Bloodborne‘s first battle – against a vaguely werewolf-ish creature inside what appears to be a 19th-century medical clinic – is so hard that you literally can’t win. You don’t even have a weapon. And there’s nowhere to run and hide. You will die. The only question is how long you can evade your relentless, monstrous foe.
When you awake in a comparatively tranquil place (though still pretty creepy, given all the graves and weird bony specters reaching out from the soil) called the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll find a couple of weapons in the form of a gun and a cleaver, plus a few tips from the developers. These single sentence missives teach you the basics: how to attack, switch weapons and items, and dodge.
Then it’s back to the nightmare world to face your attacker again.
And chances are pretty good that you’ll quickly die a second time. You’ll wake up once more in the Hunter’s Dream, maybe explore a little and find another tip or two, then head back into the fray and perhaps make it a little further before dying again.
And again.
And again.
This is the long awaited PlayStation 4 exclusive RPG made by Tokyo-based From Software, a developer that believes the harder a challenge is, the more satisfying it is to finally accomplish it.
It’s not wrong.
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There’s not much of a story.
After undergoing a mysterious blood transfusion, your hero – completely customizable, including race, gender, and a handful of classes that guide development without limiting it – wakes up in a nightmare world as a hunter of foul things. Once human, these beasts that have overrun a dark and dangerous city that wouldn’t be out of place in industrial-era Europe.
A tale (very) gradually takes shape through conversations with a few key characters, plus chats with civilians behind closed doors who’ve barred themselves inside their homes, away from the world’s horrors. But much is left to your imagination.
As in its past games, From Software has created an intricately architected world – in this case a massive, gorgeous, incredibly detailed gothic environment demanding of players’ attention – that allows us to project narrative onto it, creating little stories of our own in perhaps the same way an archeologist might imagine the lives of long-gone inhabitants of an abandoned city.
In this way the lack of much overt storytelling is actually kind of empowering, especially since it allows players to focus on exploration and combat – Bloodborne‘s stock-in-trade.
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Contrary to some rumours, Bloodborne is not significantly – if, indeed, at all – easier than From Software’s dauntingly difficult Souls games, of which it’s considered a spiritual successor.
Progress is like an inchworm. You’ll move forward a smidgeon, then things will seem stalled as force slowly builds behind you, and then you’ll scooch ahead a little more.
Lanterns – the places at which you can return to the Hunter’s Dream and spend all of the Blood Echoes (the game’s term for currency and experience points) you’ve earned – are few and far between. You might play for a couple of without encountering a new one.
And each time you die you’ll lose all of your Blood Echoes, which means you’ll have basically made no character progress. The only way to get them back is to make your way back to where you died and collect them without dying again. If a monster has consumed them you’ll need to slay the beast to get them back.
Consequently, if you’ve been playing for a while and have banked up a lot of Blood Echoes, sometimes it makes sense to simply return to your previous lantern and go back to the Hunter’s Dream to spend them – though when you return to the world all of the enemies you’ve defeated will be back, and you’ll have to kill them again.
It’s a hard-bordering-on-cruel bit of game design, as players of previous From Software adventures already no doubt know.
But you’ll eventually realize that you retain other forms of progress post-death.
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For starters, death doesn’t take back what you’ve learned of the world. You retain knowledge of where paths lead and which enemies appear where. And you have the information to keep from making the same mistake a second time.
Plus, you’ll earn items that stay with you. The most basic are bullets and vials that replenish your health, but there’s also a huge amount of mysterious and very useful items in very limited supply, from magic papers that can enhance your attacks to clouds of dust that can keep enemies from regenerating health. Finding them is exciting; trying them to see what they do is even more so. One of these items is called Madman’s Knowledge, and it’s used to gain a resource called Insight, which can alter the world around you, causing new, stronger enemies to appear in unfamiliar locations.
What’s more, you’ll eventually find shortcuts. The cleverly constructed labyrinthine world is filled with doors, gates, elevators, and breakable items that, once interacted with, will create new paths that remain from that point on, even if you die.
Indeed, one of Bloodborne‘s primary draws is world discovery. The need to know what waits beyond the next bend – be it a new monster, a treasure, or the handwringing choice of a branching path – is intense and addictive. Whenever I defeated a boss or found an emblem to unlock a gate and gain access to a new area I was downright giddy with excitement of what I might find.
I also, admittedly, found myself wishing for a map. From Software revels in providing players the bare minimum necessary for success, and maps aren’t strictly necessary. But the world is a maze, and at any juncture there are usually multiple open paths and areas of interest. It’s easy to think you’re stuck when really you just need to go back to a place you’ve forgotten about.
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Inextricably coupled with Bloodborne‘s exhilarating exploration is its combat system. Enemies are typically what keep you from advancing, so defeating them is your key to moving onward.
