The creator of brutal platformer Blasphemous, out this week on PS4, reveals its real-world inspirations

Hola, PlayStation players! Here at The Game Kitchen we are truly excited about tomorrow’s release of Blasphemous, our most ambitious game to date.

We have been working hard during the last few months to have everything ready for our unique tribute to the 16-bit era, and now that we’re done polishing all our pixel-perfect characters and scenarios we thought that this was the perfect moment to tell you a bit more about Blasphemous, what awaits you in the land of Cvstodia and how we ended up mixing centenary-old southern Spanish folklore with inspiration from great games like Castlevania, Dark Souls and even Doom.

Creating the main character

Blasphemous starts its journey in uncharted lands. We didn’t even know how to start, but we needed a hook, a powerful icon, and that icon ended being the main character: The Penitent One.

The Penitent One went through many iterations. Since our main sources of inspiration were all the historical religious elements that surrounded our city, Seville, we knew it had to do something with them.

Our first attempt for a main character ended up looking like an undertaker. It looked cool, but it wasn’t enough. We wanted it to be visually impactful, memorable and a clear homage to our local culture.

That inspiration came to us when we realized that this character could be based on the penitents who wore “sanbenitos” a few centuries ago, during the Spanish Inquisition times.

Heretics and blasphemers had to walk in a procession wearing these garments as part of their penitence, as well as a rope around their neck and a rosary in their hands. In fact, a “modern take” of these processions are still happening in our region nowadays, with hundreds of penitents wearing these cone shaped hats, parading through our city for a whole week.

Creating the world of Cvstodia

Now that we had a good-looking main character, we needed an interesting nonlinear world for the player to explore. That world ended being Cvstodia.

Cvstodia is an exaggerated take on our land and history, borrowing architectural elements and places that indeed exist in our region, but framing them into a dark fantasy world.

Creating the soundtrack

In order to complete this trio of cultural inspirations, we also needed to give the soundtrack a unique sound.

Carlos Viola, our composer, was in charge of creating this fascinating musical tour through Cvstodia. Andalusia is the root of flamenco music, and as part of our musical heritage, you’ll be listening wonderful ambience tracks recorded with real instruments inspired by this music genre with a pretty unique dark twist to set the perfect mood that this experience needed.

This unique setting and theme has never been explored in any other videogame before, which is what makes Blasphemous so special for us. Now that the game is finished, we are very excited to see how it will inspire players all over the world.

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