(Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/13/2021)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Bloodborne
Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike
Platforms: PS4
Release Date: March 24, 2015
Bloodborne is the fourth game developed by FromSoft since they started branding their own style of action RPGs starting with Demon’s Souls in 2009. Though it is not part of the Souls series, Bloodborne is so heavily intertwined with the Souls games that the franchise is now referred to as “Soulsborne” to include Bloodborne in the canon of Souls games. Bloodborne is essentially Dark Souls in a different setting with slightly different gameplay mechanics. There is something about Bloodborne that elevates its status from the other FromSoft games besides its aesthetic and technical differences. Bloodborne holds a special place in the hearts of many gamers, myself included. It’s a grand achievement in many aspects. It is arguably the best Souls game there is, it magnificently captures the essence of a Lovecraftian work in a visual medium, and it was the game that restored my hope for the video game industry.
I’ll start the last point with a little bit of context: for a hefty chunk of my life, I was a tad averse to modern triple-A titles. The new industry trends during the seventh generation of gaming, like the casual gamer market, the centralized focus of multiplayer, online experience, and microtransactions, left me disenfranchised with modern gaming. When the eighth-generation consoles came out, I was a bit apathetic. I was only interested in games from my childhood, experiencing older games that I missed out on, and modern indie games that either emulated elements from older titles or offered a less streamlined experience. I only bought a Wii U out of the obligation to get the newest Super Smash Bros. In 2016, I got a PS4 for cheap and laid in my room as a dormant paperweight for about a year and a half. In 2017, I started attending a university and got my own apartment with a roommate who also had a PS4 with about a dozen games. I brought mine up there to sample his titles, and one of them was Bloodborne. I knew the Souls games' reputation and was eager to try one. My roommate warned me about Bloodborne and its infamously high level of difficulty in a condescending fashion as if all I had played up to that point was Nintendogs or some shit. I confidently ignored his fair warning and ran head-first into my first Souls experience.
It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly made me fall in love with Bloodborne to renew my faith in gaming. I remember my first experience with the game involved a fair bit of struggling, but not to the extent of what my roommate thought I was going to experience. The combat wasn’t the initial point of strain as I quickly became comfortable with my weapon and plowed through the corrupted denizens of Yharnam. The control in Bloodborne felt so organic that I acclimated to it very quickly, making it easy to kill the mobs of enemies. I never felt like the combat was extremely inaccessible to the player, nor did I get the impression that this game had a steep learning curve. Saying that the combat in this game was “tough but fair” is a cliche, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it. The combat demands a fair amount of skill and acuity from the player, but not to the point of using difficulty as an unfair novelty to see what the player will endure. Whether the Yharnamites were meeting their end with my blade or tearing me to pieces, I never felt like the game relished in sadistically brutalizing the player. On the other end of the spectrum, Bloodborne never held my hand across Yharnam like a fretting parent. It felt refreshing to experience a modern game with so much organic control that didn’t condescend towards the player’s innate abilities.
It wasn’t until I came across a bridge with two lycanthropes that the combat difficulty started to affect me. These two beasts were too menacing to deal with in that proximity, and I died numerous times attempting to get past them with a fight. It didn’t help that I expected to see another lantern in this level after a long trek through Central Yharnam because I didn’t understand how the layout of a Souls game worked yet. I kept enduring the lengthy path to get here just to die at the monstrous claws of the lycanthropes again and again. After being frustrated with the game, I decided there must be another way around this obstacle. In doing this, I discovered many brilliant things about Bloodborne’s level design. I found another passageway at the other end of the bridge obscured by breakable backdrop objects like coffins and wooden barrels. This took me to another area of Central Yharnam, seemingly removed from the path I was taking that led me to the bridge. It wasn’t a dead-end but a different route that took me to the first main boss of the game. I also found an elevator around the bend that took me back to the first lantern at the beginning, a heavy relief after attempting to trek all the way through the level without any respite. In discovering this, I was in awe of the layered design of Central Yharnam. It encourages players to meticulously explore the world and find solutions in places that don’t seem as obvious as the beaten path. The long, arduous expedition of Central Yharnam was rewarded by giving me a shortcut to the spawn point, feeling as if I unraveled the level. It felt much more satisfying than bolting through the level like a race to the finish. The game also presents the player with more than one route when an obstacle becomes too daunting to tackle. All of this is very reminiscent of a Metroidvania-like design philosophy which is one of my favorite methods of game design. It was nice to see that the developers took more from Castlevania than just an aesthetic influence. I was also incredibly impressed that they could execute this concisely in a 3D space, something seldom seen in gaming.
