Bloodborne (2015)

I. Limits

It's September, 2021, and I've decided to play a game that, on paper, I shouldn't like.

I skip past jump scares in movies. I look away from body horror and gory violence. I get sympathetic pain and nausea from any depicted injury worse than a scraped knee—actually scrap that, just thinking about a scraped knee made me wince a little.

So why would I want to play a gory gothic horror game that's also famously difficult?

The answer is...I don't know. This is the problem with reviewing a game it's taken me nearly 4 years to actually finish, I don't actually remember what drew me to it in the first place. I vaguely remember wanting to try a FromSoft game and thinking "well, the one with the gun will be easier, probably." Maybe I read about the trick weapons and thought that was interesting, maybe someone said it was more accessible than a Dark Souls; also, apparently in my Nioh review I swore I would never play a Dark Souls, so maybe I felt like if I had to play a FromSoft it was this or Sekiro, and this was cheaper.

Regardless of the reason, I find myself in Yharnam. I have, of course, died to a beast and come back from the Hunter's Dream armed and ready to take on the world (and then died again but let's not talk about that). I open the front gate of Iosefka's Clinic and step out.

And that's when Bloodborne gets its hooks in me.

It turns out I can stand horror, even appreciate horror, when the world is so immediately compelling. The panoramic view of irrational, sprawling, all-consuming Gothic architecture that greets you outside the clinic, the ominous sound design, the immediate knowledge that this world is huge, and the immediate desire to explore every possible inch of it. And then there's the sound design, scary, sure, but it feels organic, not petty or manipulative. And the narrative framing gives the whole thing a sort of dreamlike quality that undercuts what might otherwise seem like a harsh, nasty world. Rarely have I been so instantly immersed in a game.

It's a struggle, at first. What I think I know about games is that you can always brute force them if you need to, so I'm using the axe, which deals the most damage out of the three starting weapons, but it feels like the game isn't designed for it, as just a random villager is fast enough to get past my guard and shank me with a pitchfork. I try the gun parry and pretty quickly give up on it as too unreliable. I try my hand at what I would think would be a relatively easy enemy given it's just down the stairs from the 2nd lamp, and I die in two hits. I suffer some demoralizing blood echo losses. I aggro a character I later find out is actually an important NPC. Oops.

But I do start to find a rhythm. I grind a bit, find enough Blood Stone Shards to level up my axe and start doing serious damage. I molotov through the Cleric Beast, I hack through Father Gascoigne. I work my way up to Vicar Amelia and I beat her on the first try. I'm feeling pretty good about myself.

Slightly dampened when I get got and sent to Gaol and of course lose all my blood echos trying to get out, but these things happen. Apparently. Am I ok with that? Not sure.

Hemwick Charnel Lane has some annoyances, and the environment is all rocks and dirt and hovels now which I'm less awed by, but the Witches are even easier than Amelia, and now I've got the Rune Workshop Tool, one of the biggest upgrades in the game. So I'm riding pretty high as I head to the Forbidden Woods. And I actually do pretty good there. In the first half. It's the 2nd half that's the problem.

FromSoft games, and indeed soulsbourne-likes more generally, have always been surrounded by difficulty discourse. Are they too hard? Should there be an easy mode? Are people who don't like them wusses and not real gamers (laudatory)? Are people who say that snotty assholes and real gamers (derogatory)?

But rarely, if ever, discussed is the fact that in almost every one of these games there comes a point when you find yourself somewhere that is not only difficult to navigate but also deeply unpleasant to be in. Any positive aspects of the game that have been mitigating the difficulty frustration have been removed, and you're faced with the prospect of continuing to spend an unknown amount of time in a place you don't want to be that is making it as hard as possible for you to get out. This is where I stop having fun.

The 2nd half of the Forbidden Woods is possibly the least interesting, most grating, most unpleasant area of the entire game. Visually it's all dank, dark woods and swamps. Enemies are hidden in every nook and cranny and all of them can and will kill you quite easily. It's difficult to navigate. And most importantly, your ears are filled with the constant sound of hissing snakes.

After I don't know how many failed attempts to get through this area, never even finding another lamp to make it feel like I was making some progress, I simply did not want to exist in this world anymore. I had hit my limit. So I left.

