What is there to say about Bloodborne that hasn't already been said? So much has been said about this game I feel like I agree with nearly all of it. It's a game where the modern FromSoft formula had been solidified but they still wanted to experiment with it and see what they could play with while still holding onto what makes a FromSoft game a FromSoft game.
A couple of notes before I get into it: my previous 'Souls-like' experience is the Dark Souls trilogy and Code Vein but not much else. I made sure to get the secret ending. I beat all the base game bosses and three of the five DLC bosses. This review doesn't have much coherent flow to it as it's just a rambling series of thoughts on various bits and pieces of the game. Please enjoy.
One thing I feel like I should note, is that I feel like the difficulty of the game has been somewhat overstated. Or, at the very least, like the talk around it is a bit misleading. This isn't some "oh this game is so easy" proclamation, not at all. Before playing this game, I had been lead to believe that this game was centered around using the gun to parry which, would've been a miserable time for me because I am absolutely terrible at parry timing in every game that has it. But, outside of a few select enemies, you can cruise through the game without ever bothering with parrying. I mostly used the gun for pulling enemies or getting a cheeky 20 extra damage in here or there. So while I thought this game was going to be ludicrously hard for me, it ended up being comparable to any of the Souls games.
One of my favorite parts of modern FromSoft games, and the 'Souls-like' genre as a whole, is the very special sense of exploration I get with these games. It's not just about visiting a new place and seeing what's there, but the specific feeling I get when I can look back and see how an area wraps around on itself or connects to other areas. I build this map in my mind of what it all looks like and how one area connects to another and the moment of realization when I open a new shortcut and figure out where I've just gone back to is unparalleled. It's one of my favorite feelings in games and is one of the biggest reasons I enjoy FromSoft's Souls games. Bloodborne absolutely continues that and while some of the areas felt relatively small, it still delivered time after time.
Something that perplexes me about Bloodborne, though, is how FromSoft looked at their games and decided to un-solve some problems. The first of these things is Blood Vials. I feel like with Dark Souls 2 they had kind of nailed the way limited healing worked. You had your Estus Flask changes that refill endlessly whenever you rest plus consumable healing. It was a good balance. Bloodborne is that but minus the Flask aspect of it so if you ever ended up in a position where you ran out of Blood Vials, then you had to either risk pushing on with no healing or backtrack and farm. And, to me, this sort of FromSoft game isn't about farming. Farming is never the solution. It may be beneficial and you could use it to get a leg up here or there but there never comes a time when you need to go farm something. It was a problem with the various healing grasses in Demon's Souls that they figured out better options for in the Dark Souls games and yet with Bloodborne they went back again. Normally I can look at something like this and see some reason why a developer might make this sort of change even if I disagree with it but in this case it feels like a step backwards for no benefit at all. It doesn't make for any interesting tension and just adds the potential for frustration. Just make the stash in the Hunter's Dream have infinite vials, problem solved. You maintain the limited healing but are never going to force someone to farm for more. A bizarre problem to re-add to the game.
On a related note, the way fast travel works is also a strange step backwards. It's a relatively minor thing, but having to travel to the Hunter's Dream and then to the lantern you want instead of directly from lantern to lantern is a bit tedious. And if you accidentally travel to the wrong place? May god have mercy on your soul.
On another, different, related note, I think there's a particular elegance to the flow of a FromSoft game. You know how I said you never really need to farm? I think it's pretty crucial to the way their games work. As long as you clear an area without losing too many Souls (or Blood Echoes or whatever) then you can probably level up and upgrade your equipment enough to safely move on to the next area without too much trouble. It's an important bit of design work that goes mostly unnoticed until you stop and think about it more.
The way Bloodborne encourages aggression is really fascinating. There's the obvious things they do such as the 'rally' mechanic of regaining a portion of your lost health by attacking after you've been hit or the lack of shields or heavy armor (and the one time you do get a shield, the description is a jab at the idea of blocking). But there are some other, more subtle ways they do it as well. What I found is that with quite a few of the bosses, there are attacks that it's better to move towards the boss rather than to try and back away or dodge out of danger. It's a minor thing but it's a very clever bit of design. They want you to push the attack and to be on the offensive and are looking at each aspect of the game and saying "how can we encourage this particular play style while still allowing people options?" It's very smart game design on their part.
Chalice Dungeons are an interesting idea that I found to be dreadfully boring. I like exploring areas. I like figuring out the weird lore. I like seeing interesting sights. So having a series of dungeons that are the same handful of tiles repeated over and over with little to no reward to them beyond more Blood Echoes is perhaps the most tedious thing they could've done. So even though I only did a few before I tapped out on those, I do hope they iterate on the ideas here in some way in a future game. I will say that I was surprised at how much unique asset work there was in those areas. The enemies, the areas themselves, and the bosses were entirely new from the base game. I was expecting it to be similar to the Depths from Code Vein where it was content from the main path of the game being recycled and remixed into little dungeons. So that at least was a welcome surprise.
