Dark Souls’ sin was being born perfect. This isn’t to discount its spiritual prequel in Demon’s Souls or literal sequel in Dark Souls II, but rather highlight the difficult process of iterating upon virtue. Any successor is a solution in search of a problem, and one in desperate need of a thesis to spend time proving.
Enter Bloodborne, FromSoftware’s latest subscription to ideas explored and empowered in the Souls series of games. Its aim isn’t necessarily a course correction, but rather a Y-axis slant into an alternative series of objectives. In practice, Bloodborne is consumed with the notion of aggressive action, and it shapes its world to suit this very specific condition. Sacrificed are a few degrees of personal customization only to be replaced by a renewed sense of distress and wonder. Its relative novelty, even with its unrepentant focus, feels built to last.
Bloodborne’s opaque systems, for the uninitiated, require a primer. You’re a Hunter dropped off in the bewildering and immediately threatening world of Yharnam. It’s objectively an action/RPG hybrid, but Bloodborne’s unconventional assembly prefers patience and planning over a more traditional and frenzied direct assault. Making your way through the hostile streets and outskirts of Yharnam comes with risks not often carried by other games, and even basic concepts like leveling up or what stats even do aren’t immediately apparent. In all aspects of its operation, Bloodborne pleas for perseverance and determination.
Bloodborne’s defiance of Souls norms is instantly noticeable by choice of its mandatory sidearm. Shields, friends to both novice and veteran Souls players, have been replaced by guns. This seems preposterous. Players, myself included, built a certain operating repertoire in these games, and taking away a perceived foundation is enough to send even the most seasoned of folks into a panic. At first glance, removing shields from Bloodborne’s equation seems to be another paean to its antagonistic reputation or a gimmick employed for the simple objective of taking away everything that you know.
A better truth arrives after a bit of play. Bloodborne’s sidearms are tools intended for defense and indirect forms offense. Not only can pulling the trigger knock some enemies right out of their assigned animation (itself a drastic twist in PvP), but a properly timed interruption can leave your opponent in an instantly vulnerable state and open for a visceral, highly effective attack . Similar to the riposte mechanic in Souls, leveraging the Blunderbuss as a defense tool outweighs the benefit of its meager firepower. Other side weapons are available, including a more range-friendly pistol, a torch, and the sorriest excuse for a shield you’ve ever seen, but they all serve the same function; support mechanisms intended to aid the aggressive nature of Bloodborne’s melee-focused combat systems.
As Bloodborne carried on, so did my relationship with my gun. I tried other sidearms, but not seemed to have the reliability of my Blunderbuss. Early on it was essential for pushing away crowds and allowing me to separate and better engage those who made it through. As the game proceeded and I basically memorized every enemy attack pattern, it was in indispensable tool in efficient annihilation. In the end my Blunderbuss and its twenty bullets were a cache of chances to be distributed under both leisure and duress. The former when I was cruising through environments on the hunt for hidden areas, and the latter as a last-ditch effort in the face of certain doom.
The tiniest shift in dynamic just revels in potential, and this is thoroughly proven by Bloodborne’s “regain” mechanic. After you’re attacked by an enemy, you’re granted a limited window of time to instantly respond and regain lost health. It’s a precious couple of seconds before health gone permanently, effectively stomping the gas pedal on fight-or-flight reactions. Bloodborne, in both form and practice, rewards patience – but the lure of instantly correcting a mistake presents a tremendous risk and reward. After suffering a serious blow, my natural inclination, forged in hundreds of hours of Souls games, was to dodge-roll to safety and collect my bearings. In Bloodborne, a desire to take my health back rewrote my approach to otherwise familiar combat.
The regain mechanic also changed my approach to boss encounters. Souls is synonymous with patience, and anything that disrupts your mechanical harmony is poison to effective play. Repeatedly fighting bosses or scouring environments builds toward an engagement routine, and breaking that routine almost always ends in disaster. This is especially true in boss encounters, where the allure of an almost depleted health bar prompts the impatient to dive in for a few risky attacks – an endeavor that typically ends in mouth-agape failure. I thought I was over that idea in this sort of game, but then the regain mechanic came along and tempted me to throw it all away – and maybe strike at glory in the process.
A streamlined focus may seem counterintuitive to the open nature of Bloodborne’s predecessors, but in practice it comes off as a deliberate decision forged to banish a very specific problem. The cynic in me assumes FromSoftware watched too many Dark Souls Let’s Plays and became infuriated by the relative lack of skill in turtling away through every possible encounter. They responded by designing a game specifically to eradicate that style of play. I sincerely doubt that’s true, but it’s hard not to indulge in Bloodborne’s combat and feel like flight is ever a reasonable option over fight. The recognition that quickly builds under the lack of viable options propels mindful players to adapt to Bloodborne’s aggressive demands, and I got the feeling that’s what FromSoftware was planning all along. You’re here to learn something new, not relay on the safety of past experiences.
