddenly just fall off majorly out of nowhere. I don't understand if there's some hidden RNG that forces me to do less damage, but you can feel it the second it starts happening. It, so far, is the only reason that I've died to any of the boss enemies because suddenly they just won't take damage. And, no, they're not in the middle of any of their transitions when I'm attacking.

-Some areas are not well designed. There's too much nonsense in the foreground that obscures the actual "playing field", especially during the little arena sections where the game bombards you with waves of enemies. This will generally result in you dying because you couldn't see the 3 pixels in the corner that you hadn't killed yet that suddenly decide to hit you and knock out the rest of your health.

-Some of the platforming just feels bad. You can't see too far off the sides of the screen, and there are times where you'll have to make blind jumps on a timer and just hope that you make it. If not, sucks to be you because you'll lose a massive chunk of your health and have to try again if you don't outright die and have to walk all the way back to it.

There's also some sections that are just lame. They'll put big enemies on small platforms and throw spikes all over the place so that it's a guaranteed death if you get knocked off. Some of the combat arenas suffer from the same retardation.

-Checkpoints are whack, honestly. They're never near where you need to respawn to, so this leads to a lot of unnecessary, unwanted wandering back to where you died. And, trust me, you'll be walking back a lot with how whack the damage system seems to be in this game.

-The aforementioned arena areas all suck. They are the least inspired part of this game, and I'm fully convinced they were only added in to pad out the run time because I'm positive that most people who played the first game would breeze through this in less than a couple hours.

-The parry system is back, but it's broken. If you parry at the correct time, you'll still get the parry off, but if you're too close to the enemy, you'll get contact damage because it doesn't knock them back. This results in unnecessary damage.

-Enemy hitboxes are all over the place. You can be behind something and an attack that's facing the opposite direction can still hit you. Your weapon hitboxes are equally all over the place, with some weapons not being able to hit some enemies, even if they're right in front of you.

-While I like the new cutscenes, they DON'T fit into the game whatsoever. It's very jarring to go from the charming pixel look that the whole game has to being thrown into D budget animeland. It just didn't make sense and it's one of the many gripes I have with this game. You took the time to animate every cutscene in the first game in pixel-style, why change it for the second game?

Edit:

So, I kept playing, but I will not finish this game. It's just...Bad.

-I've noticed that things are WILDLY inconsistent. I bashed my head against a boss for almost an hour, kept dying, changed absolutely nothing, then breezed through in about 3 minutes. How does that work? I did absolutely nothing different. Did the boss suddenly decide to take more damage, or did I get some kind of hidden buff?

I joke about that, of course, the game is just wildly inconsistent, so you can do everything technically and mechanically right and still lose because the game just doesn't want you to win.

-The bosses that I've fought since I originally wrote my review all suck. They're just all over the place and are constantly spamming AOE attacks to force you to move back so you can never really get any damage in, which is just dumb game design. If you can't make a boss challenging other than just forcing it to spam AOE moves, remove it from your game or redesign it.

-Upgrade items are few and far between, so you're intentionally left weak for the better part of what I've played. Not enough healing flasks? Locked behind doors that you can't open until you have specific skills that don't show up for the next 3 hours. Flasks don't heal enough? Same BS. I played over half of the game with one rosary bead slot because it was never explained that you could upgrade to have more slots...But guess what? This is in a higher level area than you'll be ready for where most things will 1-2 shot you, so you'll never actually try to go in and find this woman because YOU'LL THINK THAT YOU SHOULDN'T BE THERE YET, BUT THE AREA DOESN'T GET ANY EASIER THE MORE YOU PROGRESS. IT'S GREAT GAME DESIGN, RIGHT?

-The weapon upgrades are equally useless and I find myself only ever using the sword because it's the only weapon that actually has a good balance of damage and speed. Equally, there's really nothing to upgrade your damage without forcing you to give up carving slots, which is just dumb when you may need your slots for other things. Why even HAVE the upgrade tree if it's just going to be useless moves or things that reduce my fervor use?

-Speaking of things that are inconsistent, the I-frames are completely busted. You can successfully I-frame through maybe half of the attacks in the game, but others are literally just roadblocks that will knock you back...Or maybe they'll knock you forward into the the enemies, because that's how getting hit works, right?

-Also, animation cancelling should be a thing. Every single souls-like to every exist since the dawn of the genre has animation cancelling to a certain point. Why is it that this is the only game that doesn't? It's also the only game the severely punishes you for NOT BEING ABLE TO ANIMATION CANCEL.

-The final boss is also an absolute slog. As someone below said, "he gives off 'OC DO NOT STEAL'" energy, and getting to him and actually having to fight him, I can see that now. He's whack, and nothing that you've fought up until this point has the absolutely stupid amount of tracking, speed, and just general damage output to prepare you for him. Do you like getting hit 3 times in a single frame of animation? Because, this ♥♥♥♥♥ certainly loves to spam this attack that shoots out projectiles, hits you with his sword, and then also gives you contact damage ontop of that because the best way to avoid it is to stay close to him.

This game is just BAD at every turn, only being redeemed by it's nice art style (until they flub that and throw it away because making the game's cutscenes into a D-rate anime was the easier and lazier option)

If there was any kind of consistency, it'd be great, but there isn't even a slight bit of it to be found in this game.

Just play the first one, and you'll thank yourself later.

It's a good game, don't get me wrong. But the first Blasphemous was better. The atmosphere, animation, and writing (plus some combat things like contact damage and parrying) felt like a step down compared to the first game, which is a shame, because the first game knocked it out of the park and I would've loved to see a continuation of that.

Also, the last boss guy, Evan-whatever, has big "OC do not steal" vibes and you cannot convince me otherwise.