II. Loops

It's January, 2024. Since moving to a new apartment I've developed insomnia and have been spending 3 am to 6 am playing games. I try some Elden Ring and weirdly bounce off it even though it seems like it was made specifically to appeal to me (inasmuch as a From Soft game could be). What's this itch I'm feeling? Do I...want to go back to Bloodborne?

I guess I do.

What I think I know about games is that you can't just brute force them, you have to lean into their design choices, and Bloodborne is clearly a game about speed and technique, the give-and-take, the dance. So I start a new game, with the cane.

Immediately I think, yes, this is how Bloodborne was meant to played. Sure I'm doing less damage, but I'm so much more agile, more responsive, and the transformed cane might be even better than the transformed axe for crowd control.

That being said, I do find myself missing the damage output of the axe a little bit. But here's the thing about being awake at 3 am: I'm not really that awake. Like, I haven't had that much sleep, I haven't had breakfast yet, it's still dark out. You know what's perfect for that time of day? Grinding. Mindless, repetitive, calming, grinding.

So I establish loops. At first the loops are fairly small: maybe down to the house, out to the dog alley, back under the bridge. A little bigger: down the stairs to the street, up to the bonfire, back down through the gate and up the ladder. That's not loopy enough though, so then once you hit the bonfire you go through the courtyard and up to the bridge, through the beasts, which you can actually handle at this point, and down through the house, then back up to the lamp. Or maybe you go the other way and do the perimeter: up through the house, across the bridge, down to the courtyard, jump down into the dog alley then back under the bridge.

Bloodborne is a horror game. It runs on tension, uncertainty. Loops undo all that. To establish a loop in Bloodborne, to run it over and over, is to master the game, in the most oppressive sense of the word. Nothing is unexpected, everything is controlled.

This is not how Bloodborne was meant to be played. But I don't know that yet.

I move into the sewers, creating new loops as I map them out, tracing each enemy's position and movements (I don't aggro Eileen this time, though it won't matter). But it's not enough. I must show this game who's boss. I twist and expand the loops until eventually I can clear every enemy between Iosefka's Clinic and Father Gascoigne—who I haven't even tried to fight yet, because as with all oppressors my secret is that I'm scared. "I'm probably nearly ready to fight him," I think. "Just one more loop."

I do eventually get past Father Gascoigne, rather easily in fact (one might even say unsatisfyingly easily), but the Cathedral Ward proves immune to my loops. Too many dead ends. Too many big enemies for my little threaded cane. Frustration creeps in.

What really kills my run, though, is how I try to solve the problem. Desperate to reclaim the feeling of power I got from my loops, I do the unthinkable: I look up best blood echo farming spots. This it turns out, is a bad idea.

I don't know why the Chalice Dungeons exist, except to break the game. Procedurally generated modular dungeons with no bearing on the main story of the game, within them one might find weapon variants of weapons one doesn't even have access to yet, upgrade items in greater rarity and quantity than those found outside, and gems that actually make a noticeable difference when you slot them into your weapon. And, in a special dungeon available from the moment one gains access to them, whose heinous name shall not besmirch this document, one can find upwards of 80,000 blood echoes from one enemy that you don't even need to fight and that starts dying as soon as you enter the dungeon.

What happens next is not a loop, it confers no mastery. It's a binge, a thoughtless indulgence, the illusion of power without the right or skill to wield it. Over and over I load in, I wait, I leave, I level up, I come back. The game tries to stop me, to warn me this is not the way, as I quickly find the requirements for the next level scaling well past what is reasonable, but that just means I have to do it more, do it longer, put on a podcast, scroll through Bluesky with one hand, god if this were on PC I could probably script this, ugh I still need 270,000, back in I go, over and over—

The shelf before rock bottom is when you realize you're not even playing the game anymore. Rock bottom is when you realize you can't play the game anymore. You have destroyed what you sought to master.

Sometimes limits are there for a reason.