Bloodborne’s weapons are defined by various gimmicks, but all share a similar focus on melee-oriented combat. Most every weapon offers some form of transformation. The Saw Cleaver goes from a light and quick close-range saw to long(er) range pole axe. The Kirkhammer functions as a normal sword, until its transformation adds a giant mallet (and becomes two-handed, taking away the sidearm). Ludwig’s Holy Blade changes from a big sword to an even bigger sword, and the Tonitrus (a morning star) can be temporarily powered up with electricity. Light and heavy attacks compliment every weapon, and the transform button can be incorporated mid-combo to get in on the action. There’s also a charge option for the heavy attack, which is tremendously effective when combined with effective gun parrying.
I went with the Saw Cleaver as my starting weapon and used it for the entire game. It scaled well enough with my strength stat, and the gradation between shifting from light attacks and heavy attacks, with occasional transformations in-between, were just too good. Flipping the weapon open was also great for crowd control, and, when combined with my Blunderbuss, helped break almost every encounter down into a one-on-one battle. Shit got intensely more real plenty of times, of course, but I never felt like I wasn’t properly equipped to get the job done. Animation priority, properly timing your attacks against what you’re (fairly) sure the enemy will do, is still the preferred method of operation and the key to learning Bloodborne’s nuanced rhythm.
Bloodborne’s unflinching focus on melee combat may paralyze the ambitions of those used to a wealth of player customization options, but its deconstruction is in perfect service to its design. It got me thinking about the current state of Assassin’s Creed, a series, for better or worse, obligated to roll the snowball of mechanics into each iteration. It wastes time on options most will never embrace, and while a certain audience would wring absolutely everything out of every potential weapon or character-build, the relative tightness of the game’s design starts come apart at its seams. Bloodborne’s combat, on the other hand, is wound stiff without the constant threat of coming apart.
This line of thinking has also been carried over to Bloodborne’s character building system. Nine customizable stats have been cut down to six. Again, on its surface this information could drive the hardest of the core up a wall, but Bloodborne finds release in clarity. Few people know what in the world Adaptability really did in Dark Souls II, and the operating rule of Dark Souls was to never put points into Resistance. Which weapons scale with which stats were never immediately clear, and pairing them down to a more manageable number effectively cuts away the fat.
Over my sixty hour run, I dumped almost every point I earned into Vitality (health), Endurance (action bar), and Strength (a weapon stat that seemed to scale well with my Saw Cleaver). I only put points into Skill or Arcane, parallel weapon stats, so I could meet the minimum to test out new weapons. Bloodtinge, which governs the effectiveness of guns, was never adjusted because I didn’t quite understand what it was for. I built my character to swoop in, unleash a fury of quick swipes, and bail out before the enemy could respond. This probably would have been more effective had I gone with Skill-friendly Threaded Cane, but I managed just fine under my chosen path.
There’s still plenty of Souls ideals realized in Bloodborne. Souls, currency used to level-up your character and buy items at shops, are now Blood Echoes. Upon defeat, you still lose every unspent Blood Echo and the world completely repopulates itself. A twist is added in that, rather than remain stationary where you fell, lost Blood Echoes can be assumed by a nearby enemy. Their eyes will glow blue, and you’ll have to take them out to retrieve your Blood Echoes. Additionally, Bonfires, Dark Souls’ bastion of sanity and safety, have been repurposed as glowing purple lamp posts. All of these shifts in nomenclature were surely the result of publishing duties that officially separate Bloodborne from Dark Souls, but it all feels the same, regardless of what it’s being called.
If there’s any dissent in Bloodborne basic operations, its tied system of fast travel. The player (sort of) begins in Hunter’s Dream, a hub-area full of basic gameplay tips and, with time, kiosks to level up, repair and boost weapons, spend Blood Echoes, buy and sell items, and talk to an older Hunter and a sentient doll. It also has a couple gravestones that offer fast travel to different lands in Bloodborne. You can’t go directly from area to area, but rather you always have to return directly to Hunter’s Dream first. I get why Bloodborne is doing this – as comforting as Majula felt, the necessity of fast travel was a mark against Dark Souls II – but seems like one step too many in an otherwise arduous process. I had also established a different hub and rounded up a few NPC’s at the Cathedral Ward, calling into question the mechanical necessity of Hunter’s Dream.
Problems with Bloodborne’s fast travel interface are amplified by the absurdity of its load times. 30-40 seconds between zones is mildly acceptable on the premise that you probably aren’t going back to Hunter’s Dream that often. It’s only when you die and are forced to sit through nearly a minute of a plain black screen that your blood starts to boil. Given the trial-and-error nature of Bloodborne’s bosses, not to mention the death-run require to even get there, elongated loading screens utterly destroy rhythm and momentum. It’s terrible, and while Sony has publically committed to resolving this issue as quickly as they possibly can, its unfortunate that Bloodborne was allowed to ship in such a state.
