Bloodborne - Review
Editor’s note: I have since changed a lot of opinions about this game and you can read about my regret towards my initial opinions here:
I cannot think of another game that I have started and stopped more times before finally beating it than Bloodborne. Despite all the things that were upsetting me about the game, causing me to give up and put it away for months at a time, I finally sat down as saw it through to the end. In most instances, once I stop playing a game and call it quits, I don’t pick it up again with even more determination to complete it. However, my stubborn nature and my adoration for the other games created by the developer, From Software, propelled me to see the game to its conclusion. Upon finally beating it, I was still compelled to see more of it, despite my ever-increasing grumbling. I love this game, but I also resent it. I am torn over how I feel about it as a whole. I wish I could enjoy it unconditionally, but I simply cannot.
The Short of It
What I’ve Played
2 complete playthroughs of single-player campaign, start to finish with 2 separate endings
Old Hunters DLC content
Pros
World design, creature design, atmosphere, and aesthetic are all at the top of their class in Bloodborne; if this were the only part of the game I could rank, it would be the best that From Software has ever done
Abilities and weapons are cool and interesting, as always
Voice-acting sells the insanity of the world with some of the best performances in a From Software game so far
Same Souls-style storytelling with lots of hints and clues scattered throughout the world for those interested enough to find them
Entire sections of the game can be skipped, leaving room for exploration in multiple playthroughs
Cons
Weapons aren’t as fun to use as they look
Reposte ability is too finicky and causes frustration
Hitboxes and invincibility frames are much less acceptable/consistent than Souls games, it seems
Loot and item reward loop for exploration is weak in comparison to other games
Chalice dungeons and some areas are just lame and boring environments
Cached button-presses and on-the-ground mechanics lead to some incredibly frustrating moments
Progression can be too obscure at times
Load times and fast-travel are not as convenient as was already accomplished in the first Dark Souls
Blood vial and bullet management is annoying
The Rest of It
Lore and World
The town of Yarnham was once an incredibly prosperous one, thanks to a revelation regarding blood transfusions that could seemingly heal every disease in this fantasy Victorian-era landscape. The economy of the town boomed, allowing for the population to grow exponentially and for the town to quickly become a massive city with multiple districts, displaying incredible feats of Gothic architecture and artistic talent. Yarnham was doing splendidly, except for the occasional moments when beasts would wander in, drawn to the blood, requiring hunters to capture and kill them. Oh wait, those beasts were once people who have been transformed by the qualities in the blood that they were using in the transfusions. What exactly was in that blood? Could have been a lot of things—something from an Eldritch elder god, perhaps. Regardless of what may have been in the blood, the entire city has gone to hell, and a random outsider (the player) in search of something called The Paleblood has arrived and become a makeshift hunter trying to survive the nightmare.
Bloodborne’s story is as vague as the other Souls games with a lot of history and lore to discover through dialogue with characters, and through descriptions of items found or purchased throughout the world. If you’re interested, there’s plenty of lore to discover that is well-written and extremely intriguing. If you’re not interested, you barely have to engage with it. There’s a lot to do and see in Bloodborne, plenty of which can be missed or skipped entirely. From Software is known for doing this sort of thing with their games, which is part of why I’m always eager to try them out. They’ve been more than willing to put small moments or entire sections of their games in obscure spots that you could very easily miss. This not only makes the world feel more cohesive as a whole, but it also just makes the game that much more interesting and worth exploring after beating the main storyline.
However, unlike their previous games, in which the story path and progression usually could be discovered rather quickly, Bloodborne tends to get a little too obscure at times. Other than in Demon’s Souls where the hub connected to different worlds and the next place you needed to go was right in front of you, there were always moments in the Souls games in which I would get a little lost about where to go next. This was rarely a real hindrance though, as the path to completion was rarely hidden or locked behind a door that needed a key that would be difficult to locate. Bloodborne follows the same format, but is less helpful about pointing you in the right direction.