Something that I was a bit surprised by was how, about halfway through my playthrough, I felt disappointed by the amount of items in the game and, more specifically, looting items off of enemies. In the Dark Souls games, getting an item drop from an enemy is always interesting. Maybe it's a weapon buff item or maybe it an upgrade material! Maybe it's a consumable item to heal a status ailment or maybe it's a new kind of hat! Sure, most of that stuff just gets thrown in a stash or sold for souls but a thing I like in RPGs is getting loot from stuff. Bloodborne feels like it really pared down the amount and variety of items in a way that makes a lot of logical sense, there is still an illogical part of me that is like "yeah but I like getting two dozen worthless swords".
A note about the DLC: Lady Maria is my wife and we were married atop the Astral Clocktower after she romantically ran me through with her sword and spilled my blood across the floorboards and left me there, bleeding to death.
More seriously, I really enjoyed how the DLC started off with an area that is familiar but also changed and how it plays with your knowledge of the area. My favorite specific example of this is at one point in that opening area, you find the building that is relatively early in the game that has an item on the ground and an old man in a chair that, when you pick up the item, he attacks you. You probably know the one I'm talking about. In the base game, you can go from that building to find a shortcut to a lantern. So when you get there in the DLC, you might think "oh, maybe there's a lantern near here, neat." And the thing is, there is a lantern nearby. But if you take the path that the you would in the base game, there isn't a lantern but instead there's a hunter who really wants to fuck you up. It's a great moment that only comes about because of how memorable the first area is and how the DLC plays with your memories of it.
The DLC definitely had one of my top moments. I got to the Living Failures fight and barely beat them on the first go in a very close fight. So to ride that high into the Lady Maria fight immediately after that felt great. I didn't care about how much she murdered me because it was such a stellar session of gaming to have those fights back to back like that. Incredibly fun pair of fights.
So, that's it. I'm happy to have finally checked this one off my backlog of games after staring at it sitting on my shelf for three or four years now. I'm not sure if I'll ever play it again (I rarely replay games these days) but I'm more than content with my time spent in the world of Yharnam and beyond.
I think this one is a four star game? It's damn close to five, though. Maybe my opinion will change with time as I think back on the game.
A couple of notes before I get into it: my previous 'Souls-like' experience is the Dark Souls trilogy and Code Vein but not much else. I made sure to get the secret ending. I beat all the base game bosses and three of the five DLC bosses. This review doesn't have much coherent flow to it as it's just a rambling series of thoughts on various bits and pieces of the game. Please enjoy.
One thing I feel like I should note, is that I feel like the difficulty of the game has been somewhat overstated. Or, at the very least, like the talk around it is a bit misleading. This isn't some "oh this game is so easy" proclamation, not at all. Before playing this game, I had been lead to believe that this game was centered around using the gun to parry which, would've been a miserable time for me because I am absolutely terrible at parry timing in every game that has it. But, outside of a few select enemies, you can cruise through the game without ever bothering with parrying. I mostly used the gun for pulling enemies or getting a cheeky 20 extra damage in here or there. So while I thought this game was going to be ludicrously hard for me, it ended up being comparable to any of the Souls games.
One of my favorite parts of modern FromSoft games, and the 'Souls-like' genre as a whole, is the very special sense of exploration I get with these games. It's not just about visiting a new place and seeing what's there, but the specific feeling I get when I can look back and see how an area wraps around on itself or connects to other areas. I build this map in my mind of what it all looks like and how one area connects to another and the moment of realization when I open a new shortcut and figure out where I've just gone back to is unparalleled. It's one of my favorite feelings in games and is one of the biggest reasons I enjoy FromSoft's Souls games. Bloodborne absolutely continues that and while some of the areas felt relatively small, it still delivered time after time.
Something that perplexes me about Bloodborne, though, is how FromSoft looked at their games and decided to un-solve some problems. The first of these things is Blood Vials. I feel like with Dark Souls 2 they had kind of nailed the way limited healing worked. You had your Estus Flask changes that refill endlessly whenever you rest plus consumable healing. It was a good balance. Bloodborne is that but minus the Flask aspect of it so if you ever ended up in a position where you ran out of Blood Vials, then you had to either risk pushing on with no healing or backtrack and farm. And, to me, this sort of FromSoft game isn't about farming. Farming is never the solution. It may be beneficial and you could use it to get a leg up here or there but there never comes a time when you need to go farm something. It was a problem with the various healing grasses in Demon's Souls that they figured out better options for in the Dark Souls games and yet with Bloodborne they went back again. Normally I can look at something like this and see some reason why a developer might make this sort of change even if I disagree with it but in this case it feels like a step backwards for no benefit at all. It doesn't make for any interesting tension and just adds the potential for frustration. Just make the stash in the Hunter's Dream have infinite vials, problem solved. You maintain the limited healing but are never going to force someone to farm for more. A bizarre problem to re-add to the game.
