The Old Hunters offers such an essential link to its base game that after playing through a few times, it's hard to even distinguish them as separate products. Good DLC gives you more content to continue and improve upon the core experience, but great DLC does all that while deepening your understanding of and connection to the world that your character occupies. Bloodborne, in the tradition of From Software's approach to DLC, uses its additional content to flesh out its dense lore even further and, for those willing to decipher its disturbing mysteries, recontextualize events and characters at the heart of Bloodborne's story in captivating ways.

Plunged into The Hunter's Nightmare, you begin to make your way through a hellish inversion of an area you'll be familiar with from the base game: The Cathedral Ward. Standing in the place of its usual guardians though are dangerous, hostile hunters — those who have been cast down from the waking world into this sort of purgatory, likely for sins committed under Ludwig, the founder of the church hunters (and the first major boss you will take down in this area). As with many hunters, his intentions were good in the beginning, but as the scourge grew, he fell to the same bloodlust that took so many people and became an abhorrent beast…

It's easy to go and on and on about the immense lore implications revealed in The Old Hunters, but it unravels in such fascinating ways that are best left to be discovered firsthand. As side content that attempts to fill in some of Bloodborne's missing pieces (while introducing plenty of new questions of its own), it's fitting that The Old Hunters is defined by a sense of well-guarded secrecy. Even accessing the DLC is hidden away, found only by those who are specifically looking for it or by a lucky few who may stumble into it by accident. Further in, you meet Lady Maria, a person so key in shaping the events that take place in Bloodborne; she bemoans the hidden past you are uncovering, warning that "a corpse should be left well alone" and that she of all people knows "how the secrets beckon so sweetly." Director Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team are so good at creating intrigue through vague storytelling, never revealing concrete details and instead leaving us to reflect over characters' mysterious ruminations and their implications. Combined with this is typically impeccable environmental storytelling—their use of item descriptions, enemy design and placements, and level design to convey details of the world—with which From Software harnesses the unique qualities of games to give a confounding level of depth to their stories.

That is to say that the majority of this dense storytelling is naturally weaved into an actual game, and it's a damn good one at that. The Old Hunters offers an immensely challenging and atmospheric experience that rivals anything From Software have put out. The environments you traverse exude haunting beauty at every step, and the enemies you face are sublimely grotesque creations. Its levels are compelling as ever to explore (particularly the labyrinthine Research Hall, which is just a marvel of level design) and the boss fights are beyond incredible, pushing the players' skills to a level previously unseen in the base game and providing for moments of pure, unfettered adrenaline to take hold. If Bloodborne got anything right though, it was its dedication to its Victorian setting and the gnarly mix of Gothic and Lovecraftian horror that takes hold of it, all of which is translated in high form to its expansion.

All of this is simply to say that without The Old Hunters, there is no Bloodborne. Of course it exists and succeeds as a game on its own, but that The Old Hunters expands Bloodborne's already masterful game design with such exceptional, meaningful content makes the base game feel incomplete without it. Essential.

(Doubles as a review for Bloodborne itself, too.)

Old Hunters is definitely the finest piece of content we've gotten in the whole series. It's got loads of atmosphere in each stage, lots of weapon variety and enemy types and the level design takes a step up aswell, with the bosses.

The original bloodborne starts strong, but I think fumbles in the middle pretty hard when you start wandering around the woods forever up till Rom. Both floors of yharnam, the church, is all great, but the woods just doesn't have a really great atmosphere to it. The transition to the more haunting aspects of the setting is fantastic, but the gameplay starts taking a nosedive at that point, with bosses that become all too easy and enemies getting repetitive. The final boss is the best one From soft as made though.

I liked it but I think the base game provided a more balanced experience. I loved the Maria boss fight and the Orphan of Kos boss fight. Fun, balanced, tough but fair. Living Failures were laughably easy, which every Souls-like has a boss like that so it's fine. But Ludwig? HATED him. Did not enjoy the challenge at all. Took me about a week, thought the fight was very clunky, his movement was very weirdly programmed. But everything else was really good, the exploration is still great, the enemy types are fun, the areas are unique. It's good!

Has a weird structure, beginning on a brutally hard note (the Ludwig fight), going narratively explicit in the middle, and finishing somewhere primal and hard again. Orphan of Kos is a great fight, and some of the environmental design is good, but I still have the same problem with Bloodborne: it's at once too vague to be satisfying and not abstract enough to work as a mood piece. Comparisons to the original Dark Souls are unfavourable - that was all about light and shadow and could be enjoyed as a kind of perverse origin myth, whereas this is more a series of disjointed setpieces with tenuous thematic connections. It's trying to evoke dream logic, which is at odds with the grounded, you-are-there nature of the gameplay. Which is maybe the point, but it doesn't always work for me. And fuck Laurence.