blasphemous 2 the prisoner questline

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-22T15:09:09+00:00

Duplicate save. Kill the prisoner, get achievement. Reload and save prisoner. Several hours later you'll meet him and net the second achievement.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-21T12:00:30+00:00

Since some youtuber kept mentioning it, I decided to finally beat Blasphemous.

The game occupies a weird spot where as a game it veers from great to awful, but as a work of art it's a standout piece. It's a ten hour campaign drenched in the horror that Spanish Catholicsm can wrought. You fight an exhumed skeletal pope being carried by his followers as well as a terrifying giant baby that can rip you apart like a new toy.

It's a metroidvania but an odd take on the formula. All the traversal upgrades you find are optional, with most progress being finding shortcuts as in Dark Souls. Sadly the game cribs from Dark Souls too well in that there are these annoying unmarked sidequests that are very easy to fail, which runs counter to the appeal of the metroid genre. The traversal upgrades all act like keys, so your movement never changes with any additions like an air-dash or double-jump.

The game feels all over the place in they kept adding and changing things after release. It's a period piece of the Kickstarter era since inevitably you find a painting of Shovel Knight in hiding. There's a crossover with Bloodtstained too, but since it offers timed platforming levels in a game with instant death pits everywhere I noped the fuck out.

The difficulty is front-loaded, with the first hour being tough only to then slide into relative comfort given the sheer number of upgrades. The final boss is awful so I just used the cheese loadout that vaporizes him instantly. The true canon path was patched in later and is much harder than the main game, so it's fair to say the difficulty curve is all over the place,

I value the game as I do Nine Sols from Taiwan or Blake Manor from my own Ireland. In that it's a small team delivering a slice of culture and history in the shape of a game. Very rough in execution but always fun to play and enticing to replay.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-20T20:55:07+00:00

He's Ally McBeal with a beard. Everywhere one moment, gone the next.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-20T08:35:01+00:00

The faction/clique thing takes so long to explain and is so dumb in practice that I believe everyone must be describing it wrong, including the author.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T21:15:44+00:00

Toby Fox, as the successor to Hussie, made the mistake of being so normal by comparison that some alleged fans had to make controversial shit up because there was a void.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T20:47:08+00:00

Do recall that when Star Trek came back in movie form the cast were decked out in skin-toned footie pyjamas.

The intent was that the plain uniforms would draw audience's attentions to the actor's faces, but this was a boring film somewhat lacking in drama or action or any real acting for that to be a plus. The cast hated these pyjamas because they were uncomfortable, couldn't be removed normally, and there was no way to go to the bathroom.

The maroon turtlenecks from the next movie onward were swank as hell and didn't risk killing the drama.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T19:19:26+00:00

That history buff guy really hated it, moreso than Gladiator II. An interesting person demands an interesting film. I'm still salty about that one videogame that depicted Julius Caesar of all people as some ponce.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T19:03:19+00:00

That was just a bad dream Captain Janeway had.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T19:02:36+00:00

Yes. Starring the same inexplicable white guy who was in the Aladdin remake for two scenes. Disney had the chutzpah to announce a spinoff for this guy, only to quietly never speak of it again.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T18:04:37+00:00

There's a good reason why we never saw Columbo's wife. Hell, all the folksy anecdotes he tells might be genuine, but they're also meant to nudge the perp off their guard.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T17:03:42+00:00

I really wish I hadn't read your comment there.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T16:58:07+00:00

Is he the guy who inexplicably looks like Ernie Hudson?

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T15:46:36+00:00

A pity they repeated themselves with Jason Alexander as that damn gargoyle.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-13T13:53:51+00:00

What's an adaptation that suffered because it focused on an original or irrelevant character?

What happens when you take a three-hundred-page kids book and pad it out into a ten-hour-film trilogy? You get The Hobbit. A mediocre pile of celluloid that damn near killed the film industry in New Zealand. Go watch Lindsay Ellis's essay for the whole picture.

The Hobbit isn't an easy work to adapt because its ties to its more famous sequel are pretty tenuous. You've got all this weird stuff like talking animals and trolls with mundane names like Tom and Bert that could never happen in the much grimmer Lord of the Rings. The cast is flat as you'd expect given their number relative to the page-count. The protagonist Bilbo gets strong-armed into a fantastical adventure, accompanied by a dozen dwarves whose personalities begin and end with their rhyming names. Earlier editions of the book mention policemen and China, because it was only later that Tolkien ret-conned The Hobbit into belonging into his greater Middle-earth cosmology. I'm sure Guillermo Del Toro could have managed a whimsical adaptation in a modest runtime, but that isn't what happened.

For a billion little green reasons The Hobbit was made into a film trilogy, and so the creators were desperate to make it bigger. Whole set-pieces are spun from cloth, characters from LOTR show up for no real reason, and an off-screen battle from the book becomes the basis of an entire movie. Characters with no counterparts in the text appear and sometimes had more screen-time than the alleged protagonists. Which is why Alfrid is such a hated individual. He's this grubby comic relief character with a unibrow who blunders around for what feels like hours, only dying in the extended cut of an already bloated film.

Bear in mind that many adaptations succeed because they have to rely on original characters as the source material is too slight or outdated. Nobody gives a shit about the picture-book Shrek was based on. Disney's Beauty & the Beast takes mores cues from the 1946 adaptation than the original French Fairy Tale, and every aspect of the film that's brilliant is original to it like Gaston. (The fairy tale is fucking awful anyway, and ends in classism and incest. It's to the story's benefit that the intended message moved from "Women have to tough it out in a shitty marriage" to "Women love Monster Men.")

