Bloodborne: Death and progress

I have never played Dark Souls or any game like it. I hate overly difficult games and I especially despise them when they use death as the mechanic to punish you for it. I play video games to kick back and relax after a long day of work. I enjoy getting lost in a rich, immersive world with pleasing visuals and great art direction. I’m a sucker for a well-told story that tightly ties in to the gameplay of the experience. So naturally, I intentionally avoided the Soulsborne series because of all the things I had been hearing about its difficulty curve, punishing game mechanics, and the fantasy horror setting.

This month, Bloodborne was free for PS+ members. This got me intrigued. I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it and wouldn’t be good at it, but I had been hearing so many great things about this title. I have friends who bought a PS4 simply to play this game. It won numerous accolades for its combat mechanics, its level design, and its cryptic lore. I had to at least give it a shot. I wasn’t paying for it anyway. Worst case scenario, I die a bunch of times, get a couple hours of playtime, and give up on it.

And that’s exactly what happened. Initially, anyway. I booted up the game and started playing. I found the ambience and atmosphere very interesting. I wanted to keep going and explore what else is out there. The city of Yharnam seemed to have crumbled into utter chaos and I was keen to figure out why. It actually kind of reminded me of Dishonored a little bit (one of my favorite game worlds of all time), but notched up to a truly extreme level. This is what got me interested to start off with, so I kept going.

This series, apparently, is infamous for not telling players how to play the game. There’s no tutorial. There’s no tooltips telling you what button does what. It doesn’t even tell you how to equip weapons or assign items to the quick-menu. And for this reason, I struggled a lot at the beginning. Even something as basic as figuring out what the stats on each weapon mean was an excruciating endeavor to read the tiny symbols and what its associated scaling meant. After a long enough time, I managed to figure out how to assign weapons, how to quick-switch between them, and how to effectively fight with them.

And I died on my first enemy. Multiple times. The game has you fight a wolf with bare hands first, only to die and re-fight it with weapons this time. I obviously went “oh easy, now that I’ve got an axe and a gun, I should be able to slaughter it”, but no, I still die immediately. After a couple more tries, I manage to evade its attacks and then eventually kill it. This was the very first enemy of the game. And then I keep going and the same thing happens against a random villager. As soon as I get close to him, the dude torches me and I immediately die. I have to re-do the wolf and get to the villager again to try and take him out. I avoid his fire attacks but he gets me with his pitchfork. I die again. I re-do the wolf again and try the villager one more time. This time, I keep my distance and use my weapon’s long-reach attacks to take him out. Now I could move on.

Here’s the catch. Through this process of repeatedly trying to kill the villager, I had to re-fight the wolf over and over again. Normally, I would hate this mechanic in a game. In fact, I hated the idea of this when I was playing this section. But forcing you to fight the wolf multiple times actually teaches you how to fight the wolf. I had initially died multiple times to this thing, but now I’m able to end it in less than five seconds without taking a single hit. This same pattern carries over to the entire game. Later in this same level, you come across a giant mob of around twenty villagers. Again, I must have died about fifty or seventy times in this section. But doing it repeatedly over and over taught me some techniques I could use to deal with large groups of enemies who can easily overwhelm you: use pebbles to lure them, get the fast-moving dogs first, avoid the snipers, fight in open areas where there’s room to dodge, etc. When I came back to this area after moving on in the game, I was able to take out all the enemies in less than thirty seconds with my newfound combat skills. I was in shock at how much my own abilities had improved.

Most players never get past this kind of gameplay wall. They think dying is the game punishing you for doing badly. And who can blame them? This is exactly what video games have taught players over the past twenty or so years. You failed at accomplishing your task, so your character died. Now restart from the last checkpoint and try again. Bloodborne, however, forces you to throw that mentality out the window and approach death differently. Death is literally a game mechanic. There’s parts of the game where you need to die in order to progress. Ever single you time you die, it’s always your own fault. You didn’t dodge in the right direction. You didn’t time your parry properly. You weren’t cautious enough in a new area. You got greedy with your weapon combo. Even the words that pop up on the screen: “YOU DIED” tell you that it’s your own fault for dying. This in turn incentivizes you to try again and keep going.

Another big complaint players have against games like this is the lack of traditional checkpoints. The game saves your progress pretty frequently, but always kicks you back to the last lamp that you lit, which could be anywhere between two to five minutes of a walk from where you died. This seems like a huge setback and at first, players might think that they’re not making any real progress in the game. I certainly did. In a linear video game, you’re always trying to get to the next save point so that you can resume the game from there when you die. Again, this game forces you to re-learn the mechanics of what “progress” in a game means.