III. Learning

It's March, 2025 and Luke Westaway (NormalAdultLuke on Youtube) has uploaded the first video in a new series: "Bloodborne with bosses & enemies RANDOMISED." I enjoyed his randomized Dark Souls series, so I click on the video with a fair amount of enthusiasm, but also, perhaps, a hint of trepidation, a la Dean Pelton watching a video of an anthro Dalmatian: "This better not awaken anything in me." I'm still in Act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3, and in the middle of all the games I've started while procrastinating on Baldur's Gate 3, I cannot justify adding another game to that list. But you know, I never did try a playthrough with the saw cleaver, and after all it is the one on the cover...

What I think I know about games is that "knowing things about games" is less important than being willing to learn about the game you're playing. So this time around I try to let Bloodborne teach me.

The first thing I learn is you can't go by the numbers, which is somewhat counterintuitive because there are so many numbers. But the saw cleaver apparently deals extra damage in its untransformed state that is simply not accounted for, and it actually makes it arguably the best, or at least most balanced, starting weapon: neither the slowness of the axe, nor the weakness of the cane. Going forward, I make a note to try out every weapon in familiar conditions to see how it actually feels to use, rather than just compare numbers. The loops return, but now as testing grounds rather than mindless killing fields, their slaughter now serving a purpose that drives me forward rather than holding me back.

I also finally learn how to parry, which is only unreliable if you try to generalize it, but is quite reliable if you take the term to learn each enemy and find their weakness, which of course is what the game wanted you to do. This makes being "underleveled" (a somewhat meaningless concept in a game where that is your natural state of existence) far less precarious. While I do explore Central Yharnam thoroughly, I do not overstay my welcome, and when I get to Gascoigne I am rewarded with a challenging fight. That is until I figure out his move set and manage to parry almost every single one of his attacks.

This is, finally, how Bloodborne was meant to be played.

In Old Yharnam I learn that you don't have to kill every enemy in your way, especially when there's a gatling gun shooting at you. I then learn that you do have to kill the enemies that can run faster than you. Context, as always, is king.

After defeating the Blood-starved Beast and gaining access to the chalice dungeons, I am brought face to face with my shame from the last attempted playthrough. I cannot simply pretend I don't have the knowledge that I have. There is a fast and easy way to gain a vital resource, surely I would be a fool to ignore it? At some point the realization hits me: blood echoes are not the key resource in Bloodborne—the key resource is time, and the goal is to spend that time playing the game in as enjoyable a way as possible. So grinding through the blood echo mine over and over to needlessly level up? That's a terrible use of time. Popping in once just to get enough to buy a weapon you just unlocked that you're not sure you'll even like? That's just being smart. It's with this new attitude I'm able to justify buying the Kirkhammer, even though I'd used it before and found its damage didn't outpace is slowness. Trying it out again I discover that it may be slow, but it hits hard enough to stagger some of the bigger enemies, at which point its damage output doesn't even matter. Is it possible that you're actually supposed to carry two weapons that are useful in different contexts? Is that why there are, you know, two weapon slots? (Yes, obviously, but eventually I find Ludwig's Holy Blade which can stagger most enemies depending on which mode it's in, and that's what I use for the rest of the game. So it is possible to find your one-and-only.)

Eventually I make it to my old nemesis, the Forbidden Woods. And I learn that actually it's fine to not explore every nook and cranny and kill every enemy. Why make yourself spend more time there than you need to? Fairly quickly I find my way to the next fog door, have a bit of a Sam Gamgee moment ("If I take one more step it'll be the farthest into Bloodborne I've ever been"), and then I immediately get destroyed by 3-person boss fight because Bloodborne is hard, guys. It doesn't stop being hard just because you're having this zen epiphany about it.

But it's fine, because something I learned from Elden Ring is that it's ok to use walkthroughs so long as you don't actually follow them. Which is to say, if you're stuck look something up. But don't then immediately look up the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So I learn about the pitfalls of the Shadow of Yharnam fight, and I try it again. And I die again. So I learn that there's a summon you can do that I missed because I went a different way through the level, so ok exploring some nooks and crannies is probably good, but I go back and find that and I try again and I die again but then I try again again and this time I barely manage to get through.

