Blasphemous dev explains how the game's level design iterates on classic the Metroidvania approach

There's no doubt that Blasphemous falls into the Metroidvania genre, but the dev team behind the game wasn't satisfied with taking a paint-by-numbers approach to that tried-and-true layout. In an interview with Gamasutra, Enrique Colinet, the level designer on Blasphemous, explains how their team took things a bit future.

“I was pretty confident that people expected something similar to Castlevania. It looks like a Metroidvania game, so it had to feel like one. So, the problem was we were not really…comfortable or confident about the idea of opening areas with new abilities. Our intention was if you are the kind of player who likes to explore every corner of the map, then that’s fine, but we don’t want players to backtrack or explore areas if they don’t want to.”