As a medium that often hinges on spectacle, the video game has become a comfortable home for these tropes. A sign of public humiliation, the pointed sanbenito hats of the penitents in that painting are much like the thorned helmet worn by Blasphemous’s protagonist, while the artist’s depictions of cruelty and zealotry rebound throughout the game’s grotesque reverie.īlasphemous draws from the deep well of Catholic gothic – ranging from Matthew Lewis’s Madrid-based novel The Monk (1796) to the action-adventure game Resident Evil 4 (2005), set in a nameless Spanish village and castle – in which the exploits of satanic priests and violent inquisitions have long been the stuff of horror.
#Blasphemous penitent one series
Courtesy: The Game KitchenĬabeza also cites the influence of Spanish painters including Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco Goya, Jusepe de Ribera, Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán – in particular, a series of paintings Goya made between 18 that includes A Procession of Flagellants. It’s part of our idiosyncrasy it’s within our cultural DNA.’īlasphemous, 2019. ‘We, as a studio, have been influenced by religious art, but here in southern Spain all that religious art is really more popular culture than religion.
#Blasphemous penitent one full
‘Seville is full of religious images,’ I’m told by Enrique Cabeza, the game’s creative director. Its designers, from Spanish studio The Game Kitchen, looked to the architecture and sculpture of their native Seville. The game starts as it means to go on, as the hero – The Penitent One – explores the world of Cvstodia, fighting flagellants, collecting rosary beads, unravelling the secrets of a deity known as The Miracle of Greatest Pain.īlasphemous wears its religious inspirations on its sleeve.
It’s an effective introduction to the game’s quasi-Catholic iconography, which pulls on imagery of baptism, vampirism, the catching of Christ’s blood at the crucifixion and the drinking of sacramental wine. In no time at all, the hero of the video game Blasphemous (2019) has cut down a monstrous church warden and, in a cathedral littered with dead bodies, removes his pointed helmet, holds it beneath a gushing wound in the ogre’s side, waits for it to be filled with blood, then calmly places it back on his head.
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