4/5 ★ – forlornronin's review of Bloodborne.

-Visuals are generally pretty muddy, especially in the early sections of the game. While the actual designwork behind Yarnham is top notch, the graphics and lighting typically turn a lot of what's there to appreciate into potato soup. This is especially bad for stuff like enemy identification. In some locations (namely the River of Blood before Ludwig) combat typically relies on lock-on and swinging. You cannot and will not see your target among the very very busy textures and clutter -Lock on is horrific. It just doesn't really work intuitively, between not being able to toggle between certain enemies, and having a distance requirement (about thirty meters) in order to actually lock onto an enemy. However, despite it being absolutely fucking awful, you still are forced to rely on it to properly orient yourself in combat. so get ready to lose a few times because something that should have worked simply didn't -The game suffers a lot from typical Fromsoft storytelling. This is fine in something like Dark Souls I feel, but it just doesn't really work for Bloodborne where so much of the setting is being affected by a story you don't really get told a lot about without heavy digging, which sucks. There are still concepts I don't fully understand despite having beaten the game completely, and now I get to toiletread the wiki, which is a bad feeling. Especially for a game that has so many utterly genius concepts that I really wish it just said out loud a little bit more. And it’s generally pretty rare that I ask a game in today’s times to be LESS subtle. +Gameplay is so strong. It really feels like an accessible stepping stone to Dark Souls gameplay, but without really sacrificing the depth of mechanics and equipment like Sekiro did. No complaints whatsoever +Setting is fantastic. The actual design of Yarnham and the surrounding areas gives each location a lot of identity, which is a problem I have had with Dark Souls before. nowhere is very forgettable +Cosmic horror done well in a videogame for the first and last time in recorded history -The game heavily disincentivizes trying new equipment, because past around 15 hours, store-bought weapons have no way to stack up against weapons you've been dumping lots of upgrades into. This is a shame, because so many genius weapons do not have any chance to shine because they're just useless. This is a Souls-series wide problem +The weapons themselves all have very strong identities and manage to be fresh every time. I can't really think of any two weapons out of the 20 that I tried that have a very similar niche or playstyle +Ludwig blew my mind. I almost didn't like him, but the second phase completely brought me around. one of my favourite boss fights of all time +Gerhman fight is also fantastic and a great thematic end +The concept of running cyclical media is always a big winner with me, especially the idea of overthrowing Gerhman just to take his place and guide the next bastard -A lot of rough early bosses. At one point in the game I felt like there were more lame bosses than good ones, but this wasn't true by the time I was done. Still a shame. I can easily see why someone would drop the game after going from Shadows of Yarnham to Rom back to back -Weapon durability has zero reason to exist and serves nothing. It’s not present enough to make you use multiple playstyles/weapons but always juuuust enough to get you at the worst times. +I enjoy there only being two real currencies a lot. Spending the same resource between items, levels, upgrades, repairs etc. is very satisfying to me -Insight feels very very underutilized as a mechanic and has a lot of unseen potential, ESPECIALLY in a game about losing your mind and false perceptions +The Old Hunters is great. I really love these "cast call" type of appearances in videogames, so finally getting to be face to face with so many important previously-lore-only characters is great -More one-hit-kill moves than I'm really comfortable with (the only amount I'm comfortable with is "zero") +I love my stakedriver Run time: 41h11m I enjoyed this game a lot. I'm not sure if it will be the stepping stone I need to get into titles like Dark Souls after not liking them already, but I'm sure we'll see. It mostly felt great to play and especially felt great to soak in the environments and worldbuilding (when I was able to). good gaming. 8/10