Yeah, or the best Victorian Gothic game.
i sometimes feel like it might just be the best game
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Itâs fucking great so far. Iâm basically just working for Bloodborne hours at this point. Hell, iâm tempted to take a day off just to play it. Being an adult sucks i want to be home playing video games all day.
The Souls games have always held a dreamlike quality for me, with the oddly placed NPCs that mysteriously disappear at unknown times and sudden transitions into vastly different spaces and eerie quiet/emptiness of environments. So iâm thrilled that Bloodborne is leaning into that feeling.
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ya I beat this+dlc recently, basically took me 3 12-hour sessions every time I had a day off from work. didnât wanna pull myself away from it
I had one session of approximately three hours, made it to the first boss on the bridge who obliterated me, never figured out that the gun was also a parry mechanic. Iâll get back to it in like a couple years
this is one of my favorite things to do
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the thing with the whole first yharnam stretch is that itâs one of the best and densest parts of the game but itâs also where people are most likely to be rebuffed by the difficulty so I want to tell people âif you can clear one boss youâre good to sick with itâ but also not to rush that part
I currently believe this is the best and most honest way to design a modern action game:
- Once the player has learned the controls and practiced in no-challenge areas (and as fast as possible),
- Give them a significantly difficult combat test
- An area large enough to allow multiple approaches, multiple camp points, multiple throughlines
- Itâs going to be an arena, but make it big enough players wonât see it entire on each encounter
- By designing it so players die 3-5 times, encourage them to experiment with the full scope of their abilities
- If the player gives up, itâs too hard â good! Youâve been honest about what the game is and what makes it fun. If they donât want to play your action game, ok.
I first saw this in RE4âs village (still my favorite action game setpiece ever), saw it repeated in Vanquish (the end of the demo level); Bloodborne does it around that bonfire, nu-Doom does it in that first imp room. Itâs lovely.
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I mean, this is level 2 of DMC3 pretty much in a nut shell, aside from the âlargeâ part, but then space was never really what the game was going for, so âlarge enoughâ works.
Yeah, Iâd consider that relatively late but they share enough design philosophy with Mikami that I bet itâs the same reasoning.
I much prefer this to DMC1âs spider boss or God Handâs first vs. Devil Hand as a mid-game midterm of improbable difficulty
Is it that late though? I mean, level 1 is just one room (which the game helpfully lets you replay as many times as you want), then level 2 is like fight a few waves of little dudes then the first Reaper, who will probably hand you your ass a few times (seriously, never forget the original Gamespot review that gave up on the game there and said it was too hard) until you figure him out, and then can handle him like a normal enemy. Heâs the one I am talking about.
I mean, if you mean like the Cerberus fight, sure, that one takes awhile longer to get to. And yes, either of those is much more elegant than the fucking spider in 1. I recently started up a game of 1 just cold, and was happy to beat the spider on my first try, but man, that was rough back when that came out.
good point, I may be misremembering DMC3âs intro
The difficulty in Bloodborne has been very manageable with my usual âfirst time through a Soulsâ approach: walking slowly through each area and slowly peering around every corner with the camera. Most of my deaths have been to dogs, because of course they have.
I beat clerical worker beast on my first try, by treating him like a faster taurus demon. Juking in, baiting out slams and swings, and hopping in for a few hits between attacks or chucking molotovs if he was a little too far away. He was less aggressive than i was expecting tbqh.
Excited to take a crack at Big Daddy Gascoigne tonight, i have a feeling heâll be a lot tougher. I summoned him for awhile and cleared out most of Central Yharnam street level with his help. It was awesome, he juggles dudes into the air and screams and flails away at their bodies even after killing them.
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i beat him on my second attempt lol
Then i went to church and GOT PICKED UP BY A GIANT INVISIBLE MONSTER, WHAT THE FUCK??
this is the coolest video game iâve ever played
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Might as well share this â good observations on Bloodborne (past those on Souls, ~51:30 mark) and spends a bit of time explaining why the Lovecraft associations are fairly limited and superficial (re: Tulpaâs last post)
ehhhh I donât know about that. I mean itâs an interesting point but I donât think you have to also mimic the ideology behind Lovecraftâs stories in order to be considered influenced by other aspects of the world building. FWIW the most impactful Lovecraft story to me has always been The Shadow out of Time, and I think a lot of the closest similarities can be found there. I donât think I would ever call it derivative, I think it does something pretty interesting with the influence, but I donât know if I would try to claim it isnât there, or isnât important to the world of the game.
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The description this person gives of a lovecraft story as âyou discover the existence of an ancient god and you go madâ is exactly the kind of memetic lovecraft I was talking about. Thereâs very few if any actual lovecraft stories that fit that particular pattern. In actual details, Bloodborneâs focus on pure bloodlines, miscegenation with eldritch monsters, the dangers of scientific curiosity, xenophobia, even entering dream states to explore different worlds is textbook lovecraft tropes that arenât otherwise common to other turn of the century horror and supernatural fiction. Even the iconic âstory told through item descriptionsâ thematically coheres with intertextual readings of Lovecraft: Almost all of Lovecraftâs stories do not begin with a direct observation of the horror, but with an unreliable second hand account of a reproduction of a facsimile of the event. This works to keep the nature of the world unsettled, to have the truth in the mouths and minds of untrustworthy witnesses.
Yes, people that stop at facile tentacle trivia are wrong but I think it is just as wrong to ignore the many ways the game can be read through a Lovecraftian lens.
As far as specific stories:
Shadow over Innsmouth (bloodlines and miscegenation and xenophobia, but fish people instead of werewolf people, Attention to architectural detail and the âlevel designâ of that chase)
At the Mountains of Madness (the twist that one of the species of aliens is not hostile at all and exploring the remaining ruins of their once great civilization)
Polaris (communicating with star entities, worlds within dreams that exist outside of the normal curve of time)
The Statement of Randolph Carter (journeys into forbidden underworlds that follow rules of dream logic, essentially the Chalice Dungeons can be strongly associated with this story but also with the general lovecraft theme of the true horror being buried underground.)
Celephais (Mostly this echoes the common interpretation of Gehrmann that he is trapped in a dream that resembles a location in the real world. When we later see the main character of Celephais in another dreamlands story, he has grown homesick and made parts of it resemble his memories of the real location)
The Outsider (becoming abhuman from a first person perspective. Many people only memetically aware of Lovecraft assume that thereâs a hard separation between human and monstrous in lovecraftâs works but this is not the case at all)
The Festival (obsession with 17th and 18th century architecture:
with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch
Its the one I think of most in association with Bloodborne. It also centers around a strange occult ritual happening at a centralized church, the denizens of the town becoming progressively less human as the story progresses, and one of them pointing out the âfamily resemblanceâ between the narrator and the townsfolk.)
This is rambling and pedantic but I hope this at least illustrates that there are far more commonalities with specifically HPLâs lit than just âsome of the monsters have tentaclesâ
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The Bonfireside Chat boys are bona fide Lovecraft fans and theyâre all in on âthis game is Lovecraft AFâ, having never read a Lovecraft story (i have that superficial âcosmic horror; lousy with tentaclesâ understanding) iâve just taken their word for it.
Going to guess Lovecraft:Bloodborne::Berserk:Demonâs Souls â the influence is stated and obviously there, but of course itâs not the only ingredient in the stew.
Also, even if youâre just taking a superficial look at what Lovecraft stories may or may not do, human confronts otherworldly being and is driven insane is a pretty reasonable reading of the moon presence ending imo