It’s tough getting into FromSoftware’s style of video games. It was even tougher back before the release (and success) of Elden Ring, when seemingly every fan of the soulslike genre was a jobless masochist who would twist your difficulty with Dark Souls into a commentary on you being a failed person in life. This was just as true for myself as it was for the rest of my friends, many of whom avoided FromSoftware games altogether due to the general atmosphere of fear that the company’s games had generated.
Of course, this couldn’t last forever. Fast forward ten years and I’m a disciple of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s, having played every game he ever directed. Plus Dark Souls 2. And it’s all down to Bloodborne, FromSoftware’s strange orphan of a game.
Let me explain. I’d tried Dark Souls as a teenager to very little avail; it just seemed cruelly (and needlessly) difficult and grim. And for what? Making me prove myself? It didn’t help that the game seemed uptight even with plot details; I guess something happened, once, and I’m somebody trying to achieve something, but why bother explaining any of it to me? I’d decided that I just wasn’t going to click with it and left before even reaching Blighttown. An obvious mistake, but an easy one to make.
This all changed with Bloodborne. I picked it up not knowing it was a Miyazaki project, driven by its gothic aesthetic and the fact I was desperate for a decent PS4 exclusive. And yes, upon booting it up I could feel the distinctive FromSoftware style in all its characteristic third-person action game clunkiness. Still, the opening cinematic intrigued me, and I thought to myself about how I’d give it a go, but drop it if it was as annoying as Dark Souls.
Fat chance. I spent dozens of hours on it and loved every minute. Even all of the elements that people recognise are bad I still liked regardless; that’s just how strong of a grip this game had on me.
So, what’s the deal? What made this one click while Dark Souls failed to? There’s a couple of elements to this. Bloodborne‘s largest draw for me was (and continues to be) its sense of presentation and aesthetic; the game simply exudes style from every inch. Nothing quite feels like Bloodborne; the Latin choral soundtrack, the gothic architecture, the intermingling of the sacred and the profane. It’s hardly a comfortable game to experience, but that experience isn’t really like anything else.
Unlike other FromSoft games, this one has a distinctively dreamlike feel to it. With your character’s safe haven being a place called The Hunter’s Dream, which features a number of headstones listing locations for you to ‘awaken’ at, you might believe that this location is not real, while the city where the majority of the game is set is. Things are, of course, never that easy; the game progresses, and things in the ‘real’ world fade into shades of frightening unreality, while the two realities begin to infringe upon one another.
The other element is Bloodborne‘s prioritisation of proactive behaviour. In Dark Souls, players could cower behind shields and the game design forced players to distance themselves as much from enemies as possible in order to avoid getting hit. Bloodborne flips this: shields are (almost) entirely removed from the game, being replaced by a gun for parrying, and closer contact is prioritised by the combat design as attempting to dodge out of the enemy’s rage is more likely to get yourself hit. Rather, players are implicitly encouraged to dodge towards enemies, using the brief moment of invincibility during a dodge to avoid receiving damage, meaning that you’ll always be within range to perform a counter-blow.
Speaking of counter-blows, Bloodborne‘s rallying system is nothing short of brilliance. While the response to getting hit in Dark Souls might have been to sprint away to a corner and chug your Estus Flask, Bloodborne allows you to recover lost health through counter-attacking enemies in a short duration after being hit. This, then, allows for combat to feel almost like a dance with your enemies, as you give and receive blows until one eventually perishes.
The other result of conditioning players into prioritising proactive behaviour is the ludonarrative; much of Bloodborne concerns itself with the difference between men and beasts and how, in our attempts to prove our superior statuses as men, we prove ourselves to be just as (if not more) vicious as the same beasts we reject. It’s easy, in combat, to give into the bloodlust, to become animalistic with your attacks.
The overall combat system was overhauled from Dark Souls in order for movement to feel faster and more fluid, but did not sacrifice the weightiness that characterises FromSoftware’s combat systems. You might move faster but so do your opponents, and it’s just as easy to get yourself killed as it is in any other FromSoftware game.
This change has had a significant impact upon FromSoftware’s own approach to combat design; Dark Souls 3, released a year after Bloodborne, featured a much faster combat system than its predecessors, and each subsequent game FromSoftware has released has been more in line with Bloodborne‘s emphasis on proactive behaviour.
It’s also worth discussing the game’s writing, which is more accessible than that of Dark Souls. Certainly, compared to most games this one will still feel cryptic and unforthcoming with information. Nevertheless, the game still sets you off with a concrete goal and you feel more as though you’ve simply been thrown into a new, dense world with plenty of things to discover, rather than feeling as though the game is deliberately obfuscating information for the sake of difficulty.
You’ll be dimly aware of some sort of beast hunt, that you’re in a city called Yharnam, and that you need to find something called ‘paleblood’. But this isn’t important, the game tells you: just go out and kill some things and you’ll be doing just fine. So you do just that, axe in hand. And, as you venture through the blood-slick streets, the game will steadily drip-feed you information from there.
It doesn’t exactly hold your hand through all of this; plenty of information you’ll need to glean for yourself through connecting the dots and being observant. But, so long as you’re paying attention, you’ll be rewarded with a relatively readable main story, even if you might miss the finer details (and are disturbed by what you do experience). Said finer details are, however, very rewarding when you do notice them. This is a game that steeps itself in motifs and symbols, and being able to recognise a motif in a circumstance when the game doesn’t spell it out for you feels great and gives you greater insight into what’s going on.
If all of this works so well, why, then, has Bloodborne never received a sequel? I called it an ‘orphan’ earlier, largely because it’s received less attention from its creators than almost any of the other FromSoftware games. The only exception to this is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which was brilliant but evidently something of a side-project for FromSoftware as it deviated greatly from their typical ‘souls’ style and was smaller in scope. Players have been waiting so long for a Bloodborne sequel that we’ve all given up, and we even saw the release of Lies of P, an obvious ode to Bloodborne, and a game that filled the gap where a Bloodborne sequel should be.
On top of that, Bloodborne is a PS4 exclusive; the game has still not been ported to PC, and there doesn’t seem to be any hope for a remaster in the future. With all this, I worry that Bloodborne is already being forgotten about, despite featuring some of FromSoftware’s best work.
While Elden Ring is still in the current zeitgeist, Bloodborne, a game whose combat design and accessibility of story information directly influenced Elden Ring‘s, is receding further into the past. Indeed, it even seems as though Elden Ring‘s upcoming sequel, Nightreign, has been influenced by Bloodborne‘s Chalice Dungeons with regard to level design. In the age of FromSoftware supremacy, let’s remember one of its neglected children; and even if we’re never getting a sequel (I, for one, have entirely given up), its influence will continue to echo ten years after its release.