The enemies and bosses in Bloodborne were the icings on a cake that solidified my adoration for this game. In most of the modern triple-A games I was familiar with at the time, the enemies were carbon copies of one another, and bosses were either entirely absent or glaringly obvious to defeat. Nothing in Bloodborne is obvious, including the enemies and the bosses, another aspect that made the game so invigorating. While the game has some standard enemies like the gangly, pitchfork, and machete-wielding villagers, each area introduces new ones to keep the players on their toes. These enemies can range in size, power, numbers, etc., and in Dark Souls fashion, the unassuming foes can be as dangerous as the gigantic ones. The bosses in this game are a real treat. The inspiration of HP Lovecraft naturally gives the developers leeway to design some pretty intimidating, eldritch beasts. Some of these bosses proved to be quite challenging, but dying to them did not vex me because each of them was magnificent. I’d sometimes speed through a level just to get at the chance to conquer the next boss.
Since being impressed and enthralled by my initial Bloodborne experience, I have played through every other Soulsborne game (except for Demon’s Souls for a lack of a PS3). I now have the insight to compare Bloodborne to the other FromSoft games. Even though the first Dark Souls is my favorite due to its world design and game progression, Bloodborne is still a very close second favorite for me. I’d still argue that Bloodborne is objectively the best Soulsborne game due to its superior mechanics. It took the principles of Dark Souls and sanded out the rough edges without compromising on the substantial qualities of the series. Bloodborne is, in essence, a translation of the Souls series. It has the same properties as Dark Souls, but all of these have been shifted to fit the gothic foreground of Bloodborne. The change in setting is an obvious shift from the middle-ages-inspired Dark Souls, but plenty of other aspects have been shifted to make Bloodborne discernible from Dark Souls. Many of these aspects elevate Bloodborne from the rest of the FromSoft games.
Bloodborne is a much more visceral experience than Dark Souls. No longer are we hacking up languished hollows and dragons. The ravenous villagers and arcane beings in Bloodborne are much more aggressive. You have to match their aggression to survive the onslaught of eldritch terrors. Your character can’t just wait to strike and block attacks with a shield. The game even gives you a wooden shield that shatters after using it once to lull you into a false sense of Dark Souls familiarity. It reminds veteran Souls players that this isn’t Dark Souls and Bloodborne has something new to offer that will take some time to get accustomed to. Your character in Bloodborne is much more agile, opting for a dash move instead of a roll to fit the swift combat. A new feature allows the player to restore lost health by striking enemies, which gives the player incentive to be more aggressive. The backstab move involves using a charged strike to put the enemy in a vulnerable kneeled position which is then followed up by what is referred to as a “visceral attack”. Your character plunges their hand into the enemy and then blows them back upon exiting, resulting in a pulpy, coagulated mess of blood. Another way to initiate this visceral attack is reposting Bloodborne's version of parrying. Using a shield is out of the question, so Bloodborne proposes that the player blowback the scourges of Yharnam with a gun. From a distance, you can use the gun in your left hand to time a shot when an enemy is about to attack, rendering him vulnerable in the familiar kneeled stance. Reposting is by far the superior method of blocking the enemy’s attacks. It’s much easier to do than parrying with a shield, but it still requires the same precision. I avoid parrying in Dark Souls like the plague, but reposting is second nature. Reposting also compliments the faster-paced gameplay Bloodborne offers.
If the enemies in Bloodborne don’t force you to be aggressive, the bosses certainly will. Dark Souls bosses will make you consider the best tactics to defeat them, but the bosses in Bloodborne will mop the floor with you if you don’t act quickly. I can’t imagine bosses like the frantic Darkbeast Paarl or the feral Blood-Starved Beast in a slower-paced game like Dark Souls. Their movement is so erratic that there wouldn’t even be a window to block their attacks with a shield. Bloodborne bosses also have second waves after downing a certain amount of their health. These are meant to throw you for a loop even after you pin down their unpredictable windows of opportunity. Every boss fight is a chaotic, heart-thumping duel that will have you exhausted by the end of it. While these bosses require more vigor to overcome than the calculated methods of victory in Dark Souls, Bloodborne offers the most consistent array of foes out of every FromSoft game. Each boss is totally unique, and they come in a variety of sizes and forms. These bosses were more varied than the tired, sword-wielding bosses in Dark Souls and better considered than the reskinned bosses littered in the Souls games.
