It frustrates more than it impresses. The sacrifices to make this game feel more archaic are just baffling. I get it, the point is to make the game look like an old, charming, busted-ass PS1 game. Did it have to play like one too?

You know what the PS1 had? The Dualshock. Which had plenty of buttons and sticks to map almost ALL of PS4 Bloodborne's functions verbatim. But since the goal is to make this game play like a game with a limited controls, what were simple actions in PS4 Bloodborne will now sometimes require multiple steps to achieve. Remember how convenient it was to have a button for your equipped quick slot items, and a dedicated button for healing? Goodbye to that, they're the same button now, which means they all occupy the same quick use slots that you have to scroll through, based on what you need. Even keys will have to occupy these same slots, so what was once as simple as even opening a door is now a test of your patience. First you go up to the door that says it is locked by a key. Now take a trip into the start menu, then scroll down to your items, scroll over to the key you want, then equip the key to one of your quick slots (2 rats you did not notice before pausing are now biting you in the ass during this process), now unpause the game (kill the fucking rats), then in-game switch past all your other items to the key you want, and NOW you can open the door. This should not be a thing at all. Just have the door say (You used the **** Key). Even the first Resident Evil got that right!

Your character's movement is also more limited. No more stick, so movement is done with the d-pad. But even if you manually map the controls the way they would be on PS4 to a USB controller with 2 sticks, it still does not feel the same. Dodging around agile enemies is now very finicky where it was not before. Dodging away from enemy attacks or through them is a 50/50 gamble. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And yet, nobody told the enemies that your movement was limited! Be prepared to be stunlocked by extremely fast dogs, werewolves and rats with obnoxiously long reaching attacks, over and over again. And then, some enemies are totally comatose, like the cleric beast. He barely fights back. And some enemies just vibrate and jitter around like their movement is bugged.

And bugs aplenty too. I visceral attacked an enemy on the stairs, which put me through the stairs and I was stuck. Doors you unlock with levers will often become locked again as soon as you walk through them, meaning you will have to go the long way around AGAIN and hope when you pull the lever this time, it will stick. Sometimes gates appear like they are up and you are able to walk under them, only for you to be blocked by an invisible wall when you try. Very frustrating.

I want to like this game. I know it is a labor of love. The people involved love Bloodborne and have worked hard to get everything just right. The visuals and music and sounds all are just the way they should be to hit that PS1 nostalgia spot in your brain, and that took a lot of effort. But at the end of the day Bloodborne PSX is a game, and I didn't have fun playing it.

A really cool little demake of what is now one of my favourite games. Hard to rate since it feels like a short and sweet passion project but I had a lot of fun playing it after my recent obsession with the series.

I hope to see more games come along in this style because I really think it has a lot to offer. Same way we always see a lot of 2D pixel art styles, i’d love to see more games going for that retro / early 3D look. Interestingly, I think it particularly serves bloodborne’s dark, twisted aesthetic. It even managed to unsettle me at times with that fuzzy, crunchy ps1 vibe, short render distances, warped textures & these small touches of imperfection which gave it real charm and a nostalgic feel.

Would have been really cool to see cathedral ward but what we got is a demake of some of the best first few hours in gaming history and it adds its own spin on things too. The familiarity of everything is still there and I was really surprised at how much they managed to replicate the game feel with things like the rally system, landing parries and viscerals and using items, it all carried over from playing bloodborne. Plus I do think the new boss and new area that they came up with is really cool and unique while still very much feeling like a legitimate part of the world. Having the night ‘turn deep’ and cutting off fast travel and then forcing the player back to the beginning was such a neat idea to round it all off.

Its Nightmare Creatures aesthetic and a surprising amount of content make this well worth playing beyond its novelty factor.

The one real downside is that the controls are retro to a fault: no analog support whatsoever, with movement being entirely handled via the d-pad and camera by the triggers. Depending on which controller you'll be using this can be fine (Playstation) or absolutely miserable (Xbox), as d-pads vary greatly in quality. This would definitely benefit from a Steam release to make use of the advanced controller API's to sidestep the problem.

What we have is a proper PS1-style demake of the first few hours of Bloodborne: from the start to Father Gascoigne and back through an unexpectedly revisited Central Yarnham and an entirely original dungeon and final boss. It's all really good and faithful, with a host of graphical tweaks to make the experience as authentically retro as you like, from frame rate by default capped at 20 (optionally up to unlimited), dithering, CRT effects and more. Someone who has never heard of Bloodborne would really feel like playing a long-lost Nightmare Creatures 3, and a far superior one to its predecessors.

Game design makes some naive mistakes, such as handling trick weapon transformation from within a (non-pausing) Tomb Raider-style menu, which makes switching completely unusable in combat, the intentionally cumbersome key management or foregoing the item storage chest, which limits the total number of vials and bullets to 20, forcing a bit of a grind after a boss fight, of which there are three.

All issues that could easily be fixed in a (hopefully planned) revision, and which do not hamper the experience too much. This is a genuinely new way to experience Bloodborne from a new perspective and worthy of being played unironically.

In February 1997, I remember stumbling upon a PS1 game in my local blockbuster with a haunting cover. A fog filled town, zombie-like villagers roaming about, with the giant presence of a vicious werewolf with blood dripping from its terrible fangs. Almost nobody had ever heard of the game at the time. I was lucky that my now late brother had decided to pick up the game at a whim one day without our mother's permission. At around midnight, I was curled up in my bedsheets as I watched my brother play Bloodborne.