There are a lot of dead ends in this game. Some of the dead ends give you items, which, in other games, would normally be a key to a gate you saw somewhere, or an item you knew you needed but you didn’t have before. This is true for Bloodborne in some instances. In other instances, reaching a dead end will give you an item like a chalice, which just leads you on a wild good chase into another dungeon if you don’t know any better. Sometimes, reaching a dead end causes something in the world to change without explicitly telling you. I was able to figure it all out eventually without looking it up on the internet (most of the time), but this was the most lost I’ve ever felt in any of the games From Software has made. When you reach the end of a path and then a door opens somewhere without telling you, which seemingly has nothing to do with the completion of that path, it can be frustrating trying to figure out where you need to go next.
It is also frustrating when you open up and explore a Chalice dungeon, without realizing that you’re not actually making progress, even though it’s the most logical thing to do when you find a chalice as a reward for defeating a difficult boss at the end of a long path. I’ve always felt the Souls games were great examples of intuitive game design: requiring players to use their brains and look for clues using logic. This is still true in the smaller areas where shortcuts loop back around and help build the world as a big cohesive whole. However, Bloodborne has multiple moments in which I was led astray and just had to stumble around until I could move on. When your games are as difficult as Bloodborne and Dark Souls, and when progressing in the game requires analog exploration, it’s crucial to be able to convey to players when they’re heading in the right or wrong direction without allowing too much frustration to take hold and prevent progress. Bloodborne, in my opinion, fails to do so in certain spots, which is not consistent in how other Souls-like games have done it before or since Bloodborne’s release.
Mechanics & Gameplay
This is where a majority of my issues with Bloodborne rear their head. It’s also where I am the most torn. On the one hand, I am extremely intrigued with the game and its combat, which makes me want to keep playing it and experimenting with different playstyles and weaponry, like I’ve done in the Souls games. On the other hand, there are specific traits about Bloodborne’s combat that infuriate me and prevent me from wanting to explore it beyond what I have found to work for me.
Before we get to the details, however, let’s start with the basics. Bloodborne plays similar to the Dark Souls games in that it’s a third-person action game in which you must dodge and punish your enemies as they attack, staying mindful of other hazards in the process. You must avoid taking too much damage, which doesn’t take much. Should you lose all your health, you die and go back to the previous checkpoint and all the enemies that you’ve killed are repopulated. Dying removes all the experience points/money you’ve accumulated from killing enemies and places them in a blood puddle where you died, or in a powered-up enemy that you must defeat to regain them. If you are unable to make your way back to your death puddle and die along the way, those points are lost forever. Aside from the difficulty, the core mechanics, and the bleak atmosphere of the world and its inhabitants, that’s where the similarities between Bloodborne and Dark Souls mostly end.
Combat
Combat takes a faster, riskier approach than the Souls games. While in the fantasy Souls games, you could use a shield to block and deflect attacks, Bloodborne forces the player to rely on agility. There are shields, but they’re both rare and ineffective against most attacks. Also, instead of the traditional Dark Souls dodge roll, in which a player can avoid attacks by rolling out of the way, Bloodborne has a much faster, but riskier side-step dodge. It’s quicker and less exhaustive on the character’s stamina, as there isn’t anything like equipment encumbrance to interfere with the movement, however, the invincibility frames of the Souls roll are lost in the process. This means that your dodges will have to be timed better than ever, which can often lead to the more frustrating moments of Bloodborne. If you do get hit, there is a small “rally” period in which the player can strike back and regain some of that lost health before resorting to using a blood vial to regain health points.
When it comes to attacking, the hunters must use weapons designed for use in specific hands. Unlike how in Souls games a player could put whatever weapon they wanted in whichever hand to enable certain attacks, Bloodborne has weapons that are for the primary hand and weapons for the secondary hand. While there are exceptions you might find along the way, for the most part, the primary hand holds a “trick weapon” that could transform its function and shape, giving you new attacks. Meanwhile, the other hand holds a firearm-type weapon that allows you to parry enemy attacks, putting the enemy in a stunned state, allowing you to perform a “visceral attack” and cause massive critical damage to the opponent. Depending on how you specialize your character’s skill points, you can focus on the use of your primary weapon and go for traditional physical attacks, or you can take a ranged approach and focus on the guns. Keep in mind, however, that guns, as you’d expect, require bullets. The bullets are, thankfully, kept in ready supply through the constant and consistent murdering of enemies, but can also be a finite resource in the early parts of the game, requiring a good amount of farming if you find yourself dying a bunch with very few bullets left over.