I’d have a difficult time trying to determine which magnificent, eldritch beast I enjoyed vanquishing the most. Rom’s fight occurs entirely while walking on the water of a remote, gorgeous lake illuminated by the moon. The One Reborn is a grotesque pile of corpses that is quite literally shat out by the moon. Amygdala and Ebrietas’s designs are more reminiscent of the arcane monsters from the Lovecraft lore. My favorite fight is the Shadows of Yharnam, a gank boss between three ringwraiths at the end of the Forbidden Woods. This fight is as well-balanced as Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls 1, with each ringwraith having different moves complementing one another. Their foggy entrance into the arena is also effectively ominous. The main criticism I have with the bosses of Bloodborne is that the difficulty curve of these fights is the most inconsistent out of every FromSoft game. Father Gascoigne is the first main boss of this game and his hectic swipes with an axe and relentless second form make him one of the hardest fights in the game. On the other hand, Mergo’s Wet Nurse can potentially be the last boss in the game, but she’s slow and predictable. The range of difficulty is dispersed so unevenly.
Bloodborne’s inspiration doesn’t stop at the Lovecraftian themes. The kingdom of Yharnam takes inspiration from a bevy of gothic influences. The city's architecture is towering and brooding with stained glass windows, pointed arches, and ornate decorations. The moon has a heavy presence at every point of the game, and its color even signifies the worsening condition of Yharnam. Cemeteries, cathedrals, and dark forests are common areas. The game is so gothic that the statues along the architecture are weeping, which I think is a little much. The game also retains a very Anglo influence like Dark Souls, but the influence stemmed from Mary Shelley and John Keats rather than Chaucer and Beowulf. Bloodborne isn’t directly set during Victorian England, but the gothic nature matched with the clothes and technology sort of leads people to assume that it is. The urban environments of Yharnam look like the foggy streets of London that Jack the Ripper used to prowl. Yharnam is utterly sublime and always has a foreboding, bewitching atmosphere. Yharnam may not have the same seamless world that won me over in Dark Souls 1, but there are still plenty of consistent paths that cross over each other. I was pretty impressed that a hidden route in the Forbidden Woods took me all the way back to Iosefka’s clinic. The strength of Bloodborne’s world is in the quality of each individual level. They are all intricate in their design and are discernable from one another. None of the levels suffer from seeming unfinished, nor do they piss me off like some individual levels in Dark Souls 1. The closest exception is the Upper Cathedral Ward, a calamitously dim area with incredibly narrow hallways littered with some of the worst enemies in the game. Invest in a torch. The stand-out level for me is Cainhurst, the be-all, end-all of gothic castles. The level is so grandiose that you need an invitation to go there, like attending a gallant ball in a Jane Austen novel.
Many of the names of familiar properties from Dark Souls have been shifted to fit the “blood” moniker of Bloodborne. Souls are now referred to as “blood echoes”, titanite shards are “bloodstones”, estus flasks are “blood vials,” etc. Homogenizing these properties with a singular word is probably used to distance the Dark Souls roots from Bloodborne. Still, it could also indicate simplifying some convoluted aspects of Dark Souls. The many builds and play styles one can use in Dark Souls are streamlined in Bloodborne as a singular hunter class, but this doesn’t mean the combat is limited. There are many weapons, including swords, axes, greatswords, and even whips (calling back a possible Castlevania influence). Instead of finding a smattering of different materials for these weapons, they all level up with bloodstones, increasing in size as the weapon gets stronger. The Victorian garb still has protective attributes, but I wouldn’t consider any of these clothing items to be like the armor in Dark Souls. You can’t upgrade the clothing, and none of it will weigh you down. The rare weapons can also be bought at the vendor in Hunter’s Dream instead of having to scrounge around for them. Some might argue that this more streamlined approach to character and weapon building is for cheap accessibility, but I choose to think of it more optimistically. Bloodborne translated these build aspects and filtered out the convoluted tedium.