A short masterpiece, Bloodborne picks apart the psyche of the player as they dangerously go through the game. At first, my brother was infuriated at the game due to its difficulty. He kept blaming it on the controller, or the enemies being cheap. One time he tried to give the controller to me, but I was too much of a baby at the time to play. Though there was something about the difficulty that made every moment more intense than the last. Checkpoints were scarce, resources even scarcer. Every corner felt like danger was lurking, and I would often see my brother jumping at the littlest of things all too often. The pixelated graphics and low draw distance made enemies and danger hard to see, which meant that we had to be paying attention at all times.

To be honest, I still don't know how the developers pulled off this kind of look with the PS1. 1997 gave us Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy VII, yet I had never seen anything quite like Bloodborne. Extremely violent, yet oddly beautiful. The graphics and sound were absolutely incredible. Enemies were grotesque and struck fear directly towards our hearts. Spaces in the town of Yharnam felt very closed and claustrophobic, and pressure was felt in our throats as everyone in the town were always out to get us. Specifically, the part with all the villagers by the burning cross really got to my brother. He kept dying over and over...until eventually he just started getting it. Like he attuned with the night, my brother started getting through the game like it was a second language. He dodged enemies at the right times, learnt mechanics that I had never quite seen in a video game up until then. An experience beyond words.

I'll never forget the time when we went through a loading screen on the Great Bridge to encounter the Cleric Beast for the first time. I nearly screamed and woke up my parents. My brother was all too focused, and despite everything managed to beat it on his first try. Frankly, I'll never forget the screams of that creature. Gascoigne was something else, that intro cutscene still plays in my head as an adult working at a newspaper company. The slow swing of his axe and his cold breath gave me goosebumps. When he transformed into a beast, I stood up with excitement as my brother focused. That boss took us a good number of tries...And the ending was something else entirely. Something so beautiful and haunting, that I will refuse to spoil the surprise for anybody who hasn't seen it yet.

Me and my brother started Bloodborne at midnight and finished it at dawn. We were both so tired, we accidentally slept through the entire Monday. Our parents were mad, but luckily they never found out what we were playing that night. With that, it's no exaggeration for me to say that Bloodborne is a masterpiece. It might have been short, but it also chilled to the bone. And the fond experience I had shared with my brother before he fell into a pit of hot tar will stick with me forever. Yet, I had seen almost no discussion of the game online aside from a very few forums talking about it. My only guess was that the cover and content of the game was too horrific back then, prompting major retailers to pull it from the shelves.

With that being said, I was shocked to find out in E3 2014 that the game would get a full remake. A game so obscure that almost nobody had heard of it; it was being born again. Bloodborne on PS4...I couldn't believe it, the years have finally caught up to me. It had been years since my brother died, and with that Bloodborne slowly became a distant memory to me. It's back. Bloodborne is back.

It was incredibly disappointing. To be fair, they added much more to the game, which I felt like must have been the creator's original intention. Despite that, the game could not carry the same charm that the original had. Almost all of the loading screens have been replaced with a seamless world which breaks up the simple fear of waiting for what the game had in store next. There was no more low draw distance, so threats could be seen a mile away. Instead of a horror experience that broke boundaries, it ended up being just another action game. It did not help that the game was incredibly easy. The parry window of the gun was made much more forgiving, which made many of the challenges trivial at best. And the plot was just confusing! There was a spider thing, a guy in a stupid cage, aliens?? They changed Winter Lanterns to be regular enemies which was just cruel, and they scrapped the original ending so the main character can turn into a slug. Pathetic. This is not Bloodborne, not the one I knew, not the one me and my brother played together before he fell in that pit of hot tar. It's a shame that people don't see it that way, but I guess mediocrity sells this day and age.

At least I was lucky enough to play this game again with the recent PC fan port. My first time playing it, and I felt like a kid again. I was so giddy playing it that I woke up my wife who had been sleeping in a separate room. She was a little upset haha. Either way, I'll always love you Bloodborne.

~ To my late brother, Frank

Just an insanely cool fanwork, and a very successful reworking of turning Bloodborne into a PSX game. If you've played the beginning of Central Yharnam, everything you would know and expect is there, and just seeing all the sights in glorious 32 bits, and the fun reworkings of now classic tracks into midi songs is a delight. I appreciate the new content added to the game as well, it made for a fun little surprise.

Not much more to add, I think Lilith Walther should be proud of what she's accomplished here, even just this snippet of game must've taken quite a while to get just right and she nailed it. And it made for an excellent evening experience with my friends!

I enjoy the dev's aesthetics and her fun lil posts online more than I enjoyed playing this game, which is a shame because visually it's out of the park! It just is clunkier than most ps1 games I can think of. The gamefeel is similar to a bad memory of a really shitty bargain bin adventure game feel which OG Bloodborne is not.

But honestly fan project wise and in terms of actual understanding of PS1 limitations, it is very faithful to that. A fun thing to look at but trying to just go through it for full completion, I do not recommend.

A oportunidade única de poder jogar o meu jogo favorito pela primeira vez de novo. Tudo é bastante expandido, o esgoto agora é uma área inteira a explorar, a casa que leva até a ponte agora possui um porão macabro e as ruas da cidade levam a novos cantos. Ainda na parte do conteúdo novo, a mansão do Gilbert é incrível, um ambiente fechado, que reserva o maior susto do jogo, além de um boss inteiramente novo com uma apresentação simplesmente espetacular dele se rompendo das amarras enquanto as janelas explodem. Todo o aspécto estético do jogo é sublime, destaque para a iluminação e os modelos dos inimigos. Uma linda homenagem a um dos melhores jogos já feitos.