It turns out, the bullets are also what you need to perform magic. Yes, magic is in the game in one form or another, but it’s something that isn’t really discovered or used by the player until a good number of hours in. This is mainly due to the story-telling of Bloodborne and how “magic” is more like tapping into the Lovecraftian horror that you are slowly uncovering. Nonetheless, if you’re a fan of using magic in the From Software games, you will be out of luck for quite some time. Not to mention, there aren’t nearly as many spells to uncover as other games, so get comfortable using the guns and the trick weapons. If you look in the right spots, you might find the right weapons that scale damage to the stat that governs magic, but there aren’t many options.
While the rest of the general combat flow and movement in Bloodborne is similar to that of Dark Souls, it’s in this somewhat limited variety that I find my first mechanical fault with the game, which also leads me to other issues I have. There aren’t that many weapons in the game, and what are there are fixed to a particular hand, further reducing the variety of options you might have for combat. It’s an intentional choice on the part of the developers for a more specific experience, but the problem is that, as I played, I wasn’t really happy with the effectiveness of most of the weapons I was finding. I finally settled on one that seemed to work for the amount of damage I was willing to exchange per hit, but I only used the secondary form of the trick weapon, which also made it two-handed and basically removed the firearm aspect of combat.
I tried to engage with the firearms to parry and reposte enemy attacks, but found that it was something I could only use in specific circumstances. Even though the game seemed to imply that you could parry any enemy of significant size or stature, I had to learn the hard way, using up a lot of bullets in the process, this was not the case. So, I used a sword that could be transformed into a bigger sword and started playing Bloodborne like Dark Souls and just whacked things with a big weapon that caused a lot of stun instead of frustrating myself by trying to engage with one of the core mechanics of the game. It was only after in a fit of vindictive anger that I made this decision not to engage with the guns that I finally started to have fun with Bloodborne.
Changing weapons did not completely alleviate my woes with the combat, however. One of the particulars I noticed with Bloodborne was in the way that button-presses were cached and how that made the combat more difficult. The Souls games have always required that you choose your attacks and dodges carefully, making sure that your timing is right to avoid committing to an attack or dodge at a moment in which you would be severely punished. If you press the attack button, you are then committed to that animation until the strike connects. Likewise, if you try to heal, that animation would start and only stop once completed or the player is hit out of the animation. The same is true here, except there also happens to be a longer period of time in which you could cache up presses of a button.
What I mean is that, during long animations, like a strong attack or the process of getting back up from being knocked down, you can press the attack, heal, or item buttons multiple times, which will then cause your character to do all those things once the initial animation is complete. This is normal for the Souls series, but Bloodborne’s mechanics and speed cause this to be a severely frustrating issue when it wasn’t in the past. The relentless nature of the combat and lack of invincibility frames in your dodge, means you have to be very cautious about spamming button presses. However, the fact that you can take damage while you are on the ground after getting knocked down by an attack, and that you will always get up extremely slowly after getting knocked down, requires that you spam the dodge button to cancel that animation and move out of the way. Regardless of how soon you do this, there is a period in which you will still be performing the “get up” animation until it’s finally canceled. Pressing any other button or direction does not cancel this animation and instead caches the button presses. While this seems like a minor gripe that shouldn’t matter on paper, it felt completely unintuitive and sluggish that I couldn’t do anything other than spam “dodge” in those situations, when spamming is something you don’t really want to do in this game. I can’t really complain about it as anything other than something that felt wrong—a feeling similar to a bad connection in an online fighting game—but whenever it got me killed, it definitely pissed me off. Even after beating the game, I still find myself surprised that the rising animation is so slow and requires me to rapidly press a button, when everything else about the game and what it’s taught me in the combat requires precision and timing.