Not all of these translations are exceptional. While Bloodborne excels in delivering a finer-tuned Souls experience, it also adds plenty of tedium that wasn’t present in Dark Souls. In Bloodborne, the bonfires have been shifted into eerily lit lanterns. The issue is that these lanterns do not function the same way the bonfires do. Interacting with these lanterns will automatically take you to an area called The Hunter’s Dream, an isolated realm covered with white lilies and crocuses with gravestones erected symmetrically along a paved path with a quaint, Victorian manor on the top of a hill. The Hunter’s Dream is similar to the Firelink Shrine from the Souls games in that it acts as a sort of comfortable refuge from the unrelenting world around you. Due to the sublime design and ethereal atmosphere, I’d say the Hunter’s Dream is the best respite area across all of the FromSoft games, next to the Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls 1. I would be confident with this claim if I wasn’t forced to visit The Hunter’s Dream so often during the game. The ability to travel between the lanterns is available right at the start, accessed through the gravestones on the right of the path that goes up to the manor. The problem is that The Hunter’s Dream is the sole passage between each lantern. You can’t rest at a lantern but only teleport between them through the gravestones in The Hunter’s Dream. I’d be more critical of this method of traveling if The Hunter’s Dream wasn’t the hub for everything in this game, giving the place a great deal of utility. Similar to Dark Souls II, a cloaked female character upgrades your stats after speaking with her. In Bloodborne, this figure is a pale doll that sits on a stoop at the bottom of the manor. The manor also has a workbench to repair one’s equipment and upgrade weapons. It fills its role as a hub splendidly, but I much prefer being able to teleport between checkpoints without going to a hub. It doesn’t help that the loading screens in Bloodborne are abysmally long, so traveling between the hub and another lantern can sometimes be grueling.
The health system has been changed to healing items called blood vials. These will restore about 40% of your maximum health, and you can hold up to 20 of them at a time. Unlike the estus system in Dark Souls, blood vials are treated as items the player has to accumulate by either pillaging them from enemies or buying them in the Hunter’s Dream. If you die or reawaken in another place, the number of blood vials will return to the maximum. This is only if you have a number over the limit as insurance. Blood vials are not a rare item as enemies like the giant executioners, villagers, and giant pigs will drop a number of them. Exhausting your blood vial count happens often, and rebuilding your blood vial inventory requires killing multiple enemies that drop them or farming for blood echoes. Either tactic requires a hefty amount of grinding, which I’m not particularly a fan of. One would think the blood vials wouldn’t be an item like the antidotes or pebbles because they are relegated to their own button, but they are just as finite. The healing power of the blood vials can’t be upgraded like the estus flasks, so you use quite a few at once. This usually results in having you grind every so often to restock on blood vials which is something I never enjoyed doing.
In The Hunter’s Dream, there is another array of gravestones located on the opposite side of the teleporting ones. These gravestones will transport you to the chalice dungeons, the most grind-intensive aspect of Bloodborne. In the chalice dungeons, Bloodborne adopts a dungeon-crawler approach as you’ll navigate maze-like, gossamer-filled hallways with a boss at the end. Some bosses are completely new, and some are harder versions of bosses from the base game. I’m told that these new bosses are some of the hardest in the game, but I can’t share their frustration because I decided to tackle the chalice dungeons on NG+2, and the difficulty of NG+ doesn’t stack in the chalice dungeons. I strongly recommend doing these on an NG+ run, by the way. Even in doing this, the chalice dungeons are a long slog. The sublime, sprawling landscapes of Yharnam are reduced to claustrophobic mazes which are tedious to the senses. Even more tedious are the rituals needed to conduct the means to enter these dungeons. The specific materials needed come with a long checklist. Some of these items are common, but the scarce ones will have you flipping over every nook and cranny in Yharnam like a madman. The relieving thing about these chalice dungeons is that they are completely optional. At the end of the last one, the Pthumerian Queen, who you might recognize from the base game, is a secret boss, and defeating her wins you a gold PSN trophy. Unless you are a completionist, don’t bother with the chalice dungeons.
The chalice dungeons are a great source of the game’s lore, but you wouldn’t know that just by playing through them. Bloodborne adopts the same subtle, esoteric method of telling its narrative just like Dark Souls. In fact, the narrative in Bloodborne is presented in an even more oblique manner than in Dark Souls. Bloodborne is not a melancholy journey marked by despair but a living nightmare marked by madness. The thin veil between dream and reality is never clear and becomes even more distorted as you progress through it. This veil is illustrated in the first cutscene as the player is greeted by a man in a top hat to sign a contract and begin a “transfusion” in a hazy stupor. This cutscene turns into a sleep paralysis terror as you are approached by a bloody lycanthrope and a group of small, boney creatures with shark teeth. Once you get to the Hunter’s Dream for the first time, the man from the first cutscene sits in the manor on the hill in a wheelchair. This is Gehrman, the creator of the Hunter’s Dream. He explains that you have been assigned to the duty of a hunter, a person responsible for ridding Yharnam of the scourge that plagues it like he once was long ago. You fulfill your duties on the streets of Central Yharnam, slicing up the corrupted villagers.
