Amazing game overall, some feedback that maybe can help it to be even better

[Efore]

Dear The Game Kitchen devs,

I am writting this just after finishing the game (95% completed) with the good ending.
First of all, congratulations for such a great title. I played Blasphemous 1 on released and I loved it but, as you know, it was harsh on some edges. This release is miles ahead in terms of polish, delivery, and overall experience.
I have thought about giving some feedback on the bits that somehow stained my experience a little bit, but please keep in mind, these are just that: bits. In general, this is a solid 8.5/9 game, and it is worth every penny.

I won't be writing about known/game breeaking bugs. For those you are probably receiving hundreds of reports already. What I am going to list are (in my opinion, but maybe I am wrong) design choices.

I also happen to be a gamedev, so I will sort these by its difficulty to be implemented under my estimation, but knowing nothing about how the project itself, I might be wrong:

Easy to fix:

- Affliction/Guilt Explanation: the short prompt that appears as a tutorial screen the first time you are presented with this mechanic does not explains it properly (at least in Spanish). What you get by reading it, is that it works exactly as it worked on Blasphemous 1, but it does not. This made me think that my Fervor bar not recovering its original state, even after recovering al Guilt Pieces, was a bug instead of a mechanic. This should be a quick localization fix (maybe even it takes more time to come with the right words than actually implement the fix).

- Aubade to the Slepless Iron: this might be quite subjective, but I used it once in one of the "arenas" (the dying old lady) and said to me that never more. The spirit is too distracting to an already filled screen. In addition, it is drawn on top of other enemies, which opaques their movements. I even got to think he was another of these enemies, and tried to move away from it. Not sure about the solution here. Maybe reducing the alpha and adding some transparency would help in marking it as something the player do not need to mind.

- The Resonance Alchemical Time does not stop time for everything. The lightnings/beams and explosions of the last boss do not stop when using flasks. This might actually be a bug.

Somewhere in between:

- Stunlocked by enemies: it happened to me several times during my run, that after being pushed to a corner, the enemy will come to my position and start damaging me with contact damage from the very moment the Stand Up animation was finished.
In this position you are almost unable to jump/dash away because you are taking damage. Just by spamming those buttons could I escape some of those situations. When there are more than 1 enemy though... thats a sure death. It happened aswell in some bosses: since they are designed to attack your position, they will direct an attack that will hit you no matter what because the Standing Up animation is locking the input and there is no way to avoid it. These hits feel bad, unfair, and frustrating. Adding half a second (or 15/30 iframes) after the Stand up animation is finished could solve this problem.


Hard to Fix:

- Immaculatus's softlock: so, after finishing the game and not being 100% sure how the Immaculatus mechanic work, something that was rather clear is that the more Immaculatus you have, the more damage you take when being hit. And since this Immaculatus can only be reseted after paying... Is this not potentially a death loop problem? I mean: if for some reason you die a lot in a boss, and the Immaculatus keeps stacking... you will die even more, because every time you die, you will receive more damage... which makes you die more... and so on and so forth. Yes, you can pay for removing the stacks, but the more you pay, the higher the cost... The worse case scenario is a player that needs to farm low level areas to pay the confessor, because high level areas are already too damaging for them. Forced farming itself is already something tedious and bad, but this mechanic can potentially make it worse by forcing the player to farm in low level areas.

- Consistency on enemy attacks' telegraphy: The telegraphy of enemy attacks is all over the place. Some are well telegraphied, some are almost instantaneous. Some enemies have small warnings for when you are supposed to parry, some enemies dont. This even happens whithin the same type of enemies in a different variant (like those small guys with a dagger). Bosses do have wind up animations for when they are going to attack, but many of them are like 5 frames long, and the player has almost no time to react. This is specially frustrating with enemies that are clearly designed to be parried.

