Bloodborne is my favorite PS game. Period. In fact, it is my favorite FromSoftware game, too. It has deep lore, it has memorable style, design, enemies, atmosphere. It has everything I love and even more. And it’s hard to the core.
I came a long road to actually enjoy FromSoftware games. While I enjoy Dark Souls, and in love with Elden Ring, Bloodborne is my favorite. I already said that and I’ll tell you why. While it is typical Souls’ like game, which means it is tough, unforgiving, full of cheap shots (yep, certain things that cripple you in a fight are ignored by enemies… like fucking wall collision), but at the same time it advocates recklessness, it pushes you to take the risk, it supports fast, dynamic gameplay.
Now, I’m far from experienced Dark Souls players, but from what I remember, Dark Souls is usually slow and based on a lot of dodging, blocking, taking your time and parrying with your shield. Running and getting into fights against several enemies will get you nowhere. Very often, you’re punished for being too ballsy. Traps and set-ups are behind every corner and you have to plan your path with extreme caution. Especially since your estus flask (the stuff that heals you) is very limited, even more before you upgrade it, and you are forced into careful play style.
Bloodrborne is different. Bloodborne is fast. It is reckless, it is doesn’t give a fuck. Since the beginning, it puts you into position where you’re forced to go all in, fight multiple adversaries, dash onto the incoming attacks, dodge hair-thin from the hit and use a rather luxurious time-window to your advantage. And if you still got hit? Not a big problem, you have a retaliation window where you can input as much damage as you can to restore some of your health (at times a significant part of it), making every fight a sight to behold. A raw dance of violence, where every missed hit pushes you forward, and makes you go for it in order to survive. Also, the healing items (blood injectors… yeah, the game is obsessed with blood and this shit is really full of blood-transferred diseases, I bet the main hero by the end of the game is cooler than Ash from Pokemon, since he really got ’em all) are plenty, you can get them almost from any enemy, and you can have 20 of them on you which makes your health not an issue at all (dying from lack of it… now that’s an issue).
In Bloodborne you’re playing as a hunter, a one mean killing machine that puts its goal to end the nightmare the city of Yharnam found itself in. The unknown plague took over it, turned the night of the hunt into a nightmare, the loop of bloodshed. The citizens of the city are turning into the beasts, hunters are going crazy and start hunting their own, the blood is everywhere, the celestial beings and ancient gods are taking over the city, while cosmic entities and its orphans are pushing the edge of madness to a point of no return. And as I said, it is up to the lone hunter, outsider with disease who took upon risky blood transfusion and now has no other choice but to fix the mess city found itself in. Or become part of the problem. It all depends on the player and whether you’re attentive enough to find all hidden objects, eat things no sane being would eat, and kill at least five cosmic entities on your way to success.
Yep, the plot is crazy, right in the field of Souls-like games, but you have to want to learn it. Bloodborne, same as Dark Souls, feeds you lore and plot through the dialogues, notes, objects description. In my humble opinion, Bloodborne is much easier to understand than any of the Dark Souls. While staying cryptic, true to the nature of the genre, it has more interactions with NPCs, more stories involved, more changes in atmosphere that help you follow the plot and come up with your own theories.
When I was obsessed with this game, probably on the same scale as I’m obsessed with Dying Light 2, I knew the lore by heart. It wasn’t hard. You just had to observe, follow the narrative, and put puzzle pieces together. When you’re trying to beat the game and DLC, and get platinum, there’s no other way but to learn a thing or two about its lore. And yes, this is the only Souls-like game I managed to get platinum. And I’ll tell you what, getting this platinum wasn’t easy, in order to get it you have to jump through a lot of hoops and rings, go through a fuck-ton of dungeons that at times make no fucking sense and are there to infuriate you to a point of going berserk. To make things worse, there’s one particularly cursed dungeon where you have only 50% of your health (or maybe even less, I don’t remember already). This dungeon, from what I know, is the toughest thing in the game besides Orphan of Kos (even though I probably got lucky, since I had no troubles kicking his orphaned ass on my second or third try).
As a person who beat the game alone at least six times (I have created four separate characters, and only one character got all three endings), perhaps I can say that the game is good. The game has a crazy replayability, there are many play-styles to try out, many builds to create, many weapons to master. And I didn’t. I’m guilty here, but since I am lazy and like to stick to the simplest way possible (even if at the end of the day it’s not), all those six times I beat the game with the starting ax. Yep, the ax. The one a lot of players on the internet consider bad taste and one of the worst weapons possible. Not me. I found it really effective and useful. And to make things even weirder, I’m going to tell you another weird truth – I didn’t use parries, neither did I use guns. Yep, I was this psycho who beat the game several times with an ax (oh, yeah, I’m trying to move to American English, turns out years of learning British English have its drawback, like desperate desire to write axe instead of ax), and nothing but it. Also, rune-like, I think I went with those that gave me the most damage output, since I loved to play dangerously. Just in the spot where I jump in the heat of the fight, bring some serious damage and hopefully survive in the process.
Enemies help to shape this mindset. They can easily kill you in one or two successful series (sometimes hits), have some attacks that incapacitate you (fucking Lovecraftian brain suckers), and in general can and will rip and tear you. Yet you can also kill them in a few hits, too. And when you know their attacks, you can easily take on groups of enemies without any troubles. By the time you reach the end of the game, if you’re learning the patterns, you can expect to be an unstoppable death bringer who can die only because he miscalculated or fell. Surprisingly, Bloodborne is superb in making you feel like a badass hunter, capable of going against the mightiest foes without trace of fear and rip your victory by the skin of your teeth while at the same time keeping you vulnerable at all times.
But don’t get me wrong, you’re not a unique color of blue. Hostile hunters are the same agile death-bringing machines like yourself. They also use trick weapons and can heal themselves. Thus, every time you face hostile hunter (NPC controlled, even though there’s PVP, I played offline because I hate playing with other people and want to have at least games for myself without need to meet or cooperate with other people) you should expect a daring fight. And those hunters are tough, mean sons of bitches. The deeper you go into the nightmare, the more crazy and dangerous hunters you’re going to meet. Without going into details or spoilers, there are hunters that use fucking Gatling gun as the chief argument. And also this isn’t going to be too much of a spoiler, but father Gascoigne (first or second real boss you’re going to meet, depending whether you dare to cross the bridge or not), is the first mad hunter you have to face. Puts you into the right mood for the rest of the game. Also, there’s a rather personal story involved with Gascoigne and his family, which you can easily miss if you’re not attentive enough, seriously, it even might be somewhat heartbreaking if you hadn’t accepted hunter’s mindset and grew a thick skin.
Anything else? Yeah, there’s actually a lot.