After venturing through the Forbidden Woods, you come across a remote college set along a tranquil lake. This is Byrgenwerth, a prestigious place of learning and the establishment where the madness started. Master Willem, the founder of Byrgenwerth, discovered traces of blood from god-like beings known as the “great ones” in the Pthumerian caverns below. He founded Byrgernwerth to further the research on the findings and gain insight into them. Another scholar named Laurence has different plans for the great one's blood. He felt that Willem was underutilizing the blood and that it could be used to not only cure diseases but transcend one’s being into a potential god. Laurence founded the College of Mensis to combat Willem’s ideals and founded the Healing Church to test his hypothesis about blood. Thousands of people came to seek the blood for ailments, and while it cured their diseases, it turned them into horrifying abominations. Once this got out of hand, hunters started gathering to purge Yharnam of the mistakes that Laurence made. You encounter Willem at the edge of Byrgenwerth, now a decrepit old man who doesn’t even have the strength to lift his scepter or utter a single word. His state of elderly decay makes an interesting point for transcending the human form. At least the beasts are mobile.
After defeating Rom under the lake in Byrgenwerth, the moon changes into an ominous, splotchy orange color to signify that the nightmare is only furthering. Once you arrive in Yhar’ghul, you get a taste of it. Beasts that look like Chtutulu are scaling the gothic walls, and the villagers are even less tied to their humanity than before. This is the true extent of the madness uncovered by defeating Rom. You then come across the School of Mensis, the rivaling college established by members of the Healing Church. This place grants access to two different places, the Nightmare Frontier and the Nightmare of Mensis. Both of these places are even further removed from the world of Yharnam and signify a further descent into the nightmare. The Nightmare Frontier is a poison lake on a cliff where you fight Amygdala, one of the aptly named creatures that appear after the moon becomes blood-red, signifying the more substantial fear of furthering the nightmare. The Nightmare of Mensis is the most harrowing place in Bloodborne. It’s a gothic castle along a cliffside that looks more sinister than the blood-red moon, and it’s filled to the brim with Winter Lanterns, enemies that strike terror in the hearts of every Bloodborne player. In this gothic loft lies Micolash, a follower of Laurence and the host of the nightmare, allegedly. His unconventional boss fight is supposed to signify his state of madness from tampering with the great one’s blood, but it turns out to be the most aggravating fight in the game.
Once Micolash is slain, you must make it to the peak of the loft to fight Mergo’s Wet Nurse. Mergos is allegedly the child of the Pthumerian Queen and one of the great ones, making him a vessel between god and man. The nightmare has been slain, and you are transported back to The Hunter’s Dream. Three different endings can occur here. The first and easiest one is for Gherman to kill you, ending the nightmare for yourself. If you refuse his offer to kill you, Gherman is the final boss (and a much better one than Mergo’s Wet Nurse). After you defeat him, the Moon Presence descends upon you and gives you Gherman’s role as the Old Hunter, a cyclical ending that mirrors rekindling the flame in Dark Souls. The third, true ending is the more complicated one. After defeating Rom, the blood moon impregnates Iosefka and Arianna, a prostitute taking refuge in the Cathedral Ward. These immaculate conceptions are apparently surrogacies for the great ones. You have to kill Iosefka, kill Arianna’s Eraserhead baby, and kill Mergo’s Wet Nurse to receive three umbilical cords, remnants from the unborn children of the great ones. To get the true ending, you must consume all three of these before fighting Gherman, something I did not know in my first playthrough. Doing this will trigger a fight between you and the Moon Presence. After defeating him, you turn into what is allegedly a great one, a cosmic reward for defeating what was likely the paleblood alluded to in the beginning. It looks like a fucking squid.
The story of Bloodborne is essentially madness. It’s much more convoluted and has way more branches than the story in Dark Souls. There are so many ties to the lore, and discussing them in great detail would become a word-vomit, clusterfuck. The lore of this game is so rich and multifaceted that FromSoft should issue something like the Silmarillion to make sense of every facet of the game. The base of the lore that explains the blood-fueled plague is a cautionary tale about playing with forces beyond our comprehension. Laurence played god, and everyone suffered because of it. It probably also alludes to a class division in Yharnam, with the educated, aristocratic types in Byrgenwerth callously experimenting on the lower class. The pandemonium catching up with them is like karmic retribution, telling how catastrophic the plague has become.