Anyway, I don't need to narrate the whole game, so we'll skip to the next turning point. The blood moon has risen, and Yahar'gul, Unseen Village is kicking my ass. Cainhurst Castle is kicking my ass. Fine. I grit my teeth, I bear down (for midterms), I get through them. Then Upper Cathedral Ward is kicking my ass, because I have forgotten to not be afraid of the dark. The Nightmare of Mensis is kicking my ass because I have forgotten to not try to kill everything, especially when there's a giant brain shooting frenzy build-up at you. God this is exhausting. The spiders dropping from the ceiling are a particularly cruel joke. Also I apparently missed part of Eileen's quest chain and now she hates me again and she's kicking my ass and I'm sad about it. All of my enlightened equanimity has gone out the window and I'm starting to think I will never finish this game.

Then I play Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. As mentioned in my review of that game, it also kicks my ass, to the point that I actually have to turn down the difficulty. I return to Bloodborne battered and bruised, sure that if I can't even handle Wolfenstein II on normal difficulty then I clearly can't handle Bloodborne on the only difficulty. And then I kind of just waltz through the end of the game. The Host of the Nightmare, the Celestial Emissary, Mergo's Wet Nurse, Gehrman, Moon Presence—all fall after just a few tries. Well, except Moon Presence. Moon Presence I beat on the first try.

It is May 16th, 2025, and I have just rolled credits on Bloodborne.

Bloodborne does not have difficulty levels, which means how hard the game is is how hard it is supposed to be, and you need only accept that. At some point, if you truly commit to playing Bloodborne, then you can and should believe that it is possible for you to do so. Wolfenstein II is daring you to play it on a higher difficulty, mocking you for taking it on at even a normal level. Bloodborne does not dare, it does not mock. Bloodborne invites. And if you receive that invitation then know that it is not in error. Bloodborne is for you, if you want it to be.

p.s. And then of course it took over a month to write this essay. Nothing's ever easy with this game.

p.p.s. Section II may have actually taken place in late 2023 rather than earlier 2024, it's hard to tell. But I have a post from January 2024 where I say "My hot take on Elden Ring is it makes me want to go back to Bloodborne so that's what I'm going off of. If anyone knows how to extract the date created from individual Bloodborne save files let me know.

Where do you even start with this? Bloodborne is a souls game, a very similar experience to every other Fromsoft game that has released. Third person action RPG. Cryptic, lanterns instead of bonfires and graces where you replenish your health and reset the mobs in the game. Buff weapons, kill bosses, the formula is all there. If you know one, you know them all. However Bloodborne is very different all at the same time.

Let me explain. Souls games come from a fantasy background, knights, swords, dragons.. In comparison, Bloodborne is nightmare fuel. Yharnam is full of transformed monsters, werewolves, and other wild creatures and they mean business. Instead of a sword (which to be fair you can get swords in the game) you get weapons like a saw, a whip that transforms into a cane, and a gun at your disposal. There are no shields here to hide behind. As you twist and turn around Yharnam's very detailed, yet rugged and broken architecture you are met with a constant barrage of enemies and they want you dead. The bosses are mostly exceptional, transformed beings of their former selves into horrific monsters and even if some are easier than others certainly win in the spooky factor.

I would go as far to say that Bloodborne re-invents, not just changes some core mechanics of Souls games. For example, if you take damage, you have a brief window to go on the offense and get some of your HP back by relentlessly attacking your foes. This is such a cool thing to include in the game, because it rewards you for being aggressive, and literally allowed me to beat one very difficult boss fight in the game when I ran out of blood vials. Don't kid yourself, Bloodborne favors the bold. This is not a wait and see type affair. If you want to be successful, you have to get aggressive. Also, gone are the backstabs. If you want to stun an opponent from behind, it requires a critical hit from behind to deliver the satisfying crunch that we all love from Souls games. You need to be light on your feet and engaged to land those types of attacks. Parrying is now done by a well timed gunshot blast and it is honestly, simply put, fun as hell and super satisfying. I never fully got the hang of it, but was able to handily kill some bosses by heavily abusing my firearm.

Not all changes are for the better in my opinion. There are no re-filling flasks for HP, and rather you need to collect (or buy) blood vials to restore your HP. Later in the game, I found myself having to farm for blood echoes to purchase vials many times to continue forward, which is a huge time sink and feels unnecessary. You can always argue "well don't get hit" which truly is the point of Bloodborne, to evade enough and recover what hits you do take with the rallying mechanic, but your first time through, you are going to struggle with this and find yourself using vials much more frequently.

