Review

Bloodborne is wonderful and I'm sick and tired of it existing only in my memory. Because I will be cold and dead in the ground before I go to the trouble of hooking my PS4 back up to play a single game. (Though appropriately, Bloodborne was the game that made me buy that PS4 in the first place.) Where the fuck is Bloodborne on PC? I dunno...people wonder whether God is cruel or no. Sometimes there are signs is all I'm saying.

Anyway, as of this writing, Bloodborne is my third favorite game of all time. High praise! But for good reason. Dark Souls is right behind in my listing of Soulsborne games. But I think Bloodborne is just a more bit more well-rounded and frankly, fun to play. I think it's a more cohesive experience on the whole. Taking you through a series of fun areas where, by the end of the game, you really feel like the Hunter. I wouldn't say that Bloodborne is necessarily a perfect game. Those chalice dungeons for one...Alex and myself did fully complete all of them because we loved the game enough to where even mediocre Bloodborne is pretty good Bloodborne. But they're an obvious weak point of the whole to point at.

So to first speak to the game's weak points, there are the aforementioned chalice dungeons. Again, I think these totally skate by the acceptable line by sheer virtue of Bloodborne being a very fun gameplay system. If we had even the slightest bit more jank, I'd be a lot harder on them. They definitely are not good. I think in general any attempt to inject procedural generation into a system that is not based off of that in the first place does not feel good. And yes, I am aware that the main chalice dungeons are "bespoke" in the sense that they do have hard-coded layouts. They still consist of the pre-existing individual rooms that do get mished and mashed together in the non-main chalices. So the stink is there. Nothing particularly interesting design-wise is happening here. There are definitely some interesting looking set-pieces. The lower chalices with the static in the air because of how close we are to certain cosmic entities. The big valleys with rope bridges running from side to side. And I do like the general idea of delving into long-forgotten underground labyrinths where the gods were found. That's all great. It's just not all that much fun (in comparison to base game). I appreciate each of the new bosses, but there's way too much chaff you gotta get through to see them. And the boss arenas themselves are never interesting, because they're all just the same dingy tombs. Overall, I would say the chalice dungeons are wasted effort that should have just been reinvested into the game itself.

Next, I also think the Dark Souls world design has Bloodborne beat. There is kind of sort of the sense that the Cathedral Ward serves as your Firelink, given most of the game path spokes branch off from there. But unfortunately you're never really returning there. The passage from the Forbidden Woods into the back of Iosefka's Clinic has the exact same feeling as descending the elevator from the Undead Parish back to Firelink. But that's all. It doesn't serve as an actual pathway you'll be using. I get that by the time we're in Bloodborne, we've fully stopped caring about world design and just teleport everywhere. But I goddamn fucking love the twisting interconnected world of DS1! And I want it back! And I won't stop bitching about it until I get it! It really feels like you could do something similar with Cathedral Ward, like maybe they were considering it at some point in development. But we're just not there. It would take slightly too long to get anywhere with how things are laid out. And things are a little bit too linear for it to work.

One small thing I think the game's not as good at compared to other Soulsbornes is supporting odd builds. An arcane build is famously difficult to get going. Not impossible, but most of the weapons and tools you'd want are buried near the end of the game or in Old Hunters. Not dissimilar for Bloodtinge. The game really expects you to either pick Strength or Skill and use the others as a secondary stat at most. But most of the other Soulsbornes are a lot more liberal with such weirdo builds. Could use a little work there. Move some items around or introduce a couple new items earlier in the game. Those items that do exist are well worth using, it's very fun being a cauliflower man that snaps his spine at people to release eldritch energies that annihilate them. That was my final build I eventually moved towards. But you're literally having to play the entire game to get to that point.

Another thing I'll mention in the bad column would be multiplayer. It's far better here than in other Soulsbornes. No dealing with stupid consumables to play with your mates. You just ring your stupid bell. And there were fewer spots you could be invaded in. But let us not allow good to be the enemy of perfect. After having tasted seamless coop, I am not interested in going back. It would be great if we could just have that and turn off invaders with a setting. I just wanna be able to play with my friends and I stopped being interested in invaders after DS1. Literally, whoooooo the fuck cares if it makes the game easier? Why does that even matter? Do you know who's playing the game? Me. Do you know who doesn't care? Me. I cannot comprehend the non-Euclidean minds of those whose dick size directly correlates to how other people on the internet are playing a video game. They are unwell.

If I had to pull out one last negative, I would say that I don't really like the lack of clarity that the DLC brought with regards to what the "original sin" was so to speak for Yharnam. I did kind of enjoy From's tendency to have their DLCs be answers to questions you didn't know to ask. While Old Hunters represents my favorite Bloodborne content, it is just a little unclean with its plot. We now have two parallel instances of us first interacting with the Great Ones. Finding their blood in the labyrinth and finding Kos on the beach. Both totally work in the context of the game as well as in the wider context of being a cosmic horror story. But having both just introduces a lack of neatness. I don't think I would care quite as much if this were happening in one of the other Soulsborne games, but the plot of Bloodborne is uncharacteristically both directly followable and supportive of deeper dives. So it's a little bit annoying the confusion the DLC brings.