These are the most important things that came to mind while playing the game. As I said before, these are just side notes. The game is an authentic gem and the team should feel really proud of what they pulled off :)

[NoRest]

one bug ive encountered is with keybinds. the dash bind is swapped with prayer, prayer with special, and special with dash. and i cannot bind anything to my mouse which is how i played through b1 :p

[Iron Bacon]

Glad to see someone else mention that enemy telegraphy. It's pretty frustrating. Also the parry mechanic is slow as heck. I'm using Sarmiento & Centella which are supposed to be faster than the other two weapons, but the time between when you press the button and when the penitent one actually raises the weapons to parry is too long. I had no problems parrying in Blasphemous 1 and loved it, but in this one it seems like parrying has been nerfed by making it too slow, making the enemies have inconsistent telegraphy, and making a successful parry result in a long (both time and distance wise) knockback of the player character. A real bummer.

Lastly, there wasn't a good explanation of how/when you get Marks of Martyrdom beyond just acquiring them by killing enemies. Specific enemies? Certain numbers of each enemy? Every fourth new enemy? Nothing was really explained and it's frustrating because I have no idea if grinding is helpful or if I should focus on exploring for new areas, or fighting the same enemies over and over or what.

[orian34]

Originally posted by Iron Bacon:

Also the parry mechanic is slow as heck. I'm using Sarmiento & Centella which are supposed to be faster than the other two weapons, but the time between when you press the button and when the penitent one actually raises the weapons to parry is too long.

Lastly, there wasn't a good explanation of how/when you get Marks of Martyrdom beyond just acquiring them by killing enemies. Specific enemies? Certain numbers of each enemy? Every fourth new enemy? Nothing was really explained and it's frustrating because I have no idea if grinding is helpful or if I should focus on exploring for new areas, or fighting the same enemies over and over or what.

I'm confused, I played those too, and it felt almost instantaneous?

And for the marks, it's just as said, you get marks by killing more enemies, you can see the progress in the stats screen. It's pretty much an xp level up system. Grinding isn't necessary though, you can equip the beads to increase the rate and go through the game normally and reach the cap long before the final boss.


Now, I used the ghost spell mainly and it was very helpful, I don't see how you can mix it up with enemies, unless you fight ghosts I guess.

I do agree the corner stunlocking was rough, and I'd even say there's some input buffering backlog that can tend to happen and make me do moves I don't want because it remembers a key press from some seconds ago. It would almost always do the dash slash even unwanted.

[Iron Bacon]

Originally posted by orian34:

I'm confused, I played those too, and it felt almost instantaneous?

The number of frames it takes for the penitent one to raise the weapon for the parry are too many. In the first game the character arcs their weapon over their head so that it blocks the front of their face, while in this one they have to raise both weapons from their sides, partially crouch, and cross the weapons both in front of them. This makes me suspect that the new parry animation just requires more frames to complete than the previous one did, but it results in the parry being much slower than in the first game. I think they could afford to cut out some of the frames to speed up the animation without sacrificing much in the fluency of its look.

Originally posted by Orian34:

And for the marks, it's just as said, you get marks by killing more enemies, you can see the progress in the stats screen.

That's the problem though. They don't give any explanation about how the Marks of Martyrdom system works beyond just "kill enemies". For all the player knows the game could give Marks of Martyrdom after killing 10 of a particular enemy, or for killing 10 different enemies, or for killing 10 of any combination of enemies, be they same or different. There's no context given for how it works, exactly.

Originally posted by Orian34:

Now, I used the ghost spell mainly and it was very helpful, I don't see how you can mix it up with enemies, unless you fight ghosts I guess.

What's the ghost spell?

[orian34]

Originally posted by Iron Bacon:

What's the ghost spell?

Aubade of the sleepless iron.

For the rest, yeah that's fair.

[Washing Machine]

I just want the challenge rooms with enemy waves spawning to have longer animation to signal where the enemies spawn.

I hate how every time the enemies spawn in I have to take contact damage because they constantly spawn right on top of the player and instantly have an active hitbox that causes damage as they do, and even if I manage to not get slapped by that by some miracle, they start an attack immediately upon spawning in before I can even see what enemy type it is, so I still likely get hit by whatever thrust attack from the candlestick guys.