But they’re tough. They strike fast, hit hard, are unrelenting, and often behave unpredictably. The most basic enemies beaten with difficulty early in the game remain dangerous even 25 hours into the experience, and must continue to be approached with caution and strategy.
None of this will be a surprise if you’ve played previous From Software games. But the designers have tweaked their proven formula for punishing combat – which typically places a premium on defensive strategies – in a number of interesting ways.
First off, combat is faster paced and encourages risk taking. Rather than a weapon and a shield, you have two implements of pain: something sharp and something that shoots (you can swap your gun for a shield a little later in the game, but it turns out to be a poor fit for this sort of combat).
Your gun – which has a precious supply of ammunition – is used mostly to stun enemies by firing right before they attack. Then you can follow up with your sword, axe, cleaver, or whatever other weapon you choose to equip. And if you time it just right you can land a vicious attack that will kill most minions with a single blow.
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To push players to press their attacks, Bloodborne is less stingy with recovery potions and the length of time it takes your hero to use one. There’s also a new opportunity to regain some of your lost health if you can strike back within a couple of seconds of taking a hit.
Plus, your stamina meter – which governs all your actions – drains less quickly, especially when dodging. A very viable strategy is to dodge forward and past enemy attacks. Even if you get hit, you can likely regain most of your health when you quickly strike them from behind.
Also new is the notion of transforming weapons. Tap a shoulder button and your sword will become a stone mallet, or your short axe will morph into a halberd. These altered weapons can give you more reach or power at the cost of speed. Transform mid-flurry and you can deliver an even more powerful combination of attacks.
It all adds up to an immensely rewarding combat system that’s faster than that of other From Software games but still demands strategy and skill.
In fact, the fighting is so gratifying that it takes much of the sting out of dying and losing Blood Echoes. During the lengthy loading screen that pops up after you die (which provides plenty of time to reflect on what you did wrong and how you ought to alter your tactics), I frequently found myself thinking something to the effect of: I’m dead, and that sure sucks, but at least I get to hack up that terrifying furry man-beast all over again. Because man, that was fun.
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As with From Software’s other RPGs, a defining part of the Bloodborne experience is multiplayer, which takes on a trio of forms: asynchronous, cooperative, and player-vs.-player.
Asynchronous interactions exist as scrolls left by other players with bony messengers that live in the ground. These notes may alert you of impending boss battles and ambushes, treasures and hidden paths. You’ll also encounter blood stains which, if touched, will show you the red ghost of another player and how they died nearby. Very helpful stuff that saved my life several times over.
Even more important is cooperative multiplayer. You can ring a bell when approaching a tough section – typically a boss – and call upon one or two strangers (or friends, if they have the password you provide) to come to your aid.
The problem I ran into playing pre-release is that there were so few people online – just critics and developers – that I couldn’t find anyone to help me. That made some boss fights far more difficult than they probably should have been.
Consequently, my take cooperative multiplayer is predicated largely on how it works in games like Dark Souls and Dark Souls II. It looks to be almost identical, but I’ll update this review post-launch if it is not.
I’ve also not yet been able to try competitive multiplayer, in which other players invade your world, trying to stop you from making it to a specific boss encounter. But it looks to be peripheral and non-essential. I suspect it won’t enjoy much more than a niche audience, as has been the case with competitive play in From Software’s previous RPGs.
But again, I will provide an update if player-vs.-player proves significant in some unexpected way once the public jumps in.
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There are times in Bloodborne times when you feel stuck, when it seems as though you simply cannot beat whatever enemy stands in your way, and that your only choice is to grind levels, killing enemies to earn Blood Echoes and slowly grow your character’s stats.
But somewhere around the 15th hour I earned my first Chalice, which, along with a couple of special ingredients found elsewhere, allowed me to conduct a ritual by an altar in the Hunter’s Dream. This created a procedurally generated dungeon where I was able to hunt for fun, earning treasures and Blood Echoes before encountering random bosses just as powerful as those met in the game proper.
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I’d have been quite happy to simply keep killing foes in and around the city. But the Chalice dungeons provide fresh – if not quite as pretty or intricately constructed – scenery to explore while engaging in tough, bloody combat and gradually leveling up your hero.
The Chalice Dungeons are, in effect, the sugar on top of what is already an essential PlayStation 4 experience.
There’s been some justified grumbling about the lack of defining platform exclusives this generation.
Bloodborne should put an end to that.
The profound difficulty of From Software’s newest RPG probably won’t be to all tastes, but it makes a strong argument for the concept that the harder the challenge, the more satisfying the reward.
Give it a chance – not just a couple of hours, mind, but five or ten; enough to let its claws sink in nice and deep – and you’ll probably find Bloodborne an intoxicating dose of pure masochistic pleasure.