Bloodborne is not an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft story, nor is it a Lovecraft pastiche. There are plenty of references to Lovecraft’s stories, such as the surrogacies from The Dunwich Horror, but none of these are directly tied back to the mythos of Lovecraft. The paper-thin narrative in Bloodborne aids the subtle nature of a Lovecraftian tale. Still, I think there is something else even more subtle in Bloodborne that gives it more clemency as a Lovecraftian horror work. There is a minor mechanic in Bloodborne called insight. In the game, it functions similarly to humanity from Dark Souls in that you can use it to summon partners to aid you with boss fights, and it can be used as currency. Insight can be gained through a consumable item called a madman’s knowledge and by progressing through the game. As you gain more insight, you can find more esoteric items and the madness of Yharnam becomes clearer. Once you defeat Rom and the blood moon is revealed, your insight rockets to at least 40 more than you previously had. In Yarghul, there are tons of Cthulu-Esque monsters all over the place. If you lose the insight gained for whatever reason, many of these monsters are gone, alluding to the fact that they can no longer be perceived by you. Once you defeat Mergo’s Wet Nurse, you gain a colossal amount of insight and find the manor in the Hunter’s Dream is in a perpetual state of immolation. Once you maximize your insight, the madness encompassing Yharnam is readily transparent. It’s the fear of the unknown that Lovecraft tells of coming to life for the player in the most subtle and personal way possible. It illustrates that the forces at work are all-encompassing and impossible to overcome, which is a horrifying realization once we become privy to them.
Bloodborne achieves so much with its presentation, lore, and gameplay that I’d be hard-pressed to call it a masterpiece. It took the foundations of Dark Souls-like its gameplay and subtle narrative. It made something not only with its own concrete identity but something that arguably surpassed the already magnificent Dark Souls in many ways. The more aggressive gameplay was more invigorating, the more organized method of character and weapon building was less of a hassle, and its story managed to be even more complex and esoteric. It even accomplished presenting something in the vein of Lovecraftian horror in a visual medium, something that had rarely been executed properly. The upstanding quality of this game also rejuvenated my interest in the modern video game industry. It showed me that video games were now being treated more like art instead of as a means of commerce. Bloodborne is also arguably the most influential FromSoft game. After the success of Bloodborne, many imitators attempted to translate aspects of Dark Souls into different settings like science-fiction (The Surge), feudal Japan (Nioh), and even in the universe of Star Wars (Jedi Fallen Order). Many of these games borrowing elements from Dark Souls give credence to the “souls-like” genre it spawned due to its popularity. In terms of providing a quality translation of the Souls series, none of these games match up to when FromSoft managed to outdo themselves with Bloodborne.
(Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/14/2021)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Bloodborne: The Old Hunters
Category: DLC
Release Date: November 24, 2015
A misleading mistake some players make when trying to tackle the DLC is based on how early you can access it in the base game. The DLC can be accessed as early as defeating Vicar Amelia in the first half of the game. When I purchased the DLC, I was eager to experience more from this game and was relieved that I didn’t have to play through most of it to access the DLC. Little did I know, I’d have to level up enough in the base game not to get annihilated at every point in the DLC. Prepare for the DLC like you would prepare for a final boss. Immediately, the bizarro Cathedral Ward area known as The Hunter’s Nightmare proves to be a substantial endeavor. The place is crawling with saif hunters, hunters in the DLC that look like Gehrman and fight like him too. These enemies are similar to the hunters if they were built like club bouncers and had their tenacity. You will encounter one at every step of the way in The Hunter’s Nightmare, making getting past each one the biggest obstacle in this first level. Reposting is practically mandatory for these enemies. The Hunter’s Nightmare is also home to some of the most ruthless standard hunters in the game and the area as you trek through this without encountering a new lantern for quite a while. I stuck my proverbial toe in the water that is the Old Hunters DLC and got stung by a proverbial jellyfish. I learned that the DLC content was not to be treated as a lark and prepared immensely afterward. I didn’t get to the next lantern in The Hunter’s Nightmare until beating The One Reborn in the base game.