Those are generally my negatives I can come up with. Nothing that's obscene, more just things that if I could create a Bloodborne butthole edition I would change. So let's now talk about what's good in Bloodborne. I do feel there is a lot. The trick weapons are my children, I love them. It is incredibly satisfying to play with a weapon for a dozen hours, thinking you know it like the back of your hand. And then by complete accident discovering a new move because you happened to do some combination of movement and attack you hadn't yet done up until then. They've played in this space in post-Bloodborne games. But it's just so rich and detailed here. The lower number of weapons in total is totally fine to me, because it allows each one to be a world unto its own. Every single weapon is viable. I would love to just pick up Bloodborne again, find a weapon I have never used and sink my teeth into it, getting a real feel for it. (Rakuyo is my personal fave)

One thing I particularly respect about Bloodborne is the turn and From's willingness to hide that in the back half of the game. Presenting the game as being werewolf-hunting simulator from the very first trailer and then transitioning into dead gods who've washed ashore on cold misty beaches is magnifique. These are the people that had the confidence to hide Ash Lake behind an illusory wall. No idea what the hell happened to them afterward. I'm a big fan of cosmic horror, so having this lovely Victorian aesthetic transition to the aliens building the pyramids is an arrow aimed straight at my heart. I can't help but love it. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allows the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

Let's talk a little sugar about the music. Bloodborne has my favorite OST of the Soulsbornes. A big problem I have with post-Bloodbornes is I feel we've totally gone crazy with the orchestration. I'm gonna be very honest here, if you had a gun to my head I think I could pull out like 1 or 2 themes from DS3 (Abyss Watchers and Twin Princes) and none from Elden Ring. They're just...gaudy. They're too much. The songs come across as technically impressive. I can imagine if I were hearing them played live in an actual theater, I'd enjoy them a lot more. But in the context of the post-Bloodborne, everything-is-hard-now world, you can't possibly enjoy the boss themes. Too much is going on and the songs themselves are too complex. A good boss theme requires a simple hummable through-line. It's what you dance to. Lady Maria's theme is clear as day in my head. Literally what is a single theme from Elden Ring? Bloodborne is the proof that doing the whole orchestra thing is not the problem. Because there are plenty of themes in this game where we roll out the whole choir and start flying into the cosmos with grandeur and sweeping violins. But they're just well-made. They function as boss themes and as songs in their own right. I think From went up their own ass in subsequent games. Now, every two-bit chump has a theme as overdesigned as they are. I do enjoy the themes from pre-Bloodborne games. Some of them quite a lot. But I think the themes here were just a happy medium where we've still got the recognizable and hummable hooks of the earlier games with the technical proficiency of the full orchestra now at our command.

One thing we really need to camp out on is the rally system. This is the core of Bloodborne's combat loop and it is so fucking elegant. Combat in Bloodborne is much faster than in Demon's Souls or the first two Dark Souls. But it allows for that by way of the rally system. That is where, if you attack an enemy after you've taken damage, you will heal some of it back. Bloodborne massively incentives and rewards aggression. The moment you realize that, the whole game unlocks and you will have a much easier and more fun time. Every single time I have ever seen someone having difficulties playing the game, they're playing it like Dark Souls. They're being defensive, looking for openings. That's not what this game is. The designers are screaming this as loudly as possible with the wooden shield you find early on and its item description. Bloodborne is not a game where you really do no-damage runs. I'm sure it is possible of course, but an ideal combat encounter does not involve you dodging everything. You are fully expected to take hits and that is completely fine. The damage that enemies are doing is not the real damage they are doing. You're gonna heal some of it back. You are the Hunter. Get in their goddamn face and rip and tear them to pieces! You are the only thing they fear! I think it's so fun taking the basic system we've understood and doing this new fast take on it. It's why I get so pissed off when I think about Dark Souls 3 or Elden Ring. Because they took Bloodborne's fast combat, totally dropped the rally system and just sort of expect you to be better and deal with it. Annoying, stupid, foul in point of fact.

A small good thing that I quite like is the NPC questlines. Firstly, that they basically all end in despair no matter how you do them. Hey, that's cosmic horror for ya. But also they are all monumentally easy to complete. When you see an NPC, you speak to them. When they plan on going to an out-of-the-way area next that the player is unlikely to naturally go to...they tell you where they are going. It's wild stuff, I know, but there it is. There's some very slight weirdness if you advance the night too quickly. But that's only really an issue if you've totally missed an NPC wherever they're first at and you advance the night. The times where you need to do something non-obvious to continue one of the quests is very minimal in this game. So you know...good.

I think those are generally the big positives and negatives I can think of. I could talk more I'm sure, but it's just a good experience that I would happily pay again for if I could get it on PC.