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Written by Bryn Gelbart.

In the throes of summer, the New Mexico sky begins to go dark around 8 pm but it’s not until close to 11 or even midnight that the blackness is at its most absolute. Driving through the desert at 5 am it feels like the morning refuses to come. Closer to 5:30, an almost hopeless feeling creeps into my bones. A thought washes over me. A certainty more terrifying than dying.

THE END IS NOWHERE NEAR.

Blasphemous 2 begins with the above quote from 20th century Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez. After the Spanish Civil War, Hernandez was tried and convicted of, essentially, being a communist and was later imprisoned to a 30 year term instead. He was 29 years old at the time. My age. He had been a published writer since the age of 23. So have I.

At age 31, two years later, Hernandez died in prison from tuberculosis. His death was probably painful and not bloody.

Blasphemous 2 is a Metroidvania. It has Soulslike elements. You slash your way through its crumbling world on a cryptic path towards salvation – and more boss fights. You return through its hallways with new tools and context, new lenses to view it with.

It’s a game rooted in tradition. These traditions go back to before I was born, to the origins of gaming itself. Dungeons & Dragons & the Super Nintendo. The meager scale of my hobby pales when compared to the relics of the past that litter both our world and Blasphemous 2’s Cvstodia. Dip your toes in and you’ll see its influence stretching further back still. Cvstodia is built on top of centuries of Spanish myth, Catholic art, and warfare. More than most video games, its areas can be traced back to their worldly origins; the Spanish cities and cathedrals the artists were emulating.

Watching the dev diaries and seeing how much research is poured into the game’s aesthetic, one thing comes into focus. Blasphemous 2 is faithful.

My father couldn’t step foot into El Santuario de Chimayo. The shrine sits below sea level in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, barely more than a 30 minute drive from Santa Fe, where my parents now live.  As an orthodox Jew, he is forbidden from entering a church. So we went alone, the two of us. There was a group crowded around a marked jug of water.

“Some people,” my mother said, “believe the dirt and water here has healing properties.” This was Holy water. Just, not for Jews.

They are a monolith, my parents.

Everything they say is immovable. Concrete. And yet until it happens, it’s just an illusion. When they said they were moving to Israel, they really meant it, and there was nothing I could say to convince them that was – perhaps – a bad idea. Weeks turned into months and the idea was turning into a reality, obscuring what I couldn’t see it was from the start – a decision. It would’ve been a bad decision.

I don’t know why they changed their minds. I can say I do, giving different answers depending on how cynical or hopeful I’m feeling when you ask but I can’t say for certain. Was it unsafe, too bureaucratic, or just too far?

All the better they landed on Santa Fe. Half an hour away, we stand on a site where Christians make a pilgrimage annually for a handful of dirt and some water. Here, miracles exist.

The Miracle sits at the center of Blasphemous. It is the source of all that is Holy in Cvstodia and all that is rotten, everything that has died, decayed and arisen. It is Divine punishment. There is no Miracle without suffering. It is a curse.

Blasphemous 2 begins when a birth is foretold. The Miracle is to have a child. An immaculate conception. The Penitent One is awoken to stop it from returning. Thus, your quest begins. It is a quest that sets you on a path lined with the symbols and images of our Chrisitanity. Rosary beads give you passive buffs. The knots to tie your rosary allow you to carry more.

The 2D corridors and hallways of Cvstodia evoke a world that exists on another plane. Spires and statues extend into the background in 2.5D fashion, but in Blasphemous 2 this effect implies something else as well. Our phenomenal experience of this place, as the player, is not the same as those who live here. Yet, the two occupy the same space. The Penitent One stands next to them each – a maiden with a fleshless arm, a well adorned and creeping hand, a dying sculptor – but he doesn’t see the Miracle where he stands. I’m there again, standing at the bottom of the world on someone else’s Holy land, not able to see what they see.

Each NPC rots and decays as you further your quest with their aid, all the while giving cryptic quests and turning relics and trinkets you’ve found into helpful upgrades. Statues built from scripture bend their backs in painful unison, lowering the upper city from the heavens down to the blessed people. The birth of the Child is imminent.

Faith moves us forward. It is a propellant. It is sometimes a convenient excuse for violence. Centuries of violence in the service of something higher because we all know we are going to die sooner or later. The Spanish colonized the area that is now New Mexico over a course of hundreds of years, all the while introducing indigenous people to Roman Catholicism. Churches and Missions from the 1700s still stand – the relics of a 500 year project. Adorning them always, are the resting places of a fraction of the lives lost in process.

In the courtyard outside the church at El Santuario de Chimayo, there are some of the most beautiful graves you will ever see. Headstones carved into marble saints. Nothing I saw this summer in New Mexico reminded me more directly of Blasphemous 2’s imagery than these headstones.

The wooden carved sculptures that you find in Cvstodia all bear a different visage. Each with a new buff or ability to place upon your altarpiece. Adorn your Rosary and place your carvings upon the altarpiece, Penitent One, it is no easy road ahead. But you are not alone. You have Veredicto, the mace of great speed and strength whose image recalls a thurible. Or maybe you choose the twins, the rapier and dagger Sarmiento Y Centella based on 16th century Spanish fencing equipment. Regardless, they will all be yours in time.

The sculptor sits in his high ceiling dwelling, carving away. He will help you, allowing you to upgrade the number of sculptures you can slot in at a time. At the center of the City of the Blessed Name, he awaits gifts from the Penitent One. Crude tools from our own Earth. Tools that have been used to craft Holy items, and thus, are themselves Holy. Using the tools given, he will carve you statues, but it is his masterpiece that’s his life entire. It looms, mostly unfinished, until it begins to take the shape of a maiden. You know not her name.

A man whose mouth drips honey gives you a powerful and fragile sculpture. Should it break, you only need to return it to him for it to be repaired. The item will return to your inventory, only now it is temporarily sealed  with honey between its cracks. The more you return to the man, the more his flesh is eaten away. Bees flock to his hole in the wall as the man becomes subsumed by abundance. He is cursed… or blessed.

I don’t know how this was supposed to end before the war in Israel began. The longer it takes to get this written, the more people will die before it exists and then more people will die after. That is the reality of war. I’ve long since dismissed the idea that anything I write will save lives, but the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians play in my head, only imagined. I feel the terror I think other people have felt in my dreams, but I always get to wake up.

Some ideas, when they form, don’t have visible endings. War, I believe, was one of them.

When I, when my Jewish friends mostly, get called antisemitic online for showing solidarity with Palestinian citizens it stings not because of who says it. It’s because of who believes it, but will never say it in all those words. And I never will either, never wanting to reckon with what a difference in belief just might mean. When the people who taught you your morals, your entire world, begin to disagree with you on what is and isn’t genocide, something in the foundation breaks.

I can’t shake that broken feeling. The brokenness is not new, of course, it’s been there the whole time. I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico holding on to that brokenness. On the return journey, bathed in that 5 a.m. darkness, I foolishly thought myself healed. I know now that the dread I felt then was the dread that I might never be.

It was their first decision. You see, my parents never unmade the decision, the one to move to Israel. Not really. It was a decision you can’t unmake, like the dropping of so many bombs or the cracking of a porcelain figure.

I think, not so fondly, of the bee man and his statue, reforged with something sticky to keep the cracks from showing.