Bloodborne Review

My review of Souls games was one of the worst experiences of my life. Every single criticism I had was met with "It's meant to be that way." It's clear that the developer's intention was to frustrate players by designing the game to be overly punishing, overly vague or overly confusing. The community really treats difficulty like it's some kind of achievement. Bloodborne was the first and only game to eliminate that problem when I played it. This game didn't really change the overall difficulty, but it did eliminate most of the difficulty that made the game feel like a punishment, and replaced it with rewards for players who wanted to engage with the game. It's so good that when I played it in 2015 on my PS4 and again in 2023, when I wasn't really supposed to be playing it, I realized that I had to be going something else, that I still believe it's FromSoftware's best game by a long shot.

Yharnam: A City That Wants You Dead (And Looks Beautiful Doing It)

The hunt is now twisted and never-ending. Yharnam is a Victorian nightmare. Cobblestone streets, dying street lights, and mobs of crazy townsfolk. There are wolfbeasts in the abandoned laboratories. An Ogre is pounding on the door of the town square and is ready to smash you with a brick. The streets offer no clear sense of direction and little respit. There is a patrolling mob of crazed townfolk with torches and pitchforks. There is little goal to drive you through the cathedral, wards, courtyards, and woods. The record player in the Hunter's Dream, your hub where you spend blood echoes to level up, has a porcelain doll that instructs you to find your "worth in the waking world." Your quest log is empty.

The absence of guidance is itself a guiding factor. Yharnam is constructed in such a way as to encourage players to explore using both fear and curiosity. It’s multi-layered design gives feedback to both types of exploration. A previously locked gate that you passed an hour ago is now open and has become a shortcut. This leads to an elevator that you assumed would go up, and gives access to something much worse down below. This design operates using vertical layering: Above the streets are tunnels, below them are catacombs, and deeper still are things that may not exist; all folding back in on themselves. All these layers and more make it clear that the city is a singular, enormous, interlocking machine made to trap whatever lives inside it, including you.

Trick Weapons: The Best Combat Design FromSoftware Has Ever Made

A sword sheath turns into a great sword; a straight sword sheathe snaps into a great sword; an axe that extends into a long reaching scythe with the flick of L1; and a whip chain that can be used as a whip throughout the fight. Bloodborne has interesting mechanics where the weapons transform mid-combo: start a quick one handed string and bop! transform mid swing into the two handed form for a heavy finisher and transform back before the end of the recovery animation. It makes every weapon a toolkit rather than a stat stick.

The arsenal is small compared to Dark Souls — maybe twenty-five weapons total — but every single one is distinct, viable, and worth mastering. I ran the Threaded Cane for my first playthrough because the chain whip's crowd control was addictive. Second time, the Ludwig's Holy Blade, which transforms from a straight sword into a colossal greatsword with stagger potential that makes bosses flinch. The action combat feels tight because FromSoftware designed fewer weapons and polished each one rather than flooding the inventory with fifty variations of "slightly different sword." Find a favorite. Cling to it like a trusted friend in the moonlit horrorscape. It won't let you down.

The Rally System: Why Bloodborne Rewards Aggression

This is the mechanic that revolutionized gaming. In Dark Souls, you get hit and you fall back. You hide behind a shield while you wait for an opening to strike. The game rewards patience and caution, and if we’re being honest, even cowardice. Bloodborne destroys that comfy zone. Shields aren’t even worth using. Armor is almost irrelevant. And when you get hit, an amount of your health shows up as an orange bar that you can regain, but only if you attack within a couple seconds.

The Rally system turns every hit you take into a dare. The game just hurt you. Do you run? Or do you swing back, trading blows with something that should terrify you, clawing back health through sheer violence? Play too patiently and your blood vial supply drains fast as you heal passively against bosses whose patterns you're still learning. Play aggressively and you're rewarded — health regenerates, the boss staggers, and the fight becomes a dance of traded strikes rather than a siege of attrition. It's the single best design decision in any Souls game. It takes the franchise's core loop — die, learn, adapt — and adds a layer that rewards courage instead of just punishing ignorance.

