Bloodborne: The Old Hunters
I wrote about Bloodborne on this blog a year or so ago, here.
In so many ways, The Old Hunters wasn’t about playing a game. For me, it was weeks of reading wikis, digging up lore, watching VaatiVidya - drinking in an absolutely endless quantity of information. I loved every second. Bloodborne’s story runs deep, deep down, and each area in The Old Hunters draws you into it further and further until you hit the very bottom. Finishing this expansion leaves you with a lot more knowledge, but a lot of new questions to go with it. It is a wonderful execution of the Lovecraftian mythos concept - the more you learn, the harder it is to comprehend the whole idea.
The Old Hunters takes place across a series of dreams, as far as anyone can tell, depicting various aspects of the Bloodborne story. The storytelling poured into each area is on par with Silent Hill 2, one of my all time favourite games for environmental storytelling. Each area is unique and packed with different weapons and new sets of enemies. There’s a hunter who mercilessly pursues you through one dream, a series of terribly sad blind patients in another - the range is incredible. The paths you can take through each area are as varied as ever: one of the hardest parts of the entire expansion is an optional well that doesn’t even contain a boss, or, at first glance, anything interesting at all. There’s a huge list of things to discover.
The bosses are fantastic too, being extremely challenging while remaining mechanically interesting and, of course, neatly tied into the lore. The first boss took an obscene number of tries for me - I didn’t count, but it was several evenings before I beat him. The rest weren’t quite so bad but still took me a while. The difficulty forced me into the multiplayer aspects of the game, which I’d avoided in Bloodborne itself, which is great - it’s nice when an expansion manages to build on the existing game and encourages players to explore more aspects of it.
If you’re into this sort of thing, you can see my Orphan of Kos kill on NG+:
Overall, The Old Hunters wasn’t a necessary add-on to Bloodborne, but it was extremely welcome, rounding off one of the best games of all time. A true joy from start to finish.