Bloodborne
Bloodborne is the other game that I absolutely had to buy a PS4 for. The latest in the Souls series of games, it throws out shields, replaces them with guns, and goes all Lovecraftian. I’m all over it.
The first thing you notice, coming from Dark Souls to Bloodborne, is that the game moves a lot faster. It’s smoother, too: I was initially pretty sceptical about the worth of quick-stepping when locked onto a target instead of rolling, but it allows for a rather neat fine-tuning of your position in fights versus the rather long and unwieldy Dark Souls roll. Bloodborne wants you to dance lightly around your opponents and avoid hits, rather than survive the pummelling or get well clear every time an enemy swings their sword. It does away with any kind of encumbrance too, opening up the entire wardrobe of armour to every character. It’s hard to argue with these changes. Sure, they reduce the number of fighting styles available to you in the game, but Dark Souls’ heavy-set warrior build’s slowness was a punishment, not a boon: if you could have had the fast rolling with the heavy armour, you’d have taken it in a second. In Bloodborne, that’s what you get. Sort of.
You get no shield, and you get no armour. Not really, anyway. There are armour sets, and they do help you out, a bit, but to be honest, not one of them is going to save you. The emphasis in Bloodborne is definitely on not getting hit at all, ever. If you do get hit (and you will), you have a chance to claim back your lost hit points by successfully attacking an enemy in return for a short time after you receive the damage. This means that the best defence is a good offence and keeps the game focused on attacking. You find yourself running towards the next enemy, diving straight in, trying to get back the health you lost on the last bad guy. Each attack sprays blood into the air, coating your character, and very quickly you feel rather similar to the beasts that you’re fighting.
So yeah, you’re fighting beasts and stuff. The plot is, as you’d expect from a Souls game, quite subtle, but runs deep and invites plenty of theories and discussion. I’m not going to spoil anything, but I will say that it manages to be reasonably unpredictable and manages to be rather more complex than you initially expect. The “Who’s the real monster” trope implied by the brutality of the combat and the blood splattered across your armour never really manifests beyond the vibe introduced by Dark Souls (Probably Demon Souls, actually, but I haven’t played that, so we’ll stick with comparing to Dark souls for now): the monsters and people you destroy feel like important characters, parts of a world. Killing them feels like a negative action, like you’re ending a story too early or writing them out of a book.
I’ve completed Bloodborne, but in so many ways, I haven’t. I don’t understand it, not even after reading up on the plot and trying to piece things together from various wikis and videos. I haven’t finished the chalice dungeons, Bloodborne’s randomly generated attempt at some kind of procedural Souls game that, despite how it sounds, does have an end and a storyline, of sorts. For the first time, I feel like it might be worth getting all the achievements in a game, too. After the credits rolled and I caught my breath, I just started playing again. I don’t really feel done with this game at all. As if that all wasn’t enough, the expansion, The Old Hunters, was released last week, and I’m currently bashing my head against the first boss, who is absolutely incredible, and rock solid. I’m reminded, and not for the first time in a Souls game, of World of Warcraft’s raiding, where we would wipe over and over again on the same boss, each time shaving a little more of their health off, until eventually we mastered the strategy and defeated them. Souls games have the same vibe, and I love it.