Once you overcome the odds and discover the Nightmare Church for relief, you are in good standing to fight the first boss, Ludwig. Along with Gehrman, Ludwig was one of the first hunters. He’s obviously seen better days as he’s transformed into an abominable horse creature the size of a house. To give you a scale of what the Old Hunters have to offer, Ludwig is not the hardest boss in the DLC. He is, however, harder than any of the bosses in the base game. His movement is incredibly erratic, and he is the hardest boss to find a window to attack. He caught on to my backstab strategy implemented on most giant bosses in Soulsborne games and launched me across the room with his hooves. His landing move is difficult to time because he plummets so quickly, and he’ll even emulate a train to run you down and deplete most if not all of your health bar if you get caught in it. The saving grace of this fight is it’s much easier if you summon an NPC hunter to help you given that Ludwig will be distracted half of the time. His second phase is triggered by a cutscene in which Ludwig gets on his hind legs and brandishes a lurid green greatsword. This phase is much easier because Ludwig’s backside is finally vulnerable, but his sword slam attack will kill you even at full health if you get caught in it. If you thought Ludwig was a hectic fight that tested your full abilities, he’s merely a sampler for what is to come.
After scouring a long, dark prison hall and riding the heaviest elevator known to man, you will arrive in the Research Hall. It’s an architecturally interesting area with a winding spiral staircase towering in the center of the building. There are about three or four levels in this place with many rooms on opposite sides of the staircase. The Research Hall is the living quarters of Iosefka’s patients, forlorn abominations created due to failure. They look like humans in hospital gowns but with a gigantic, hideous growth like a blotchy scrotum protruding from their heads. Some of them are even reduced to being sentient blobs. They constantly throw tantrums like toddlers to defend themselves because they have little control over their senses and faculties. You’ll find many of them in the side rooms of the Research Hall crying out in anguish, resting on sodden beds in total darkness. Some are even restrained in chairs. It’s a genuinely disturbing site. What’s even more disturbing is that they cry out for help from Iosefka, the person who put them here in the first place. The large door in the hall's center takes you to the Lumenwood Garden, where you’ll fight the Living Failures, more cases of Iosefka’s medical catastrophes. Their fight is like a bulkier version of the Celestial Emissary, except that the Living Failures have a collective health bar and magic attacks.
The next boss is at the center of a clock tower right next to the garden. You approach a woman sitting in a chair in the center of the room when she grabs you unexpectedly. This is Lady Maria, another hunter in the league with Ludwig and Gherman. The doll in The Hunter’s Dream is also modeled in her image. She fights in the same fashion as the other hunters, swiftly dodging your attacks and waiting for a chance to strike while dual-wielding cutlasses. After a certain point, she adds blood and fire as collateral to her sword swipes. Lady Maria is my favorite fight in the DLC, and it’s not because she’s much easier than the other bosses (except for maybe the Living Failures). The ease in this fight is a testament to your proficiency with reposting. If you don’t repost or you suck at it, Lady Maria is a formidable foe. If you have practiced the art of reposting up until this point, Lady Maria will be at your mercy. I experienced a fair amount of difficulty when I couldn’t repost but was proud of myself during my last playthrough when I eviscerated Lady Maria with countless visceral attacks.
The next boss in The Old Hunter’s is the bane of my existence. I do not lose hope and give up easily on a boss in any video game, including Dark Souls. However, the countless failures at the hands of this boss matched with the cyclical monotony of running back and forth between the lantern and this boss time after every defeat was starting to drive me insane. The numerous failures made me fall to my knees, and I felt like I couldn’t beat him. He was relinquishing my confidence as a gamer. He is my Achilles heel, my kryptonite, my dark star. To this day, I still feel a sense of dread and intimidation with this boss, like confronting an abusive stepfather.
...No, I’m not talking about the Orphan of Kos. I beat that ugly shrimp on my third attempt (although I was not so lucky with him upon subsequent playthroughs). I am referring to none other than Laurence, the first Vicar, the only optional boss in the DLC.