Regardless of the combat gripes, I finally beat the game. After beating it once, looking up all the things on the internet I missed, and diving back in with a brand new character and a better understanding of how the game works, I’ve come to enjoy Bloodborne a great deal more than I initially did and have experimented with different weapons and abilities. However, I still find certain things frustrating. The parrying and reposte process is still a tricky endeavor that should be better than it is. Considering it’s a core mechanic to the game, it boggles my mind that players start out with such a finite amount of bullets. It makes it difficult to learn the mechanics of an intense, combat-heavy game if you don’t have a full supply. You can sacrifice health for a small replenishment of bullets, but in a hard game like Bloodborne, you don’t usually want to use up health for the sake of trying to learn an important part of how to play the game. It doesn’t help that by the game’s ambiguous nature, you have to learn through experience. Nowhere is the game going to flat out tell you that you can parry only certain types of attacks from certain enemies, or that particular bosses cannot be parried at all. You just have to go in blind and deal with it.
Perhaps more irritating is how particular the hitbox is when you do successfully parry and go in for a visceral attack. You have to be directly in front of the spot in order to do it. If you aren’t in the right spot, you just strike the opponent and lose your window of opportunity. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I thought I was right on top of the correct spot and it didn’t happen. What’s more baffling is that visceral attacks cannot be performed on the slightest incline. So if you parry someone while fighting on the stairs, you don’t get your visceral attack. Period. There was even a boss fight in the DLC that was amazingly fun, but extremely frustrating as well because the entire arena was slightly sloped and would make the visceral attack hitbox just that much more difficult to hit. If this is such a key part of the gameplay to the point that it’s in your marketing, and it limits the type of weapons you can use in a game that already has fewer weapons than any other similar games, maybe it should work closer to 100% of the time instead of 50% of the time. I know that Bloodborne fans reading this would just tell me to “get gud” and “shut up noob” but what is the excuse for why the thing does not work on the stairs? If it’s such a crucial part of the game’s mechanics, it should work, regardless of whether I’m standing on an incline or not.
The inconsistent experience of using the firearms and the parrying mechanic soured my taste significantly when I first played Bloodborne. I had always engaged with the parry mechanics in Dark Souls, so I was ready to do so here, but I found it to be too inconsistent to bother. So, I resorted to just using the biggest weapon I could find and stunning enemies long enough to get big hits in and shorten the battles. I’ve gotten better with the mechanics enough to try out some other weapons, but nothing seems as effective, for me, as the one method I’ve found. Since the number of weapons is lower, it’s unlikely that I’d find a suitable substitute. This leads me to another gripe I have with Bloodborne: it’s reward loop
Exploration
Part of what made exploring the worlds of Dark Souls so fun was the fact that you never knew what you might find. It could be a melee weapon, a magic weapon, a suit of armor, or a special key item, each with their own well-written description. The reduction in types of weapons has a significant impact to this feeling in Bloodborne, as there are simply not as many unique items to find in the world. You may find badges or keys that unlock the ability to purchase the weapons or armor in the store, but buying is not the same as discovering. When you discover a secret path in an elevator shaft and all you find as a reward for your efforts is the common item that gives you experience points, it’s not very satisfying. It doesn’t help when the game has this whole Chalice dungeon mechanic that doesn’t give you much reason to explore either.
The Chalice dungeons are probably the thing I dislike the most about Bloodborne—their only positive being that you don’t have to engage with them if you don’t want to. I mentioned them earlier, but essentially they’re dungeons you unlock by acquiring a chalice and placing it at a designated spot in the main hub world. Using some ritual material, the dungeon unlocks for you to explore. Apparently, these dungeons were extremely important in the lore of Bloodborne, as they were the places where the eldritch horror was initially unearthed; everything that happened to Yarnham can be traced back to the Chalice labyrinths. You wouldn’t get the impression of their significance in exploring the dungeons, however, because they’re just boring rooms that are nonsensically laid out. They’re supposed to be labyrinths, which is a lame excuse for “we didn’t really think about how to organize these things that were probably going to be procedurally generated at some point.”
The Chalice dungeons are boring and repetitive grind halls that all look the same, lack any real detail to make them interesting, and are filled with the same enemies over and over. There are occasionally some different enemy types that appear, but some of them you encounter in the main game anyway. You go through a series of rooms, kill the enemies, unlock the door to a boss room, and go down to the next level of the dungeon and do it all over again until it ends. What do you get as your reward for your troubles in exploring these dungeons? More chalices and ritual items to unlock more dungeons! What fun?!
