In a welcome bit of feel good industry news, Blasphemous level designer Enrique Colinet revealed on Twitter that Larian Studios was one of the game’s biggest backers on Kickstarter, and that the studio never made a big deal of it or asked for the backer rewards such a contribution would entail.
“Not many people know this, but @larianstudios was one of the biggest contributors during the @BlasphemousGame Kickstarter campaign,” Colinet wrote alongside a screenshot of the game’s credits with “Larian Studios LLC” plainly visible. “They dropped a four figures sum, never asked for their rewards, and just kept making one of the best games ever done in recent years. Legends!”
While Larian’s full list of backed projects is private, you can make out the company’s logo among the 3 contributors to Blasphemous’ $1000 “The Punisher” tier on its Kickstarter page.
Blasphemous is a dark and brutal metroidvania influenced by the Souls series and the aesthetics of Spanish Catholicism—as a product of parochial schooling, I’ve always been intrigued by Blasphemous’ deliciously, well, blasphemous take on the religion I was raised in. We gave the original outing a respectable 70% in our review from 2019, but PCG print editor Robert Jones was far more enthused about the sequel, calling it a “cult classic in the making” in a preview last year.
The Kickstarter donation was an admirable show of solidarity from Larian, the studio essentially paying it forward after finding its own transformative success through crowdfunding. The successful Kickstarter campaign for Divinity: Original Sin back in 2013 ushered in a new era for the studio, which before that point had survived on contract work in between Divinity games that suffered from extensive meddling by publishers. You can hear more about that history from Gameumentary’s 2018 deep dives into the development of Original Sin and Original Sin 2.