Bloodborne is actively defiant of habits established by its peers. Its gothic-punk setting of Yharnam is one of the most evocative settings around, and it exhibits a triple threat despair, desolation, and trepidation with a minimal amount of modern amenities. NPC’s, as few as there are, aren’t signposts with lore dumps, but rather functioning invitations into Yharnam’s deeper mysteries. Every environment, despite a careful construction with highly specific mechanical requirements, is lived-in space with a story to tell. Compared to other games, Bloodborne’s hellscapes feel like the difference between the masterful cut of The Force Awakens teaser and the satirical George Lucas remix. FromSoftware knows exactly when to step on the gas without spinning wildly out of control.
This unspoken trust in the player extends to Bloodborne’s basic operation. Fragments of a tutorial feel like a step back from Dark Souls II’s more drawn out opening; learning on-the-job is a clear preference. Traditional sidequests don’t exist, there’s no map to reference and find your next objective, and arrows telling you when and where to go are thrown straight into the void. Instead, you look around and find things on your own. Critics might look at this and feel like Bloodborne is deliberately obfuscating information for the sake of trolling the player, but its intentions are far more thoughtful. Human beings traditionally learn by doing, and an exercise built to facilitate that philosophy stands a greater chance of establishing a meaningful connection with the player. Better stated, I did well in Bloodborne because I wanted to do well in Bloodborne.
Games with of the size and scope (and budget) of Bloodborne seem to go out of their way to please the player. A morphine drip of congratulations, mini-achievements, checklist distractions, and other superficial instances of unwarranted catharsis permeate nervous system of modern game design. By presenting the player with its world, providing the necessary tools to take it down, and trusting in the player can muster the resolve to make their way through, Bloodborne emerges as a far more rewarding experience. It’s the reason why taking down a boss is so gratifying; it’s manifestation of everything you’ve been trying to accomplish
The cost for Bloodborne’s level of personal empowerment is general accessibility. Every Souls game has this indelible barrier that’s an unabashed pain in the ass to conquer. Losing everything and finding the will to carry on begins as an obligation and ends as an endearing asset, but you don’t know that when you’re starting out. With experience, I know that Yharnam’s environments won’t go on forever, that every boss has a weakness worth finding, and that satisfaction is dutifully delayed until it’s value couldn’t be higher. Never mind a gross unfamiliarity with the basic tenets of Bloodborne, new players may not be able to summon the resolve to make it to the first boss. I don’t actually care about this because I’ve already earned on pass on the boat bound for paradise, but I recognize that others may take one look at what Bloodborne has to offer and see it as a ship set for oblivion. It’s not for everyone, and that’s OK.
Along with its extensive disregard for conventional civility, Bloodborne exercises plenty of design choices abandoned by its peers. Most prominent is its fondness for optional content, ranging from roughly half the game’s bosses to entirely one-off environments. The idea of a game of this scale spending the time and energy on unique environments with exclusive enemies and tuck it all away behind an intense veil of secrecy is baffling, and it calls to mind RPG’s of my youth like Grandia and Final Fantasy VI that could pull off the same trick with much lower stakes. Cainhurst Castle, specifically, houses one of the best dungeons Bloodborne has to offer, and its unique items and narrative contributions feel like meaningful content. Depending on your point of view, burying all of this away is either insane or genius, but I look more toward the latter.
It’s all easy to accept because I believe in everything Bloodborne is trying to tell me. I know that when I enter Old Yharnam, an asshole NPC Hunter in a tower is going to ceaselessly unload on me with a Gatling gun and I know the game will be designed in such a way that it allows me to avoid every bullet. I know that the infrequent nature of lamp posts is largely irrelevant because another shortcut is always around the corner. Exploring every angle of Yharnam is worth its weight in gold because Bloodborne refuses to waste any of its space. Every offshoot has value, and most of it, including loot, geographic awareness, or a myriad of hidden paths, offers some sort of advantage.
The whole game is basically an exhibition of thoughtful and concentrated design. This is visible not only by the way every level wraps around itself, but also in how the whole world of Yharnam performs the same trick. The connected world of Dark Souls’ Lordrun, largely abandoned in Dark Souls II’s more level-oriented Drangleic, makes a triumphant return in Bloodborne. It bleeds off a palpable consistency to its larger world, increasing personal imagination without losing touch with its internal mystique. Better, this idea isn’t limited to pure navigation, recruiting Bloodborne’s elusive narrative to help facilitate its unified world. Everything seems to be affected by the scourge ravaging Yharnam.
