Review: Diabolically Difficult 'Bloodborne' is Among the PS4's Best
Bloodborne is a game about hope.
It’s
also a game about death. It’s about vile monsters smashing, slicing,
clawing, and chewing you to bits. It’s about horror, frustration, salty
language, and broken controllers.
What keeps you playing Bloodborne,
the incredibly challenging PS4-only role-playing game crafted by
demented developer From Software, is a spark. It’s hard to see, a
flicker in the darkness often obscured by the rage of yet another failed
attempt to kill a thing you are clearly in no shape to kill. But it’s
there, a glimmering beacon, a calm voice telling you that despite a
learning curve shaped like a wall and hours spent futilely jabbing at
creatures so hellish that you vaguely worry about the mental health of
the people who created them, you are going to be OK.
You are going to win. And it’s going to feel great.
Fans of From Software’s infamous Souls
series, which has rightfully earned a reputation as being among the
most difficult of its generation, know the value of hope in the face of
despair all too well. It’s the secret sauce that’s powered an
impenetrably obtuse video game franchise to the heights of critical and
commercial acclaim. It’s also what makes Bloodborne one of the best PS4 games yet.
Anyone expecting that Bloodborne would be something of a departure from Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls,
perhaps a bit more inviting and less grinding in its difficulty, should
prepare for the first of many disappointments. From its stressful
gameplay loop to its online mechanics to the bright red “YOU DIED”
message that mocks you roughly every 10 minutes, Bloodborne is Dark Souls 3 in all but name.
This
time, you play a hunter wandering the once-pleasant city of Yharnam,
now a gothic nightmare in the grip of an epidemic that’s transformed its
citizens into horrific creatures. Your task: kill the beasts and
restore order. Crammed with confounding religious overtones and steeped
in gore, the story isn’t the star here. But a cohesive narrative isn’t
the point of these games, and it’s all just absurd enough to keep you
marching straight into Bloodborne’s fiery video-game baptism.
At its core, Bloodborne plays like any of the past Souls
games. You fight your way through monsters in an effort to locate an
elusive progress-saving bonfire, though now it’s a progress-saving lamp.
Instead of acquiring “souls” by killing creatures, you acquire “blood
echoes,” and when you die, you still have to race back to your corpse to
retrieve them. Get killed on the way there and you lose your earnings
forever. The Groundhog Day, love-it-or-hate-it Souls gameplay flow — fight, die, run back to your cash, forge ahead, die again, start the process anew — is alive and well in Bloodborne.
But Bloodborne
carves out its own identity. For example, monsters can now pick up your
lost loot, requiring the additional step of killing whatever last
killed you to get your cash back. Activating a lamp takes you back to a
hub called the Hunter’s Dream, a safe haven where you can buy and sell
gear, repair and retrofit weapons, and boost your stats.
The biggest change, however, is found out in the field. Bloodborne is a faster, more aggressive game than Dark Souls II.
Hiding behind a shield as a 20-foot-tall ogre tries to turn you into
mush with a club the size of a Buick isn’t an option because you really
don’t have any shields (I found one; it was useless). Magic is largely
nonexistent, so you can’t stand back and lob fireballs.
No, Bloodborne
requires you to get up close and personal, dodging, back-stepping,
staying just out of range of that Buick club as you dart in and out with
your sword/axe/cleaver/hammer. It’s a stiff challenge, requiring tight
focus and a steady eye on your stamina meter, but it’s also speedier and
intrinsically more pleasing than standing back and firing arrows.
From
Software also made a few concessions to keep you in the fight. You
regain some health by immediately attacking the enemy who last injured
you. You can also equip a gun as a secondary weapon, but don’t expect to
rip through Bloodborne with a bazooka. The guns serve mainly to
stun tougher foes, opening them up for a big “Visceral Attack” that
doles out huge damage. Good luck pulling it off regularly, though,
because the only way to nail the timing is to figure it out on your own.
Part of the problem — and this is obviously by design, so maybe it’s not a problem so much as a fact — is that Bloodborne
doesn’t believe in handholding tutorials. It walks you very quickly
through its mechanics and doesn’t care to re-explain itself. How does
the “Frenzy” work? Where do I go to I equip these runes? What’s the
secret to stunning foes with guns? It’s up to you to sort it all out.
While it’s unclear in its systems, Bloodborne
is sharply focused in its macabre sensibilities. The werewolves,
zombies, giants, and giant werewolf zombies are meticulously built and
thoroughly creepy, to a one. The game keeps upping the awful ante; after
a few dozen hours, you’ll duel snake-headed monstrosities,
acid-spitting octo-things, and a numbers of creatures so gross and
insane that despite decades spent ogling Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manuals, I couldn’t describe them on a bet.
Invariably, Bloodborne’s many
roads lead to epic boss fights. You’ll need to beat the bosses to open
up new paths and acquire new abilities — and true to form, the towering
white wolf demon and electrically charged bear-skeleton thing are as
wildly difficult as they look. But this is where Bloodborne really sinks its teeth into you.
If the multitude of regular monsters are weekly tests, Bloodborne’s
bosses are its final exams, and you need to study if you want to pass.
The first time you fight a boss, you’re going to die. But you’ll learn a
thing or two, and eventually you’ll learn enough to know that despite
the limited window to hit the beast in the foot, you can hit it in the
foot. You just have to go do it.
That’s
the hope talking, and when it all comes together, it’s intoxicating.
After a couple of hours spent banging my head against the game’s first
tree-limbed behemoth of a boss, I dodged, leaped, parried, and stabbed
it just enough times to kill it before it killed me. I took a victory
lap around the house, arms raised. True, beyond Bloodborne’s hills lie only bigger hills, but when you’ve climbed one hill, you know you can climb more. You want to climb more.
Most of Bloodborne
is spent this way: scouring its vast environments for hidden treasures
and secret paths, stumbling upon something terrible, getting killed by
it, and jogging back for a little revenge. It’s repetitive, to be sure,
and often the best way forward is to spend time farming the weaker bad
guys for cash. You’ll doubtlessly fling a controller across the room
when you do something stupid and lose 45,000 blood echoes. But you’re
not mad at the game so much as at yourself. You should have been
patient. You should have spent that cash when you had the chance. You
should have been smarter. Fools rush into Bloodborne, and death rushes back out.
Fools also forget that Bloodborne has a multiplayer component. You can leave messages for fellow hunters (another holdover from the Souls
games), and you can also invite players into your game to help take
down bosses. It’s still a little wonky — you need to ring a bell, which
costs yet another poorly explained currency called “Insight,” and then
wait for someone to (maybe) come join you – but it does work, and it can
be immensely useful when you’re out of ideas. If you also run out of
things to kill (you), Bloodborne offers cool procedurally
generated dungeons, which can also be played cooperatively. And for
gamers looking to show off their skills, the game lets players invade
each other’s worlds and go mano a mano.
It’s a big package, and Bloodborne
occasionally buckles under its weight. The game looks great, all dark
and gloomy and bloody and nasty, but the severe load times when you’re
respawning only serve to drive your failure home a few inches more.
Occasional frame-rate issues can hamper fights against larger groups, a
tall-enough order even when it’s running smoothly.
Suffice it to say, Bloodborne
isn’t for everyone. It’s unforgiving, repetitive, and bad for your
blood pressure. But it’s also mysterious, powerful, and good for your
soul — the best PS4 exclusive yet. What more could you have hoped for?
What’s hot: Huge, creepy world; fast, satisfying combat; impressive monsters; smart changes to Souls formula; amazing feeling of accomplishment.
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