Outside of the local influences, Colinet says that the team also drew inspiration from the Dark Souls franchise, as well as classics like Castlevania. I think people love that fact, that the game looks exactly like something that could have been released over 20 years ago.” “We found out that we were stepping into limitations that games had 25 years ago,” he continues, “There is nothing that is not pixel art. “That became a real problem because we were limited by the pixel art style, by the size of the screen, by the graphics, because we were trying not to use any fancy shaders or helping ourself with some 3D elements to make something easier.”

“From the very beginning we wanted to be very ‘purist’ about the pixel art style,” says Colinet. It’s something that we couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist when we were making this game,” he says.Ĭapturing that in a retro pixel art style, however, proved a challenge. All of that influenced us since we were children. “We’re a little studio based in the south of Spain and we are deeply influenced by Flamenco, the parades and religious traditions that are really important in this area. “We experimented and apparently it worked!”īlasphemous draws its aesthetics from local Spanish architecture, iconography and music, explains Colinet. We have seen this a lot in Japanese games, Chinese games, games made in Sweden or Norway with Viking styles, so we were thinking how a game based on our folklore would work,” level designer Enrique Colinet tells the Donkey Con Artists podcast, hosted by The Hollywood Reporter’s Patrick Shanley.

“We had this question three years ago of how a game based on Spanish folklore would look to the eyes of people outside of Spain.

Blasphemous game art