Not only is FromSoftware the master of disguising level design with believable scenery—Bloodborne’s levels don’t feel like levels, but rather lived-in or resolute narrative entries—but enemy design and placement feels explicitly constructed. With larger, open-world games like Skyrim, I always got the feeling Bethesda had just loaded generic caves with troves of enemies. Pure action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta have more purposeful encounters, but at the risk of condensing combat into a defined arena. Bloodborne allows its bosses the concession of a de facto arena, but enemy encampments are anything but. Nearly every area of every level has specific purpose in mind, and often a new way to challenge or develop player skill along the way.
The idea of an easily digestible plot also feels alien to Bloodborne’s intentions. Having finished the game (and, again, having been trained in Bloodborne’s nuanced delivery of narrative), I can see the through-line of the game’s plot, but I’m lost on some of its less affable pieces. Its capability to shock and surprise with insane context is supported by the confidence to explain itself twenty hours down the line, a feat no doubt aided through subtle alterations to Yharnam’s outdoor environments and a tonal shift in its underlying motivations. Toward its end, Bloodborne also drives a truck full of Lovcraftian weirdness into places you’d never expect and totally gets away with it.
If anything, tone and atmosphere leave a larger impact than Bloodborne’s opaque plot. The opening area of Central Yharnam is a ruined mess of Victorian architecture, and populated with leagues of disgraced humans whom seem to think their predicament is all your fault. Worse, cognizant citizens boarded up in their homes run the gamut of tangible fear and obscene celebration, and witnessing their gradual deterioration conveys an outlook bleak to its core. What Bloodborne loses in recognized coherence it gains in presenting a desolate atmosphere, and there’s never so much as a wink or nod in any other direction. A considerable amount of primal violence populates the action of Bloodborne, but drastic turns for the worse (especially with the character of Arianna) fill out its narrative underpinnings.
Scouring Yharnam is an alluring descent into exposing the unknown. Bloodborne’s reluctance to give away the finer points of its plot rely on tension and atmosphere to relay its fiction, a feat no doubt aided by temptation to go off the beaten path. Sometimes this results in an incredible, seemingly unscripted shortcut (my rooftop descent into the depths of Old Yharnam, for example is marvelous). Sometimes you’ll find a cave full of nightmarish horrors. On rarer occasions, Bloodborne takes a hard left turn straight into its own nightmares and drops the player off without explanation. Late in the game I was still finding previously unseen areas in the Cathedral Ward and Yahar’gul, and I walked away impressed with Bloodborne’s ability to obscure its tricks and reward my dedication to solving them.
Chalice Dungeons represent Bloodborne’s greatest design departure. From the Hunter’s Dream and after acquiring a series of chalices (which are won from bosses), the player can create a randomly generated, three-part dungeon. It’s populated with a winding series of increasingly aggressive enemies and features design elements not present in Yharnam. Some sections, featuring giant swinging pendulum axes and careful verticality, called to mind Sen’s Fortress from the original Dark Souls. Chalice Dungeon’s labyrinthine construction, general size, and enemy layout make it feel more like a Zelda dungeon that anything else. There’s nothing like it in Bloodborne proper, and unique weapons, a treasure chest of different bosses, and Blood Echoes for your character serve as an effective lure.
Whereas cooperative play or player-versus-player encounters had previously been restricted or encouraged in remote areas, Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons exist to facilitate it. They can be played with randoms or, with a custom password, accessible by your friends. This is actually a first for a Souls-styled game, as trying to trick its systems into playing with someone you actually know was always a chore. In the end, much like in the proper game, cooperative play still sort of feels like cheating, but it remains a comforting option in the face of absolute despair. For what it’s worth Bloodborne still supports summoning points before bosses and items that can be bought to invade other’s games, and aside from a fewer number of covenants to join, all of that stuff feels relatively familiar.
Plainly, Bloodborne issues a call for engagement neither heard nor addressed by its peers in the same medium. This is often misrepresented as a game that’s overly punishing or unfairly difficult, or a gift to a niche that craves masochistic punishment in their daily gaming habits. Garish pleasures aren’t really my thing, and I think Bloodborne is better illustrated as a respectable payout for time well invested. Like any investment it’s not going to work out for everyone, but patience and dedicated play should yield decent rewards – up to and including the bravado associated with vanquishing every last boss and seeing the credits roll.
Bloodborne ultimately demands its player to be always on and completely focused on the lessons it’s trying to teach. Some of these lessons are obscure and others are handled poorly, but once mastered Bloodborne transitions into a marvelous spectacle of consummate gratification; however you chose to walk down its path, you’ve personally earned the right to cross the finish line. This thesis was true of other Souls games, and it’s warmly embraced but differently interpreted and explored by Bloodborne’s menacing dissertation. Meeting its gaze requires informal confidence and measured persistence, but staring it and it the eyes and walk away the victor is among gaming’s more rewarding pleasures.
