All of the original Blasphemous DLCs were released free of charge, so I was a bit surprised to see that Blasphemous 2 was set to receive a paid expansion. I can’t deny that Mea Culpa adds a surprising amount of content both in terms of playtime and in regard to new things to find. But this DLC is a bit of a mixed bag to me, offering some truly poor signposting, underwhelming quest progression, and a final boss fight that was so cheap and frustrating that it soured the experience for me by more than a bit. It’s still worth checking out for series fans, but don’t necessarily expect this to be the most meaningful addition to the game.
Most of Mea Culpa centres around the Penitent One trying to track down a mud person to swap out keys. This mud person needs to be spoken with to start the DLC, at which point you receive a mud key that allows you to open one mud door before breaking. Beyond each mud door, you’ll be able to locate the mud person again and be given another key until you eventually get the final key. As with most of Blasphemous’ story, I had no idea what most things were supposed to be or why I was doing anything, but that’s to be expected here. There are a couple more short animated cutscenes here in the same style as the base game too.
Now, Blasphemous 2 is receiving a big content update for free that’s separate from Mea Culpa that expands several biomes, adds new collectables and connections between the different areas. The DLC itself adds two new biomes, two more abilities, and features the return of the Penitent One’s weapon from the first game. I’m not entirely sure how all of this works, as the updates to the existing biomes include new challenges that require use of the two fresh abilities. I’m assuming they’re just hanging around in the area, yet inaccessible to anyone who hasn’t purchased the DLC, which would be strange.
As for these new abilities, they’re both completely reliant on interactive elements found in the world and they don’t grant any new functionality when not utilising them. The first of these just lets you briefly walk on glass platforms that break instantly without it. This seemed to me like a bargain basement upgrade that added nothing of note other than an excuse to gate certain aspects behind a new ability. The other one, however, deploys a pretty awesome new set of challenges that sees you teleport around in various directions. It’s definitely fun.
The new biomes mostly feel very familiar, albeit the snowy, smallish landscape above the new Frozen Mausoleum looks pretty different from the rest of Blasphemous 2. The Mausoleum itself just looks like another grey dungeon, while the other biome doesn’t really fare much better. The returning weapon isn’t truly wholly disparate from the other ones, as it replaces the regular sword and behaves very similarly, save for the new ability to shoot out a projectile, which isn’t as useful as it sounds. This weapon has an upgrade tree too, but you’ll need a new collectable to unlock its abilities.
Even though you might expect the events in the DLC’s new biomes to be self contained, you’ll need to explore pretty much all of the new free additions to the other biomes to find everything. Two of the mud doors are in the new biomes, but two others are in the free extensions to the base game. There’s a lot of exploration to do here, even for people who are using their original save file. If you explore everything, Mea Culpa will probably take about five or six hours, which is easily about a third or more of the base game’s length. There’s also a brand new challenge type where you hit green objects to add platforms and jumpable walls, so you don’t need the DLC to try these on for size.
The new stuff is all mostly of the same quality as the base game and there are some decently challenging platforming trials, even if some of the new enemies kind of got on my nerves. Toward the end of the second new biome, it was just combat arena after combat arena, with enemies with area of effect attacks and explosions, which got very aggravating. Speaking of aggravating, there are two (technically three, though) new boss battles. The first of these is very typical for the series, while the second one is fought twice in two different variations. The first fight is fine, albeit a little wonky, but the second bout against the second boss is the absolute worst boss battle that the series has seen.
I could write an entire article about why I absolutely loathed this fight, but will thankfully be more succinct than that here. For one, this final fight is incredibly RNG heavy, as, depending on which attacks it tries to use, you basically won’t be able to avoid getting hit. It uses this one spinning attack with practically no telegraphing that also shoots out a bunch of projectiles. If you’re standing next to the boss when it uses this, you probably won’t have any time to react and will likely die instantly. It’s horrible. Even worse, the hitboxes on some of its attacks are off (an overhead swing followed by a projectile and it plunging its sword into the ground to call giant swords to shoot out) and these attacks can hit you even if you don’t actually touch them.
But all of the above is exacerbated by the fact that the boss simply does an insane amount of damage. Many of the attacks can kill you in two hits and it’s possible to have two separate sets of projectiles raining down on you simultaneously. Even worse is the fact that you barely have any time to hit this boss. It’s just putrid. It made me feel like The Game Kitchen was trying to make an Elden Ring boss, but without any of the abilities that the Tarnished has to mitigate all the BS the bosses in that game can throw at you. It was a miserable experience for the entire hour of practice I had to put in to best it. But it was weird, because the boss was far harder than either of the games’ final bosses.
The signposting in Mea Culpa also gave me some trouble. While Blasphemous 2 remains focused with waypoints, at two points Mea Culpa requires you to interact with multiple things with zero indication of how many there are. I ended up wandering for a while, simply because I didn’t realise I hadn’t used a single lever. Then I couldn’t find one of the mud doors without knowing where it was because the devs hid a mechanism needed to even find it behind an illusory wall. It felt like guesswork and luck played a part in simply finding what I needed here, which was no good.
In the end, I honestly don’t feel like Blasphemous 2 needed to be any bigger, as a lot of this will kind of make the game (which was already long enough) feel bloated. There’s still fun to be had here, but between the bad signposting, some underwhelming new stuff, and the absolute slog of an unfair final boss fight, it all makes me feel like it might actually be preferable to play the original version of the game without all these extras. If you really do want more of the game, this will certainly give you that, though. But sometimes less is more.
Blasphemous 2 Mea Culpa: With one fun new ability and some interesting new stuff, Mea Culpa makes some questionable design choices that don't necessarily make for the best of experiences. – Andrew Farrell
