Bloodborne: Why I Want to Play it Again?

Ah, Bloodborne. The only souls game that captured me in a way that no other souls game did and changed my gaming life forever.

I am exaggerating a bit but it is undeniable that my distain towards souls games settled down a bit after my full completion plus platinum run of Bloodborne.

For context, I tired to play Dark Souls 2 and Elden Ring, I really tried to git gud but I keep dying to stupid pigs and big doggos in magical schools man. I am tired and I don't want to learn all the boss patterns, call me a casual, I don't really care. I keep trying these games because I am friends with a FromSoftware maniac fan and he keeps encouraging me to try out these games. Shout out to friends who push you to try new things in life in general 💪

I was really skeptical

I was really skeptical about the hype surrounding Bloodborne's almost mythical status among gamers, it was too overglazed, it was too praised, something was up and my mission was clear: I need to verify whether the claims were correct or not. So I managed to find the Game of the Year edition of Bloodborne, all in one disk. How convenient!

Don't worry this is not a review of the game, just hoping that me writing about it can satisfy my desire for blood.

If I think about it the gothic art style really was the first element that helped me to be immersed into the game world and hook me like a helpless fish because I didn't know what I was going into. With the perpetual fear that the game is difficult I paced myself and moved slowly, grinding and dying I upgraded my weapons and stats where I was comfortable handling the big troll enemies, then moved onto the boss.

I have to admit the second hook was the combat, the dodge and hit plus the ranged gun for stun really helped going over my fear and when I learnt the concept of the visceral attacks, that was the pinnacle of satisfaction when I performed these actions even on the boss enemies.

The claustrophobic environmental design with almost jump scare enemy placement really tickled my brain in a weird way that I still long to play Bloodborne, months after I platinumed it.

The third and final hook was definitely the story. I was intrigued what happened to this town, why there are monsters roaming everywhere? who are the hunters? why almost everyone I meet wants to kill me? So many questions and so many mysteries awaited me to check out and discover. While the story is mostly told through dialogue and world building, I have to say that while initially I was lead by this mysterious hook, the endings left me even more confused and with more questions than answers. And that is totally OK!

Overall I think the appeal of this game is the mysterious nature of its story, I read so many interpretations of the story, lore and endings on the internet I truly believe having an ambiguous story, leaving only a string of bread crumbs for the players to follow and survive to see the next part of the game is Bloodborne's biggest appeal and why it is so popular.

Too many games nowadays hold your hand during every damn puzzle, spoon feeds you the story like a baby, explains every bit of lore through cutscenes and if not, through lengthy text in some codex or whatever menu. I don't need all that. I just need a reason to continue forward and while the story was unsatisfactory to me, the other hooks already ingrained themselves so deeply, that I couldn't let it go unless I finished the game and DLC.

Allright that's enough of me rambling, not gonna lie, writing about this game didn't help and I want to play this game even more now! Ugh

Well, whatever I hope that if you were on the fence of playing this masterpiece after reading this hopefully your curiosity was piqued enough to try it out, if not try it out just to tell me how wrong I am 😂

Thanks for reading! Please let me know did you play and liked Bloodborne? @ me I am curious!