Has a weird structure, beginning on a brutally hard note (the Ludwig fight), going narratively explicit in the middle, and finishing somewhere primal and hard again. Orphan of Kos is a great fight, and some of the environmental design is good, but I still have the same problem with Bloodborne: it's at once too vague to be satisfying and not abstract enough to work as a mood piece. Comparisons to the original Dark Souls are unfavourable - that was all about light and shadow and could be enjoyed as a kind of perverse origin myth, whereas this is more a series of disjointed setpieces with tenuous thematic connections. It's trying to evoke dream logic, which is at odds with the grounded, you-are-there nature of the gameplay. Which is maybe the point, but it doesn't always work for me. And fuck Laurence.