Game review: Bloodborne (+competition)

Herald online

2 Apr, 2015 12:00 AM3 mins to read

Screengrab from from the game Bloodborne.

Hidetaka Miyazaki is a genius. The auteur behind Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and now Bloodborne approaches video games like an artist does a canvas, crafting broad strokes of rich gameplay, in-depth lore and innovative level design into works of staggering beauty. He's also a terrible jerk who loves finding new ways to make you suffer.

Want to know the first thing that happens to your character in Bloodborne after you stagger off unarmed from a makeshift sickbed? A werewolf rips you apart limb from limb as you flail ineffectually at its claws. It doesn't get better. You'll face near-certain doom at the hands of hordes of pitchfork-wielding villagers and a bewilderingly large beast just to be able to do RPG basics like levelling up.

The game progresses in a hail of blood, brain-bruisingly difficult puzzles and maddening boss fights. There may be moments, hunched over a controller at 3am, bleary eyes staring at the words, "You Died" for the millionth time, that you may want to cry at life's futility. Make no mistake: Bloodborne is hard. Get that? It's really not easy at all. Okay. Got it. Now we can go on.

Because this might be the best game released so far this year. For all its horrors, Bloodborne is immersive, satisfying and somehow, most of all, fun. Miyazaki and his team at From Software have taken pools of frustrated tears and acres of spilled pixellated guts and turned them into a masterpiece.

Many of Bloodborne's mechanics are similar to those of previous Souls games. Blood echoes replace souls as currency; a living doll is the seer who allows you to level up; level design is still non-linear. But where previous Souls games settled into a kind of melancholia between tough battles, Bloodborne is more of an edgy horror. Yharnam, the city at the centre of the action, is a truly unsettling ruined Victorian dystopia, filled with horrible beasts and deranged men.

Combat is faster and more brutal. You roll past enemies and eviscerate them from behind in the blink of an eye. Shields are a thing of the past. Instead you must master the art of disrupting opponents by shooting them in the face mid-attack. A quick counter-attack will give you back health you lost in an assault. Weapons are more awesome. You can switch between one-handed and two-handed mode mid-fight, depending on whether you need speed or power.

There are a few features that just feel mean. Blood vials, the only way of replenishing your character's health, do not refill after death. Sometimes you'll find a key in the far corner of the middle of nowhere, and have to figure out that it opens a door up a tower in a section of the game you last visited nine hours ago. They are small quibbles with a work of genius. Miyazaki may repeatedly drag you down so low that you're licking the bottom of the boots of despair, but he does it to create little miracles of innovation, skill or luck.

In the same way you have to know failure to truly appreciate success, you must fight through dozens of 'You Died' screens to appreciate the two words that pop up when you finally beat a boss. The most beautiful words in all of gaming: "Prey Slaughtered".