On a related note, the way fast travel works is also a strange step backwards. It's a relatively minor thing, but having to travel to the Hunter's Dream and then to the lantern you want instead of directly from lantern to lantern is a bit tedious. And if you accidentally travel to the wrong place? May god have mercy on your soul.
On another, different, related note, I think there's a particular elegance to the flow of a FromSoft game. You know how I said you never really need to farm? I think it's pretty crucial to the way their games work. As long as you clear an area without losing too many Souls (or Blood Echoes or whatever) then you can probably level up and upgrade your equipment enough to safely move on to the next area without too much trouble. It's an important bit of design work that goes mostly unnoticed until you stop and think about it more.
The way Bloodborne encourages aggression is really fascinating. There's the obvious things they do such as the 'rally' mechanic of regaining a portion of your lost health by attacking after you've been hit or the lack of shields or heavy armor (and the one time you do get a shield, the description is a jab at the idea of blocking). But there are some other, more subtle ways they do it as well. What I found is that with quite a few of the bosses, there are attacks that it's better to move towards the boss rather than to try and back away or dodge out of danger. It's a minor thing but it's a very clever bit of design. They want you to push the attack and to be on the offensive and are looking at each aspect of the game and saying "how can we encourage this particular play style while still allowing people options?" It's very smart game design on their part.
Chalice Dungeons are an interesting idea that I found to be dreadfully boring. I like exploring areas. I like figuring out the weird lore. I like seeing interesting sights. So having a series of dungeons that are the same handful of tiles repeated over and over with little to no reward to them beyond more Blood Echoes is perhaps the most tedious thing they could've done. So even though I only did a few before I tapped out on those, I do hope they iterate on the ideas here in some way in a future game. I will say that I was surprised at how much unique asset work there was in those areas. The enemies, the areas themselves, and the bosses were entirely new from the base game. I was expecting it to be similar to the Depths from Code Vein where it was content from the main path of the game being recycled and remixed into little dungeons. So that at least was a welcome surprise.
Something that I was a bit surprised by was how, about halfway through my playthrough, I felt disappointed by the amount of items in the game and, more specifically, looting items off of enemies. In the Dark Souls games, getting an item drop from an enemy is always interesting. Maybe it's a weapon buff item or maybe it an upgrade material! Maybe it's a consumable item to heal a status ailment or maybe it's a new kind of hat! Sure, most of that stuff just gets thrown in a stash or sold for souls but a thing I like in RPGs is getting loot from stuff. Bloodborne feels like it really pared down the amount and variety of items in a way that makes a lot of logical sense, there is still an illogical part of me that is like "yeah but I like getting two dozen worthless swords".
A note about the DLC: Lady Maria is my wife and we were married atop the Astral Clocktower after she romantically ran me through with her sword and spilled my blood across the floorboards and left me there, bleeding to death.
More seriously, I really enjoyed how the DLC started off with an area that is familiar but also changed and how it plays with your knowledge of the area. My favorite specific example of this is at one point in that opening area, you find the building that is relatively early in the game that has an item on the ground and an old man in a chair that, when you pick up the item, he attacks you. You probably know the one I'm talking about. In the base game, you can go from that building to find a shortcut to a lantern. So when you get there in the DLC, you might think "oh, maybe there's a lantern near here, neat." And the thing is, there is a lantern nearby. But if you take the path that the you would in the base game, there isn't a lantern but instead there's a hunter who really wants to fuck you up. It's a great moment that only comes about because of how memorable the first area is and how the DLC plays with your memories of it.
The DLC definitely had one of my top moments. I got to the Living Failures fight and barely beat them on the first go in a very close fight. So to ride that high into the Lady Maria fight immediately after that felt great. I didn't care about how much she murdered me because it was such a stellar session of gaming to have those fights back to back like that. Incredibly fun pair of fights.
So, that's it. I'm happy to have finally checked this one off my backlog of games after staring at it sitting on my shelf for three or four years now. I'm not sure if I'll ever play it again (I rarely replay games these days) but I'm more than content with my time spent in the world of Yharnam and beyond.
I think this one is a four star game? It's damn close to five, though. Maybe my opinion will change with time as I think back on the game.