Outside of that, well, its a Souls game. I would argue, the hardest one I have played to date, this game is tough as nails. The monsters and bosses are super aggressive, and frequently if you get caught out, you might as well just say goodbye because there is usually not a big window to recover. The art direction, gritty feeling, music and aesthetic to the game is top shelf and Fromsoft did not skimp out on any major details to make this game feel great.

Some argue its the best that From has put out. Out of the four titles I have played, I would say it goes to third place behind Elden Ring and Dark Souls 1, however we really are splitting hairs, as they are all excellent. I would personally caution against it as your first Fromsoft experience though. It is relentless, but well worth the pick up.

I have tried Bloodborne twice already, both times I get a little further, then I get stuck, get frustrated with wandering around and dying constantly, and then quit.

This third time I actually have been doing really well, 3 bosses down, and none of them have needed more then 1 try. The beginning parts of the game, minus boss fights had zero deaths too! In the segment I am in I have noticed a dramatic difficulty spike and am dying more, but not perpetually. I think playing some older games and 3D mario stuff has given me better perspective on how to play Bloodborne, both are dodge attack, dodge again games.

I love the city and monsters in this game. I am starting to grasp the story, and I have decided whenever I get lost to just look up where to go next in a walkthrough! Lets see how far I can get now!

I had a dream today.

I was at this Rite Aid looking ass store looking for stuff to ease my back. Then I go to the cashier and I see copies of Bloodborne for the PS5 there. I was screaming, the cashier was screaming, a guy behind me was screaming. We all were from the top of our lungs. Just when I was about to make my purchase of the game, I wake up. Please end my suffering Sony. Give me a way to play Bloodborne at 60 FPS.

Grinding out the Platinum on this one and hoo-boy I never realised just how abysmal these chalice dungeons are, especially the rotten one.

Putting the big dumb dog and the amygdala in here with ridiculously huge health bars while also cutting mine in half is one hell of a choice. Glad this whole aspect of the game never got carried forwards, yeesh, this is real bad!

Bloodborne wins for Coolest Weapon in the series, the Beasthunter Saif!

The transforming attacks on the Saif afford the player options for advancing and retreating mid-combo that are unlike anything else in the Souls games to date. What's more, a killer running attack with an advancing follow-up, solid horizontal attacks for unlocked camera fighting, and an incredibly quick and far reaching light attack for initiating mean that the Saif always has the right tools available for every situation.

Unfortunately it's stuck in a game where the solution to most fights is just to quickstep behind the enemy and spam light attack, but that's not the Saif's fault.

I didn't realize just how much that the DLC, though accessible extremely early in the game, is very, very much balanced for lategame equipment. So I had to go crawling back to the main game to at least get a better option than my +3 starting weapon... I decided to skip replaying a bunch more main game areas, and partially accomplish upgrade material collection through the Chalice Dungeons, which I never touched in my original playthrough.

These dungeons are not the best content in the game, but they are totally fine, featuring a lot of unique stuff that's not in the "main story," and having a fun level-based structure that's decently repeatable for loot. The whole system feels really complicated, to a point where it seems very clearly designed for the community to figure out together. And figure it out they have, as I found all kinds of resources online to plot my path toward farming the things I needed. Really gave me a greater sense of just how much there is to this game and how many types of players it caters to.

This was all very interesting, and I enjoyed doing it as the kind of person who enjoys poring over wikis and reading up on strategies and things, but still, back to the main point... I do long for From Software to handle their DLC like a few other games (such as The Witcher 3, which has just about the best DLC ever, to boot) and just let us pop in from the menu with a pre-made character. Guess we'll see how they handle expansions and endgame/NG+ states in the more open-ended Elden Ring very soon.

Bloodborne, one of my favorite games of all time, #11 highest rated game on this site, blah blah blah needs no introduction. Well, I have never played the DLC for this game, partially because you have to replay a bunch of the game to access it, and partially because of its notoriously extra high difficulty.

So anyway I finally bought it and started a new character and blasted my way through surprisingly resistance-free until the third boss. After a few one-shot deaths, though, I hit my first roadblock, this game’s biggest nightmare: its consumable economy. Out of fire items, out of the beast distraction thing, out of antidotes (on a poison boss), out of heals, out of bullets, out of insight, out of money. Uh-oh.