Laurence is obviously an incredibly important figure in Bloodborne’s lore, essentially the creator of the scourge that plagues Yharnam. His importance makes it imperative that he’s actually present in the game, and his boss fight certainly reflects his role. After scrounging up a few key items, you’ll return to the mirrored version of the cathedral where you fought Vicar Amelia in Hunter’s Nightmare. You’ll see Laurence resting upon his throne, a wild beast after imbibing the blood of the great ones and a reflection of his folly. If you’re a determined completionist like I am or batshit crazy, you’ll wake him up. You may notice that Laurence looks like a flaming version of the Cleric Beast, the first boss in the game. If you think that this fight is going to be a cakewalk because the Cleric Beast was an easy foe, your naivety will be your downfall. Laurence is incredibly unpredictable. The frames to attack him are wider than Ludwigs, but failing to properly time them will punish you more severely. Laurence has about fifteen different ways to strike at you with his hulking stature. All these are aided by his fire AOE damage that will stagger you if they hit. Keep in mind this also if don’t kill you in one hit, even at full health. Laurence also likes to combo his moves, so if the first one doesn’t kill you, the immediate second or third swipe will. He’s also a giant damage sponge. The middling damage I do to him matched with the rare opportunities I have to hit him without being punished for it severely grated on my patience. Once you think you’ve finally got a hold of him, his second phase throws you for another violent loop. Laurence loses the lower half of his body and crawls around the arena with his giant arms. His backside is no longer a vulnerable spot because it’s constantly gushing molten lava at every waking moment, so the windows to hit him are even more narrow during this phase. The lava that falls out of his backside becomes a stage hazard, and it will always be present during this phase, so you’ll have to work around it instead of directly avoiding it. Laurence will also vomit lava at some points as if the constant expulsion of lava from his ass wasn’t enough. His arms are as long as redwood trees, and will use them to chase you down the entire perimeter of the arena. If that fails, he’ll slam his arm down on you that, you guessed it, it's hard to avoid and will kill you at full health. Like Ludwig, you can summon an NPC hunter to help you, but it won’t do any good. The first phase is slightly easier, but the NPC is guaranteed to die soon after the second phase starts because he doesn’t have the sense to avoid the lava. This leaves you by yourself with a more durable Laurence for about half of the fight, giving you a total disadvantage to fighting him on your own. After failing against Laurence several times, I went back and grinded to level up in the base game. I felt like Rocky in Rocky IV, training for his rematch with Ivan Drago. Eventually, once I beat Laurence, I still did it by the skin of my teeth. Bloodborne is all about nightmares, right? Well, Laurence, the First Vicar is my fucking nightmare.
Upon defeating Maria, a new location is revealed behind the opened clock tower arms. This rainy, dilapidated place is the Fishing Hamlet, a location inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. Mutated fish creatures of all sizes make up this fishing hamlet, and just like the ones from Lovecraft’s story, they worship a deity that lies at the shore of this area. This is the notorious Orphan of Kos who is the dark secret kept in the Fishing Hamlet. Apparently, the hunter’s killed the Orphan’s mother, who then cursed them, marked by the dark moon that lights every corner of the DLC. I’d feel more sorry for the Orphan if he wasn’t such a bitch. This boss is said to be not only the hardest boss in Bloodborne but the hardest boss across the entire Soulsborne franchise. He’s another unpredictable boss with a large array of moves, but as I mentioned previously, I beat him on my third attempt when I first played this DLC. Once I played this DLC again, he kept kicking my ass. I’m unsure how to explain this, but becoming better at Bloodborne made me worse at this boss. Playing passively worked wonders when fighting Orphan of Kos on my first playthrough when it didn’t work so well with other bosses. The Orphan of Kos punished me for being more aggressive, and that aggression made other bosses more manageable. Fortunately, the Orphan gives you plenty of opportunities to attack, and he can be easily staggered. He also gives you plenty of opportunities to repost. His second phase is a lot more chaotic, but I managed to find clear windows to attack him. Once you beat him, the DLC is complete, and you have a gorgeous shore view to look upon as you marvel at your achievement.
The Old Hunters DLC follows the same direction of descending deeper into the nightmare just like in the base game. This time, your journey uncovers the horrifying truths kept secret by the essential figures of Bloodborne as you venture onward. It’s a bit of a linear excursion, but I didn’t mind in this case because the progression is excellent. I felt as if I was diving deeper into the rabbit hole, resulting in a satisfying dead end at the shore. Everything in this DLC made me feel like I was being pummeled by four mack trucks coming at me from all sides, but I appreciate it for presenting such a stark challenge (except for Laurence. Fuck that boss). For some reason, I think The Old Hunters DLC is the most substantial part of the whole Bloodborne experience. While the levels and bosses in the base game are consistently enjoyable, there’s something special about what’s presented in The Old Hunters. I don’t know if it’s the level design, progression, or bosses that make this so, but it’s something that is definitely felt after overcoming the excruciating odds. Artorias of the Abyss feels removed from the base game of Dark Souls and supplementary to the whole experience, while The Old Hunters feels like getting to the core of Bloodborne. Experiencing The Old Hunters DLC feels mandatory. When the DLC almost eclipses the base game, you know it’s worth every cent.
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