(For most of the game you'll play as the Apostle, but a few late-game puzzles allow you to switch between him and Vic when they have to work together.) Their interactions are sweet and funny, and their journey from lost souls to something like family is genuinely heartwarming. As the game progresses their rapport deepens, with Bartholomeus slowly coming to regard her less as a helpless innocent and more as a Watson-esque assistant.
TOBY FOX THE BLIND PROPHET FULL
Vic is the lone ray of sunshine illuminating the Apostle's mission: full of warmth and lively energy, she's eager to help her rescuer in whatever way she can, even if that just means reminding him what he's fighting for. Your only refuge from the sense of sad decline is Vic's tattoo parlor. It's hard to tell if the demons corrupted Rotbork or if the city's poisoned spirit drew them to it, but they seem made for one another. The mythos surrounding the Apostle is also nicely fleshed-out, with each demon-there are seven listed in the "Demonomicon" you can access through the menu, though it stresses that an Apostle rarely encounters the lot of them in a single incarnation-demonstrating a distinct personality centered around the particular sin it embodies. Each location you visit-including a seedy sex club, a gang hideout, a drug den, and a haunted mansion-helps to round out the picture of what passes for life in Rotbork. The game's world is well-realized and consistent: damaged and decaying as the city may be, it feels real and lived-in. He still believes in his mission, but these days despair is as much his enemy as the demons he hunts. The people you meet look tired and beaten down, and Bartholomeus isn't much better: scarred, gaunt, with an eyepatch and a slight hunch, his best days are as distant a memory as Rotbork’s. The rainbows of neon light that bathe exterior and interior settings alike serve only to deepen the shadows to which the city's vagrants, users, and predators cling desperately. Rotbork is a broken husk of a city, a former maritime hub left ruined by the collapse of local fisheries it’s now a dead thing being picked over by scavengers, and the visuals never let you forget it. The hand-drawn visual style is defined by thick lines and harsh angles, with washed-out colors and a layer of grime coating everything it calls to mind a lost Dark Horse Comics title from the mid-’90s. The first thing you’ll notice about The Blind Prophet is that it’s breathtakingly gorgeous to look at, despite the grim atmosphere. Now it's up to the Apostle to not only put down the current crop of infernal interlopers but to solve the mystery of who's helping them, and why. These demons seem to have foreseen Bartholomeus's coming and made preparations, almost as if someone was tipping them off.
Under normal circumstances, demons lose their memories after a saintly thrashing, meaning they can't learn from their mistakes or anticipate an Apostle's strategy, but something is different about the newest incarnations. Demons can never be killed, only vanquished and forced to piece themselves back together over a period of decades, so an Apostle's work is never done.
An Apostle’s job, we're told, is to return to the mortal world and combat the dark powers when they regroup. Once she’s safe and the creature is defeated, she introduces herself as Vic, a local tattoo artist, and offers to help the Apostle find his footing in the city as he figures out his next moves. He debarks straight into battle, drawing his sword to defend a young woman from a possessed attacker.
We first meet Bartholomeus as he sails into the city of Rotbork, which the Heavenly Hosts have pinpointed as a hub of demonic activity. While the result is full of interesting ideas and impressive graphic novel-styled visuals, unfortunately the execution falls far short of its lofty ambitions. The Blind Prophet represents developer Ars Goetia's attempt to resolve this scriptural ambiguity, telling the tale of the battle-hardened Apostle Bartholomeus and his eternal struggle to protect creation from the forces of Hell. Case in point: the Biblical “Acts of the Apostles” never says in so many words that Christ's twelve disciples went on to form an elite fighting force of sword-wielding demon slayers after ascending to Heaven-but it doesn't actually get around to saying they didn't, either. As a faith endures across the millennia, so too does the tradition of using storytelling to fill in the gaps. It's left to mortals to speculate about many of the details, oftentimes through folk stories and legends. The primary purpose of a religious text isn’t to tell a story but to impart a message to the faithful, meaning that large portions of the central figures' lives often go unrecorded.
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