Boss Fights: Horror and Spectacle in Perfect Balance

I won't spoil any bosses since the discovery is half the fun. But there is so much to elaborate on the experience of walking into a fog door that is not a monster, but a person. Or entering an arena too beautiful for what is about to happen, only to have the music shift from orchestral grandeur to desperate choral screaming as a super unexpected mid fight transformation boss change. Bloodborne's bosses are designed as horror encounters first, combat puzzles second. And the atmosphere — Gothic architecture crumbling around you, alien geometries distorting reality, creatures whose existence implies a cosmology you'd rather not think about — creates an environment to make every fight feel more like an event rather than a checkpoint.

The firearm parry system adds another layer. Your offhand gun is weak — barely does damage on its own. But fire it at the exact moment an enemy begins their attack swing and they stagger, dropping to one knee for a visceral attack that deals massive damage. The timing window is tight. Miss it and you've wasted a bullet and left yourself open. Nail it against a boss and the screen shakes, the sound design roars, and you feel like you've genuinely outsmarted something that was trying to kill you. The stagger windows differ per boss, per attack — learning which swings are parriable and which aren't is part of the mastery curve that keeps you coming back.

The Lovecraftian Turn: When the Nightmare Stops Making Sense

In Bloodborne, the first part of the game consists of Gothic horror themes, such as, werewolves, plagues, rabid cultists, and a Victorian-era setting. In the second part, the game shifts to a Cosmic Horror setting with alien Gods and other dimensions, as well as the "beasts" that you’ve been hunting basically being an insignificant symptom of the actual disease. The game gives FromSoftware the opportunity to make the first major tonal shift in their game design, and proposes players earn it since the lore and story are told through environmental design, and for those who are rewarded for paying attention to their surroundings, the game helps with the shift. For example, the items you collect in the game hint to you the things that are about to happen. The further you go into the game, the more NPC dialogue you will notice starts as coherent then devolves into incoherent, meaningless babble.

The transition from "I'm hunting monsters" to "I'm a pawn in something incomprehensibly vast" is one of the best narrative reveals in gaming — delivered not through a cutscene but through level design, enemy placement, and the gradual realization that the sky has changed and you didn't notice when. The three endings all reflect different relationships with knowledge itself: do you submit, do you refuse, or do you consume what you've learned and become something else entirely? Bloodborne doesn't explain its lore. It trusts you to piece it together, and the community has spent a decade doing exactly that — which is the highest compliment a game's storytelling can receive.

The Verdict: FromSoftware's Masterpiece, and I'm Done Debating It

In Bloodborne, every bit of imagination, every slice of terror, and every ounce of madness is showcased wonderfully. I can even ignore many of the problems present in the previous the Souls games. The melee combat done by FromSoftware for Bloodborne is best exemplified by the trick weapon system. The Rally system is unique to Bloodborne and sets it apart from the other games in the genre. The level design of Bloodborne in Central Yharnam is an example of world class design in interconnection. The game has an incredible action combat system, and the Lovecraftian influence in the second half of the game elevates the action game into something truly haunting.

The frame rate on PS4 is rough (30fps with drops — this game needs a 60fps patch or PC port that Sony still hasn't delivered in 2026). The blood vial farming in early game is tedious if you're struggling. And the Chalice Dungeons are repetitive filler that exist primarily for gem farming. These are real flaws. They're also irrelevant to the core experience, which is: pop it in, stand up to your fears, and see how a video game can give you a sense of your own humanity. I said that in 2015. I'll say it again now. Bloodborne is FromSoftware's best game. Play it on PS4, PS5 (backward compatible), or PlayStation Plus. And when you die — because you will, repeatedly, spectacularly — remember that the rally bar is waiting. Swing back. As of 2026, Bloodborne remains a PlayStation exclusive without an official 60fps remaster or PC port — the modding community's PS5 framerate patches have done what Sony hasn't, and the 2024 fan project Bloodborne Kart became the closest thing to an official follow-up the IP has seen.

All images are official screenshots from Bloodborne (FromSoftware / Sony Interactive Entertainment). Originally published April 2015. Updated March 30, 2026.

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