Battle and status items aside, which like yeah, those are going to be limited—unlike the nearly perfect healing system established in Dark Souls a few years earlier, this game chose to follow Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 2 and have heals as a finite consumable. And especially in this of all those 3 games, for a new or somewhat rusty returning player, I don’t think there is any way to avoid at some point having to stop all progress and grind out healing items and bullets to literally be able to continue playing the game.

I will never fathom the rationale for this design decision, which makes the early parts of the game potentially extremely annoying and disheartening if you get stuck. It almost single-handedly killed my initial attempt at the game back in the day before I came back a year or so later to power through. Is it the biggest deal ever? No, but I see a frustrating early game as this game’s biggest overall flaw over the other modern FromSoft games. It’s a shame because the actual parts of the game early on are so awesome, I was having a blast, until next thing I know I have nothing left. Oh well, back to the grind soon I guess.

Bloodborne doesn't really need my endorsement to be known as one of the greatest games of all time. Still, I'm happy to add my voice to the choir. A truly stunning achievement, Bloodborne is both accessible and tough managing to train players so that each obstacle overcome feels like a true achievement. If someone is kicking your ass you either have to get better or think smarter (in terms of either levelling up or fighting). Ooozing lovecraftian atmosphere meets Victorian horror, Bloodborne's aeshetic is iconic and a (creepy) pleasure to spend time with. The lore is just right with more you can dig into online if you like, or slowly piece together the chilling story of Yarnham. Most importantly, this game makes you feel like a true hard badass. Very few games I go back and replay but I could easily see my self going back to Bloodborne, I sunk 50 hours into this in the end and I loved mostly every minute.

If you own a PS4 you must play this game. Don't worry about the difficulty, you'll get through it. A true hunter is never alone.

It feels quite embarrassing to write something about Bloodborne when there are dozens of YT videos attempting to explain the lore and even a book about it. But, anyway, here it goes.

You notice the Souls-specific shortcomings from the start, but you also notice (how could you miss it?) that church bell ringing in the distance, somewhere. You do notice a gloomy atmosphere which you crave for but rarely get in a triple A game. Alas, you sadly notice you're not gud and, should you wish the night to unfurl, you need to... well, git gud.

At the heart of Lovecraft's work lies the idea that you cannot handle the truth, it will make you insane, it is sometimes incomprehensible, but always frenzy-inducing. You are helpless against this "cosmic horror", which often includes aesthetically unappealing beings of a higher plane of existence. Bloodborne progresses from your friendly gothic horror to the heart of cosmic horror as you gain Insight. Really, you're better off not knowing what's really going on, but you'll inevitably find out.

You will also find out about the people who inhabit this funereal place. They are, very likely, the saddest bunch you've ever known. This is one of the strongest elements of the game's narrative. Each character has a depressing backstory. Often, even as you slay one of those bosses who killed you 9131231231 times, you can still feel empathy for her or him. It's not their fault. They're not the enemy. They're just the unfortunate victims of some cosmic horror. Same goes for your "friends", too.

As the player gains insight into the story (usually with the help of YT), she will find not horror, but a piece of digital narrative excellence.

I almost quit this game when I couldn't get past the first level. I died probably around 70x or so. Then I figured out I was only using my charge attack, and that there was a much quicker attack option. Then I died probably another 20x. Then there was a boss. It was difficult. But then I beat the boss. And the feeling of accomplishment made me feel so good that it made I, a busy dad of two working full-time, press on. The game got easier as I leveled up, but all the bosses were challenging and interesting. The world itself was very mysterious, and never really explains what is going on, and because it does so intentionally, I feel it added to the world rather than subtract. There are of course a few flaws in the lack of explanation (there are 3 endings, none of which are really explained to you on how to get). But all in all, this game is amazing. And it's a rare time when I don't want a sequel, because the original would only be made less by a sequel.

Tough game, but very unique. While it takes a while to warm up, I was always having fun, even though I kept dying in the same places a million times. And the tension of having a ton of blood echoes (experience) while in an unfamiliar place with no save point nearby really added to the experience of the game.