This was a weird one for me. I started this game back in february and I played it for about 2 hours combined within a week or so - ended up dropping/postponing it for another time. This was probably a result of reading that the gameplay is trash prior to starting the game.

Fastforward to August's "Unfinished Business" monthly theme, I decide to give this game another shot - the result? I play another 20 hours within 3 days and end up beating the game - I was absolutely hooked. Looking past its gameplay flaws, the game perfectly recreates the charming, lighthearted atmosphere from the anime, which is exactly what I wanted from a LWA game. Sure, it's pretty difficult to recommend this to someone that isn't a fan of the anime due to fairly lackluster combat - but if you do want some more LWA after finishing the anime, you should consider picking this up at some point (especially since it's getting fairly deep discounts by now)

Played this mostly because it was the only game I had for "J" on the ABC Plan. Felt more like a visual wikipedia rather than a visual novel, honestly. It wasn't bad, but it's pretty much just experiencing random japanese culture throughout a school year. If you're into anime/VNs, you probably know 90%+ of the stuff they teach you too, so it's not particularly useful either. And if you're not into this media, you probably aren't interested in the culture either so… I have no idea who the target audience for this VN is supposed to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe the most unsatisfying bullet hell on the market at the moment.

I got this one because I sometimes feel masochistic enough to play a bullet hell game despite being pretty bad at them in general and the artstyle looked gorgeous, but that's about where the praise stops for this one. The dev completely missed the entire point of this genre by allowing unlimited continues and always having your character fully powered up. As a result, you literally cannot lose and you will 100% the game on your first attempt. With only 2 characters available, this doesn't offer much replayability either - I was done with all the content in 1.5 hours (2 runs + boss rush). Unless you like making up challenges for yourself, this is very much a hard pass - there are much better games in this genre. Actually, no - this might be something you could pick up if you want to see what a bullet hell is like if the challenging aspect was completely removed from the game.

One of the weird things about having a comically small wishlist on Steam is that everything on it is doomed to infinite delays I often wonder if there's any real reason not to buy games on release. In an alternate world where I hadn't bought Blasphemous right away, I would have probably acquired it in some bundle 2 years later and wondered why the hell I've waited so long. Luckily for me, in this world I did decide to buy it on release with some store credit I had, and also got a certain friend hyped enough to do the same.

There have been many attempts at recreating the "soulslike" atmosphere ever since the first game came out, with most of them being fairly unsuccesful. In the metroidvania scene, I would argue that only Salt & Sanctuary managed to properly nail the aspects that make a soulslike both horrifying and rewarding - that is, until Blasphemous came out.

This game holds nothing back in terms of visual design - they wanted to have a twisted world and they fully committed to it. Brutal mutilations from finishers, malformed enemies, bosses and so on - it's all in there. What the game lacks in terms of combat due to its simplicity, it more than makes up for when it comes to map design. While it may not be on the same scale as something like Hollow Knight, exploring the world of Cvstodia was far more satisfying for me just based on the shortcuts you may find, let alone other items and upgrades.

All in all, it's definitely one of my favourite games of 2019 and I'm glad I decided to pick this one up.

I'm almost done customizing my character now - really looking forward to playing the game!