Thicker than water and slicker than any Souls game to date.
Let’s say you’re the head honcho at From Software – you, a Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls devotee with the hundreds of accumulated hours, anecdotes and battle scars that come with that fandom. In which direction do you steer this esteemed developer for its next game? We’re going to go ahead and make the assumption that you don’t have a lifelong ambition to produce such hits as Polystyrene Tycoon and say you’d make the smoulderingly handsome PS4 exclusive that is Bloodborne.
Why? Not just because it introduces Yharnam, a smogcoated new world of quasi-Victorian streets, windy moors and other, non-Souls geography to explore and drench in monster viscera. It also peppers the tremendously popular series formula with inspired new mechanics and welcome movement options which, in execution, are literal game-changers.
Most notable among all Bloodborne’s mechanics is Regain. When an enemy hits you, you see a chunk of health from your bar change from red to orange, rather than disappear straight away. At this point, you have a brief window of opportunity to regain (get it?) your health by successfully landing a blow on your foe. Pull it off and you narrowly avert disaster. Miss, and you not only lose the health from your original injury, but leave yourself open to more punishment. It’s a simple and effective way of remoulding the traditional Souls fight, which until now was as much about shielding and rolling as swinging a weapon in anger. The Regain system dictates a more fast-paced and riskier approach to every fight. There are still shields, and there’s still very much a roll button, but there are also more opportunities to be a hero and to be the architect of your own downfall. In short: it drags you into each close-quarters combat encounter like a magnet.
“We want everyone who plays the game to feel they’re in peril in every situation,” says producer Masaaki Yamagiwa. It sounds like kind of an obvious thing to say about a From Software game, but most Souls enemies stay put rather than roaming (that bloody, bloody Pursuer notwithstanding), and a significant portion of your Souls time is spent retreading old ground after falling in battle. With that being the case, did you always feel a sense of peril? In ’Borne, most enemies do move around. Sometimes in large packs, even. Occasionally, a single undead foe will burst out from a coffin as you draw near. Yharnam’s streets don’t simply demand muscle memory but also reactions, strategy and a thick serving of bravery.
With the behaviour of your health bar and your foes equally transformed in Bloodborne, other parts of that old Souls blueprint (we promise that’s the last time we’ll mention it) need to follow suit to complement them. The backstep is a good example of this evolution – it’s a more pronounced animation that covers a longer distance now. It gives you that bit more confidence to lunge in and out of an engagement at speed, which loops back to that whole ‘peril’ thing.
Then there’s the way in which your weapons transform on the fly, and your ability to wield a firearm in addition to a melee weapon. That’s huge. It means when you’re building a combo, your weapon has three possible states for each hit: extended, contracted, and transforming. The cleaver-like weapon seen in the game’s trailer deals fast, mid-damage hits in its contracted form, and slower, high-damage hits in extended form, as you’d expect. By charging up an especially slow and hard-hitting attack in its extended form, you can stun enemies and leave them vulnerable to more attacks for an extended window, too. But you can also lengthen and shorten the cleaver on the fly, making it less repetitive and more reactive.
And at all times, there’s a firearm at your side, ready to pop a shot away with a tap of L1. You can even dual-wield guns, though with ammo being as scarce as it is you probably won’t get far. They’re best used to shave off a bit of health from long range, or simply to get an adversary’s attention. Doing so will alert all nearby enemies, though. To aggravate just one and keep his friends none the wiser, you’ll need to find a pebble and lob it at him. Given the proclivity Bloodborne’s population demonstrates for hanging around in packs in the game’s early build, this’ll likely be an essential strategy.
There’s one more big change that From Software’s implementing, this one more likely to be divisive among the old guard. We’ll leave it to Yamagiwa-san to break the news: “there’s no class system, as such.” Nor can you customise the player-character, known simply as ‘Hunter’, beyond the clothing he wears and equipment he carries. Alright, breathe. Breathe. In one sense this means you’re getting a more directed experience in Bloodborne, although we’re assured there’s still plenty of scope for malleability as you level up your beast slayin’ character.
But directed certainly does not mean linear. In fact the idea of exploring your surroundings in Bloodborne is something Yamagiwa-san keeps coming back to when he talks about the world From Software is crafting. Not just exploration in a game-ified sense, but noseying in every corner and finding an oil flask that can be thrown at enemies before shooting them do deal significantly more fire damage, say.
That kind of janitorial work reaps obvious rewards, but Yamagiwa-san also talks about exploration for its own sake – this is a setting worth savouring. From’s only shown a small area of inner city architecture off publicly, but we’ve seen much greater variety. Henwick’s Gravetown, for example. A wide, open moor punctuated by the odd dead tree and more ankle-deep fog than an episode of Top Of The Pops 2. Here, the Hunter is pursued by gnarled old hags whose weak spots, appropriately enough,are their dodgy hips.
Wherever you are in its haunting world, the fidelity is striking. Textures are pin-sharp; darker colours inky and rich; light sources fittingly eerie. The visual jump between Dark Souls (From always refers back to this game rather than its sequel, tellingly) and Bloodborne is absolutely enormous, and it’s not the only reason to rub the game’s exclusivity in the noses of, well, everyone else. This may not hold the most RPG elements a From game has ever boasted, but it looks and, more importantly, feels more sophisticated, polished and more coherent in character than its forefathers. It’s got soul.
Format PS4
ETA 2015
Pub Sony
Dev From Software/SCE Japan Studio