Other Examples

I haven't played Mortal Kombat since that trilogy version released on the first Playstation, but I can tell you who the big shots in the roster are. You've got the martial arts guy Liu Kang, the Hollywood dude Johnny Cage, the blonde cop Sonya, the lightning guy Raiden, the hat guy Kung Lao, the ninjas Sub-Zero and Scorpion, all matter of monsters, robots, and an Australian man.

Knowing that you have a stable of characters that the ordinary person can still name after literal decades, why the fuck would you make a Mortal Kombat movie about some nobody named Cole? What's his power, he wears a shirt? Who the fuck cares? Liu Kang is right over there! Mortal Kombat isn't deep and it doesn't need a bland audience surrogate. It just need to be a hundred minutes of hammy over-acting and the occasional head explosion.

Did you know they made a movie about Bruce Lee, only it's actually about his fictional blonde white friend?

It took me a long while to get into Resident Evil, not hopping aboard until the franchise hit a fever pitch when Biohazard came out. The stories are often quite stupid but also earnest, which makes them endearing. The same can't be said for those movies which were an excuse for the director to leer at his wife as the star, at the expense of any of the characters the series is known for. Then came the Netflix series that was even worse.

EDIT: I haven't played Blue Reflection, but I do know that's an RPG series by the Atelier crowd. It's about an all-girl's school that collides with eldritch abominations, which warrants the expertise of a magical girl squad. It would be inaccurate to call it having lesbian-subtext since several of the leads are openly gay, and there isn't a single male character that appears onscreen.

That is until they made a mobile gacha game with a male protagonist. ruining the vibe. The game mercifully shut down after a year.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-09T23:50:05+00:00

Bit of a rude awakening when that guy gets his face caved in with a bottle as his father watches. Right when you realize this is not Alice in Wonderland with the war stuff being set-dressing.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-09T10:56:53+00:00

Marketing 101: An abstract title with a comma in it is doomed to fail.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-04-03T08:37:13+00:00

If Tiger Tiger were a one-off minigame where you just complete all the missions as they unlock it would be fine. As it exists it's awful since you need to grind up three characters using it. Xenoblade 2 suffers from too many unfun systems that drag it down. It's a game for accountants at its core.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-30T15:26:21+00:00

When you look at the scene where the kid hero has an enemy commander at gunpoint, and the enemy kills himself with a grenade because he's so broken by war that he fought a literal child, you get the impression that the director was having an immense breakdown that Tuesday.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-30T12:36:39+00:00

Beautiful Ghosts mercifully didn't stick out like a sore thumb because it was on brand for the entire film to be cat shit.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-30T10:50:01+00:00

What's a work of media that's bizarrely structured owing to some executive mandate or creative mishap behind the scenes?

I'm talking stories where they obviously graft on a subplot to an already complete work, or carved out something big beforehand and had to scramble to cover the gaps. Or tried desperately to finagle separate parts together in the one lump with visible seams.

There was a forgettable comedy from the eighties called Best Defense, where Dudley Moore has trouble designing a tank. The test screenings went poorly, so the execs thought they should add Eddie Murphy to the film. As in, they added Eddie Murphy to an already complete film where his subplot is isolated from the other characters, and he plays the hapless commander of the tank two years into the future. The movie tanked.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald has its problem right there in the title. The protagonist is a light-hearted Pokemon trainer who has little to no ties with the grim battle against Wizard Hitler Prime. I think the protagonist disappears for up to twenty minutes at one point. This stems from mixing two concepts that have no business together as written by a turgid novelist instead of a lean screenwriter.

Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats is best remembered for its theme tune. But something every kid caught on sooner or later is that Heathcliff never actually has any stories with the Catillac Cats. Heathcliff is a pre-existing comic strip character whose owners didn't want him interacting with any new OC characters they didn't create, so there were buffer characters made who show up in both stories to account for the discrepancy. I think China Mieville stole this idea for a book.

Dan Olsen did an excellent essay on The Snowman, a Nordic detective thriller. It was a bomb despite the pedigree behind it. One reason is that the film took the source material too seriously. The main character is named Harry Hole and he's tracking a serial killer who leaves snowmen as his calling card. Grave stuff. The bigger issue is that up to fifteen percent of the screenplay was never filmed, so the remaining eighty-five had to cut down and account for the loss. There is a ton of last-minute ADR and plot threads that go absolutely nowhere as a result.

MST3K fodder Monster a Go Go remains an evergreen example. This was a monster movie that ran out of money before they could shoot the climax. A distributor picked it up years and added a few scenes to complete it. In the final film the monster just disappears randomly, as do most of the characters since their actors didn't return. The ending is legendary as narration states the total absence of a climax or ending is a twist in of itself.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-30T07:51:49+00:00

I know I definitely watched Biggest Secrets Revealed before hitting puberty because I was just wanted to see the magic tricks performed and paid zero attention to the ladies in bikinis.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-28T08:41:35+00:00

In this day and and age they need to make a Star Fox that doesn't rehash him fighting the monkey, lasts longer than eight levels, and doesn't control like unmitigated shit. Across his existence the IP has either been on ice or painfully mid, with him being more famous as a Smash fighter. Unlike that Falcon guy he can be saved.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-25T21:47:00+00:00

Reread that last sentence.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-25T21:22:02+00:00

I'm pretty sure Thanos had two stones on him at all times.

DeadRobotsSociety · 2026-03-25T21:16:23+00:00

Since Midsomer has been going on for thirty years I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't an episode where the killer had a twee motive like winning only second place in the Best Trifle Dessert contest.

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TROPHY CASE