Good game and can makes you annoyed so hard ngl lol. Beware if you have short temper then this game is not for you lmao.
Manage to get full achievement and I'm proud of it because all of my suffering is paid off 😂.

10/10 will buy the second one later.

Divine art direction and atmosphere that I longed to appreciate further, but regrettably the controls are bad and the hit detection and platforming are clunky, so it plays like an alcoholic crane operator sleeping on the job and drooling all over the work interface.

I don't normally write reviews for games unless I've had the want to play the game for so long and when the time finally comes; the game ends up falling short.

The game being under the category "Metroidvania" is going to make me compare it to Metroid games regardless (mainly Zero Mission and Fusion). The only thing it really has that is similar to those games is the map/zone variety imo.

For starters, the controls are super clunky. Any game that has slight input lag, I always feel like it's gonna be a bad time. You can blame it on the game and figure that you just need to get use to the mechanics and how they expect you to play the game but I promise you a lot of the times you'll be trying to do one thing and it will feel like the game just cant keep up.

Other than that the game felt very unlinear. The occasional bosses and mini bosses made the game worth playing until it got to the point where I couldn't progress the story without doing some of the side quests which mainly sent me on a wild goose chase all over Cvstodia for about an hour or so until I reached a point in the story where I had to slay 3 enemies that are found in different zones of the world and make it back to a room without dying.

After what felt like forever going back and forth finding key items for side quests(because your character never gets REAL bonus movement other then the arbitrary dodge/dash you're forced to spam to speed up the gameplay), I have to AGAIN go back and forth between zones to slay enemies just to progress the story? And on top of that; I don't believe its ever really explained what has to be done in half the zones in order to know what to do to progress the story. You apparently NEED to buy the items from the shops even though they felt like optional equipment (feels kind of lame to be forced to buy key items instead of earning them through story progression). Plus the shops aren't marked on the map and there's only 3 shops with different items at each shop. At least in Zero Mission/Fusion (from what i can remember) they have a map legend and key locations/point of interests are marked/highlighted on the map for you so you know where you need to head to next.

Maybe the game wants you to use the marker system yourself to make it easier for you but again, no real gameplay supporting mechanics are explained and you're forced to learn the Legend yourself. Which sure; is easy since they correlate with what POI exists in the room but them not automatically marking certain NPCs that are required to progress the story as a part of the Legend makes you backtrack a lot. And I mean A LOT. and backtracking (when not part of the progression) can feel so slow, dull, and boring when you have no powers/abilities that help you traverse zones faster.

Yup. In my 12 or so hours that I played, i thought surely - eventually- I'd get some sort of movement bonus. Double jump, wall jump, grapple hook, run speed boost. Nothing.
The lackluster mobility is what really started to make the game slow down for me. You're getting stronger, your health is going up, your sword's power is increasing, but your body/movement is at its peak from since the start of the game.

In Zero Mission/Fusion, Samus gets PERMANENT power-up bonuses as you progress the story. In Blasphemous, you have equip/unequip relics to reach parts of the zones that otherwise are not reachable.
An easier option would have been to gain armor that grants permanent power-ups that the relics offer. For me, being forced to choose what relics I HAVE TO HAVE equipped in order to move through the story makes me feel like my character is only as strong as the relics I have equipped and that I'm not getting stronger with the further I progress.

I haven't really touched on the combat. I recommend looking at other users' comments that have negative feedback. Almost every single one I read had the same reasoning to which I agree. My only gripe that I didn't see anyone mention is that the only real combat progression there is is that you get an extra hit/finisher on your ground combo. Half the enemies/bosses either have too low health, revenge value, or don't get stunned long enough for you to achieve a full combo/finisher. For me, I want to do these combo/finishers as they're the only real abilities you get but as I try to do them each time I'm forced to take massive damage as there's no real value from achieving the combo/finisher. It got to the point where it felt useless to get more combo/finishers because there wouldn't be a chance to actually see the effect of them.

It's unfortunate because I really wanted to like and finish this game and move on to the next but after playing it for a while I started to lose interest in finishing. I know I compared it to the Metroid games a lot and I know its not a Metroid game but there's a reason the category Metroidvania exists just as much as Rogue-like, Souls-like exists.