I've had divergent experiences with Bloodborne every time I've played it. The first time, I found it aggravating; the second, I found it transcendent. This, my third, felt like a mix between the two. Bloodborne is a flawed game, and in some ways endlessly frustrating. But those flaws rise from its ambition, as one of the biggest swings a developer has ever taken.
I cannot identify a game with better level design than Bloodborne — the way its world interlocks with itself, transforming space and using verticality in a way that never makes sense until its moments of sudden clarity. But with that comes constant friction — some that works (fast-paced, hard-hitting combat), and some that really, really doesn't (needing to grind for healing and essential consumables). It's so deflating to lose a high-octane fight and realize that, rather than taking it on again, you need to spend 20 minutes grinding instead. With that, Bloodborne contains some of the worst, most boring bosses Fromsoft has ever made — and several of their best. The Old Hunters, Bloodborne's DLC, is a masterclass in game design. Narratively and aesthetically, it's a brilliant piece of cosmic horror that takes the genre's history of racism and xenophobia and uses that as fuel for a story about how the humans at its core — insular religious orders and guilds of hunters and cults of violence — are far more terrifying than anything its alien "Great Ones" ever do. On a visceral level, it still manages to make me jump — even though, next to something like Elden Ring, its performance issues are deeply frustrating.
But for me, Bloodborne's flawed ambitious are most clearly embodied in the chalice dungeons — an entire system that locks many of the game's most powerful combat options behind procedural generation and a series of quasi-roguelite dungeons. The chalice dungeons are entirely optional — and before this playthrough, I'd never engaged with the "root" chalices (i.e., the truly randomized ones). After running through all of them in this playthrough, at least one of each root, I can see in them the core of games like Returnal and Prey: Mooncrash, and occasionally, they're revelatory. But more often they're just frustrating. And that's Bloodborne — the power hitter of video games, unafraid of striking out in search of home runs.
I cannot identify a game with better level design than Bloodborne — the way its world interlocks with itself, transforming space and using verticality in a way that never makes sense until its moments of sudden clarity. But with that comes constant friction — some that works (fast-paced, hard-hitting combat), and some that really, really doesn't (needing to grind for healing and essential consumables). It's so deflating to lose a high-octane fight and realize that, rather than taking it on again, you need to spend 20 minutes grinding instead. With that, Bloodborne contains some of the worst, most boring bosses Fromsoft has ever made — and several of their best. The Old Hunters, Bloodborne's DLC, is a masterclass in game design. Narratively and aesthetically, it's a brilliant piece of cosmic horror that takes the genre's history of racism and xenophobia and uses that as fuel for a story about how the humans at its core — insular religious orders and guilds of hunters and cults of violence — are far more terrifying than anything its alien "Great Ones" ever do. On a visceral level, it still manages to make me jump — even though, next to something like Elden Ring, its performance issues are deeply frustrating.
But for me, Bloodborne's flawed ambitious are most clearly embodied in the chalice dungeons — an entire system that locks many of the game's most powerful combat options behind procedural generation and a series of quasi-roguelite dungeons. The chalice dungeons are entirely optional — and before this playthrough, I'd never engaged with the "root" chalices (i.e., the truly randomized ones). After running through all of them in this playthrough, at least one of each root, I can see in them the core of games like Returnal and Prey: Mooncrash, and occasionally, they're revelatory. But more often they're just frustrating. And that's Bloodborne — the power hitter of video games, unafraid of striking out in search of home runs.