Team 17 is running a publisher sale over the next week, offering an array of discounts like half-price on eldritch fishing sim Dredge and 80% off chaotic cooperative chef adventure Overcooked. By far and away the best discount, though, is for the The Game Kitchen’s Catholocism-coded angst ‘n’ slash Blasphemous, which is a whopping 90% off for the next few days.
That knocks the cost all the way down to $2.50 (£2.00), less than the price of, well, most things really. A bus ticket. A cup of coffee. A Tesco meal deal. I can just about get a McDonald’s cheeseburger for less, but there’s only 30p in it and that cheeseburger won’t last 14 hours or let me fight a giant baby wearing a crown of thorns.
Indeed, it’s the strange and grotesque world of Cvstodia that made Blasphemous worth investigating when it launched back in 2019, as Callum Agnew observed in his review. “Every moment in Blasphemous is unsettling and my morbid curiosity dragged me from screen to screen. What tortured unholy sight would I see next? The world is horrible and it’s all the more compelling for it. It felt like I was on a mercy-killing spree.”
It isn’t a perfect game. The combat is somewhat limited by the restriction to two dimensions, while the platforming can lean too far toward unforgiving. But it was worth putting up with those flaws just to see what magnificent weirdness The Game Kitchen had cooked up, more so when it costs just a couple of quid.
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It’s worth nothing that Blasphemous 2 is also on a discount, available at half-price for $15 (£11.24). While not a steal like the original, if you grab the first game and really jive with it, it might be worth picking up the sequel while it’s relatively cheap. While we didn’t review Blasphemous 2, the consensus is it’s a bigger, better version of the original, albeit not vastly different from a mechanical perspective.
In fact, Blasphemous 2 grew even larger last year thanks to the double-barrelled blast of a paid expansion and a free update. This brought a new game plus mode and a 40% increase in the game’s footprint before it asked you to lay down any cash.
Both discounts run until Thursday, when Team 17’s publisher sale ends.