In Bloodborne, progressing means learning about the level’s layout so that you know the optimal route forward the next time from the lamp. It means discovering what enemies are worth fighting for item drops and knowing which ones to leave alone. It means opening up a shortcut back to the lamp so that you have an even shorter walk to the next area of the level. It’s a massive interconnected world and it’s a joy to discover how it’s all linked together, as opposed to a linear game with isolated levels like Dishonored. Again, most players don’t realize that this is how progress works in this game, so they feel like they’re never moving forward.

I myself have very limited time to play games these days, so I like to make as much of a dent as possible in games that I play in that limited time. I thought that repeatedly dying and being reset back to the lamp I activated thirty mins ago would mean that I lost that half-hour of playtime. It took me a while to understand that I didn’t lose anything (maybe save for some blood echoes). I actually gained knowledge of the level’s layout and where all the enemies are in it. I know exactly where to go next and how to proceed forward with caution. It’s almost like the game wants you to learn every nook and cranny of its complex world so that you know where to go and what to do as best as possible.

The world. Right. I mentioned I like games with a good atmosphere and a rich narrative. And boy, does Bloodborne have it. So much of the game’s lore is entirely hidden off that you could technically beat the entire game and have no idea what the world or setting is all about. There’s an incredibly deep lore behind everything and it’s all hidden away in optionally viewable item descriptions, of all things. If you take the time to read these and observe the world around you, you’ll be blown away at how much there actually is to the story of the game. It’s easy to dismiss simple things like special enemies being able to detect you by your scent as just being gameplay mechanics, but there is a strong lore connection here, and many players will entirely miss it until their subsequent playthroughs. The overall atmosphere of the setting also has this insane and crazy gothic horror feel to it. You can’t help but feel scared with every step that you take.

I’ve also stumbled upon countless NPC interactions that could’ve gone in a variety of different ways, and it gives off a very Witcher-like sense of moral ambiguity in how gray your reactions to these NPCs can be. It makes the world feel very complete and gives it a sense of purpose, rather than have it just be a backdrop stage for the gory combat that this game has to offer. You can choose to help these characters or deal with them some other way or just leave them alone. You’ll often get rewarded with a special item or something else later down the line. The mystery of what will happen and how it’ll affect the game world is very compelling and makes you want to try something different the next time around.

We haven’t talked about the bosses yet. The game is infamously known for its uber-challenging boss fights. And trust me, they are tough. I managed to beat the first couple of them all by myself, which was a great feeling. On the third one, which was a posion-laden beast looking to feast on anything that entered its holy chapel, I struggled a lot. I repeatedly died over and over again while getting it down to around one or two hits away from death. I eventually ended up calling for help using the game’s co-op feature and with the help of two other hunters, I was able to take it down! It was a very satisfying feeling. I still find boss fights very difficult and I have a feeling I’m gonna need help on the rest of them as well.

The way co-op works is interesting too. When you play online, you’ll find notes left by other players giving you a somewhat cryptic hint about what lies ahead or how to best deal with the situation, such as “ambush lies ahead” or “fire is effective” or “beware of trap”. I found these very useful before entering an area I had never been to before. You also have to be careful though, because sometimes players like to mess with you too, leaving notes like “take a step forward” in front of a bottomless pit only to have you plummet to your death when you take that step. Players can upvote or downvote these notes, so I haven’t encountered many of the nefarious ones yet. I’ve never played another game that implemented a multiplayer feature that’s so limited and yet so incredibly valuable to other players (I know the mechanic came from Dark Souls, but I have yet to play it).

Overall, the game as a whole is a bit of a mixed bag. It chooses to min-max its own game design by prioritizing certain features over others. For instance, the world design is amazing, the lore is fantastic, the co-op notes feature is executed to perfection, and the combat is top-notch. On the other hand, characters’ lips are not animated, NPC animations in general are extremely limited or non-existent, inventory management is a bit of a nightmare, and there’s some particularly annoying imprecisions in the controls for general world traversal and platforming. I think this is all intentional and works in the favor of the game. It does what it does well really well and tends to go for the “acceptable” category in everything else. It really is a triumph of game design with how it re-invents long established video game tropes and flips them on its head, while choosing to go all out on what it wants to well.

I’m not even that far into the game yet, and I’m really looking forward to being challenged by what comes next. I never would’ve thought that I would even make it as far as I have so far and I certainly didn’t expect to be looking forward to playing it even more. It’s a very unique type of game that challenges you to keep getting better and keep going. It almost believes in you to some degree and lets you know that you can do it, despite the horrific terrors that lie ahead. I’m progressing at a snail’s pace, but I’m excited to keep going and see what else this terrifying game has in store for me. I even bought the DLC because of how good people are saying it is! For anyone else who has been putting off the Soulsborne series due to what they’ve been hearing about its difficulty, I hope this inspires you to at least give it a shot! You won’t regret it.