The only reason I initially engaged with them was because I thought I had to in order to progress in the story, as I mentioned earlier. Once I learned that the boring dungeons were completely optional and wouldn’t get me any interesting loot, I steered clear. Then, I realized that they had bosses I would never encounter in the main game. Bosses, are usually a highlight of these types of games, so I wanted to see them all. Unfortunately for me, that meant that I had to explore countless of these boring dungeons. I also had to face many of the same bosses I already fought in the game before seeing new ones, because they recycle bosses from within the dungeons and the main game as well. For how many dungeons there are for you to unlock in this game, they had to recycle a lot of material in the process. It would have been better to have fewer dungeons so you could have more unique boss battles. Alternatively, just make it a boss rush mode, because that’s all I was in it for by the end anyway. It’s more bizarre that the layouts don’t change for the dungeon, even though they’re so dull looking with a lot of the same room setups. You would think they would procedurally rearrange, but if you want to grind, you can just grind away in a dungeon that gives you fewer experience points than the main story areas and barely any interesting items. Occasionally, your reward for your time spent in these thoughtless halls of boredom is a new boss. What a waste.
Insight
To end this mechanics section on a positive note, the last bit I want to mention is the addition of Insight. This is something of a blend of the Humanity mechanic in the Dark Souls games, and the Tendency mechanic from Demon’s Souls. Like in Dark Souls, Insight can be gained in numerical value through particular encounters with enemies, playing online with other players, or just by exploring the world. Your Insight can actually be used to purchase rare items and equipment in the game as a secondary currency, as well as summon NPCs or other players to your world to help you beat more difficult enemies. Similar to the Tendency mechanic from Demon’s Souls, it also affects what you experience in the world. The more Insight you get causes you to see more weird things. It’s a clever mechanic to serve as a not-so-subtle nod to how characters in H.P. Lovecraft stories would tend to slowly go insane and see more disturbing things as they delved deeper and deeper into the horror in search of knowledge. I think that the Insight mechanic is a great one, though I also think it could have gone a bit further. It makes some enemies more dangerous and appear different, it determines whether some appear at all, and it even affects a boss battle or two. However, I would have loved it if Insight had an even more profound effect on the world and the character. Maybe if there’s a bigger budget sequel, I’ll get my wish one day.
Presentation
Of all the From Software games I’ve played, this is probably my favorite in terms of style. All of their games have implemented some elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but never as explicitly as this. I still probably prefer the more subtle approaches they’ve taken in the past, but the Victorian style of character designs, the Gothic architecture, the creative weapon and monster designs, and the bleak, horrific atmosphere of Bloodborne all mesh extremely well in a way that was enough to convince me to see the game to its end, despite my issues with the gameplay. This doesn’t completely excuse the more dull environments like the Chalice dungeons or the Forbidden Woods areas, but there always seem to be some environments in these sorts of games that lack the attention and polish of others. The graphics of the game are not as good as some of their later Souls games, and the slow framerate is a bit of a bummer, but considering that this was a game at the early part of the PS4’s lifespan, I’d say the art style carries the weight substantially. Hopefully, one day, it will get a remaster at a faster frame rate and higher resolution.
Sound design has always been a strength of these sorts of games. There are numerous enemy noises and background sounds that are reused and recognizable from the Souls games, but there are also plenty of sound effects that are unique to Bloodborne that are effective in their own disgusting or blood curdling way. Music rarely plays except in specific moments for background atmosphere or during a boss battle. The music, as always, is extremely good and suitable for the moment without necessarily being something you’d want to listen to during your afternoon workout routine.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Bloodborne was an explosive experience and probably made me the most divisive I’ve ever felt towards a game of this particular genre. It took me a long time to get over the particulars in the mechanics and gameplay that bothered me, but the overall look and intriguing lore helped me in finally seeing it through to the end. Now that I have gained some insight and seen what Bloodborne has to offer, I couldn’t stop playing it until I beat it a second time. I still get bothered by certain quirks, but I think Bloodborne is a great game. Maybe it’s my own fault for just not being good enough at it. I think I understand where I was wrong to be so frustrated. It was only trying to teach me. It was only trying to help me grow my eyes on the inside. I understand now…
