"Beasts all over the shop... You'll be one of them, sooner or later..."

There are many reason to love bloodborne. The viscerally engaging combat system that is simple yet satisfying, the brilliant level design that is complex and rewarding, the raw-ass enemy and boss design, the stellar art direction that perfectly encaptulates the victorian gothic feel(seriously the graphics of this game simply cannot age, I'll be looking 50 years from now at this game and I would still say it's jaw-dropping), the fucking banger soundtrack, the general story and its characters. This game just has it all. But I want now to focus on one aspect of this game, the one that I consider the best thing this game does, the lovecraftian horror

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"In case you've failed to realize...
The things you hunt, they're not beasts. They're people."

The game starts off as just a gothic horror game and does a good job hiding its true intentions and themes for the first half of the game or so. Heck even the trailers didn't capitalise on the cosmic horror aspect which makes the reveal all the more compelling. But it's not random. The game gives you small breadcrumbs that can be easily spotted by people who know the game well but for new players it will go right over them still creating a sense of surprise in them when it is revealed.
To change subject a bit, this game has a phenomenal roaster of npcs. From the terribly kind chapel dweller, to the maniacal but understandable suspicious begger, to the misterious Eileen the Crow it has plenty of unique and interesting characters to talk and interact with. But the best of them has to be Djura. A powder keg hunter that was once just like the player but came to the odd realization that the things he killed were more than just mindles beasts. And it isn't just pulled out of the games ass for some cheap symphathy, oh no. If you just stop and listen in Old Yharnam whenever you want, you can softly hear the beasts cry and weep while hinding in corners. You can perfectly understand why he feels this way and why he has to protect them to make up for killing so many of them in the past. Games are at their best when they combine gameplay and narrative into one and this game does this flawlessly

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"We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open..."

Now to cut back to the aspect I like the most about this game. Video games and cosmic horror have a quite rough relationship. Some attempts have been made but almost none were very successful. Mostly due to them just ripping HP Lovecrafts mythos with no though or deeper understanding of the source material. Also if you remove the lovecraftian aspect, they are pretty shit games on their own. Bloodborne is still an excellent game without them and a true masterpiece with. It does a couple of things to differentiate itself from the rest, mostly by actually putting the work to create its own mythos and abominations. It's cosmic horror, unarguably, but it's still feels fresh and unique. On a surface-level, it seems like the game is a contradiction, you kill the things that are supposed to be eldrich, unreachable, horrors? But then you realize, are the things I kill truly great ones, or just mere rejects? Lesser great ones or literally "left behinds"? The NIGHTMARE SLAIN title appears only in 3 distinct locations. One is after Mergo's Wet Nurse is defeated and Mergo stops crying, another after hitting the spirit of the Orphan of Kos and the last after the Moon Presence. Are these the true great ones or are they just puppets controlled by them? This game fundamentally understands cosmic horror and takes full advantage of it.
The enviromental horror isn't far behind either. One of the scariest moments in bloodborne for me is seeing the corpses in yarha'gul and realizing they are just men, women and children trying to run away from.........something. The game doesn't say anything more about this. It just lets you imagine what happened. It goes hand in hand with the brief storytelling of the game by creating a real sense of unknown and mistery. Or how as the night goes on the citizens start to go mad the simply vanish with no trace whatsoever when the blood moon falls. Or how when you say to the gatekeeper the pasword to access the forbidden woods but when you open the door he is long dead. This doesn't make the game scary, it makes it fucking terrifying.
The funny thing is that before this game I never really cared about lovecraftian horror all that much but after completing it, it's BY FAR my favorite kind of horror. I even bought a book with the entire fiction Lovecraft made lol.

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"As you once did for the Vacuous Rom... Grant us eyes, Grant us eyes! Plant eyes on our brains to cleanse our beastly idiocy!"

Bloodborne has a lot of excellent areas, and I mean A LOT, everybody knows that, but my favorite one has to be Nightmare of Mensis. A couple of reasons why:

Fantastic level design
Solid enemy variety
Thick atmosphere
The best enviromental hazard in the series
Intriguing lore

There are so many more things about this area. The Brain of Mensis, Mergo itself, the winter lanters which have my vote for most terrifying enemy in the souls series, both mechanically and design-wise, Micolash and his fascinating dialogue. The fact that Mergo's Wet Nurse ost is a fucking lullaby and it works so wonderfully is outstanding. One of my absolute favorite moments in all of gaming is just simply looking at the giant pale moon in the sky in the area. Just blindly starring and thinking about this whole game and what it means to me

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"Ah, sweet child of Kos, returned to the ocean. A bottomless curse, a bottomless sea. Accepting of all that there is, and can be."

Will try to keep it brief here since I aready made a separate review for the dlc but safe to say this is one of the best dlcs ever, if not the best. It has 3 incredibly well designed areas, 4 of the best bosses in the game, fixed the weapon variety issue from the main game, new interesting lore and some of the best music fromsoftware ever composed. Legendary.


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"Tonight, Gehrman joins the hunt..."

When I first played the game, Gehrman was underwhelming to me for some reason. Maybe he was too easy, or I didn't understand the lore but now I want to take it all back, he's one of bloodborne's best bosses. The emotions, the music, the gorgeous arena, the fight itself, it's all majestic.
In conclusion, bloodborne is my favorite game of all time and my favorite piece of media I've ever had the pleasure of consuming. It's an artistically rich, superbly designed game and I am forever grateful for playing it. This doesn't mean it's perfect(chalice dungeons are a complete waste of time, the build variety is kinda shallow, the healing system is good but inferior to estus and some technical issues that could be fixed in a pc remaster port that will probably never happen) but I don't care honestly, it's very dear and close to my heart and soul.

I love you, Bloodborne

Reviewed on Aug 31, 2022


4 Comments


1 year ago

Zased review

1 year ago

Appreciate it, Mr. Mad!

1 year ago

Based

1 year ago

based