Nightmare Fuel / Blasphemous

“I awake now, from the silver ashes that had been my cradle. The Miracle calles me.”

Blasphemous features one of the most grim worlds of Martyrdom Culture, where Fate Worse than Death, religious suffering and pain is aplenty.

General

• The state of the world. Something that can be seen as Hell on Earth, overrun by monsters born from supernatural phenomen known as the Miracle that manifested in form of negative human traits becoming real.
• The suffering took place even before the Miracle. Tons of false accusations and executions of the innocent, rampart crime, false religions and saints. And then there's the scale of how much Cvstodia was a Martyrdom Culture...
• The Penitent One himself is an ominous figure that inspires fear on those who face against him. He is a silent monk with a metal capirote covering his head who wields Mea Culpa, a longsword born from the guilt of a woman and draws more strength from his own guilt and he uses it to make deadly executions such as stabbing someone all the way through and slamming their corpse to the ground. While not the creepiest character of the game, Penitent One still does very questionable actions such as bathing himself in the blood of the Warden of the Silent Sorrow in a ritual of the brotherhood he was once from.

NPC Characters

• Nacimiento is a gigantic man with the face of a young man and a old man’s face coming out of his chest. He tells us to bring him quicksilver because he thinks this is the way to cure himself from such affliction. It backfires him completely since the old man is starting to crawl out of him and Nacimiento dies after the old man finally comes out of him.
• The Lady of the Six Sorrows is a woman undressed and showing her chest… which is pierced with six swords and covered in blood, she is the one who increases the health of the Penitent One.
• Altasgracias is a giant woman with three faces fused up with each other. She used to be three separate sisters who were being forced to marry with mens they didn’t want to so they all prayed to the Miracle and it fused the sisters and placed them inside of a giant egg made out of their own hair.
• Socorro, the Lady of the Perpetual Agony is a tortured woman who prayed the Miracle for the people who were executed in her village. The Miracle answered by making all the damage that would have suffered the victims go to Socorro herself. She was canonized for her selfless behavior but now she must live with all the pain and damage other people she takes into her protection suffers.
• One of the collectibles mentions a thief named Joel who was caught stealing from the Pontiff Himself. It explains that no one in Cvstodia has endured greater torture. Recall that basically everyone in Cvstodia has to endure brutal torture on a daily basis, from the Wheelbroken to the Lady of the Charred Visage, to name a few. So what exactly did they DO to Joel?

Locations

• The very first area, Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrow, is filled to the brim with corpses of Peninent One's comrades. And there are not just hundreds, but seemingly thousands of corpses that go on and on, seen in almost every room of the area. The game begins with the aftermath of an absolute purge, setting the tone for the rest of the game.
• Albero is tame compared to other locations, but it houses the place for suffering lepers in care of Order of Kissers of Wounds, and they are everywhere and of every age.
• Mercy Dreams

Enemies

• Many of the Punished include victims of this as much as those who caused them.
  • Cimbalillos were supposedly victims of immurement, tied to their bells and left to die.
  • The Damned were killed through stoning, and now use those same stones to try and kill others.
  • The Crucified were... well, crucified to winged statues with thorny brambles.
  • The Headless Chamberlain and Shieldmaidens seem to have died from decapitation, the former carrying its original head on a pillow while it sends out copies to attack you while the latter has replaced their heads with the one from the statue-shield they carry.
  • The Lunatics were prisoners of the Inquisition, tortured to insanity.
  • The Wheelbroken were likely killed through the Breaking Wheels they carry, having their bones crushed bit by bit until they were dead.
  • The Aserrado was sawed in half, starting at their heads and ending at their groins.

Bosses

• The Warden of the Silent Sorrow is a massive giant with a chandelier as a mace and is among the mountains of corpses in the Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrow. His grunts and imposing figure are just but the beginning of what is about to come.
• The Ten Piedad is a hideous beast of a mix-and-match between a goat, a man and a gnarled tree. It has a skull of a goat for head and twisting roots coming out of his body, contorting and crushing his body. He is able to grow twisted roots out of the ground to impale anyone unlucky enough to face such an abhorrent monster. It is revealed in the Thorned Symbol that the Ten Piedad used to be a man who decided to rest in a statue he found and when he woke up again, he discovered that The Miracle blessed him by being turned into the beast we see him in the game and see how he kills everyone around him while he is not even controlling his own body. Killing him is an act of mercy.
• Our Lady of our Charred Visage was once a beautiful woman named Áurea. She had a face that was so beautiful and pious many sculptors used her likeness as a model. Over time, people saw her as a living image of divinity to the point they took her out on procession and replaced their own religious images with her likeness, much to her horror. She eventually poured burning oil onto her face and entered a convent. As she aged, her burn scar remained untouched by time, which was understood to be a miracle and made her canonized in life. Thus the Convent of Our Lady of the Charred Visage was founded, where all nun hopefuls would have to pour boiling oil on their faces to be accepted into the convent's ranks.