When my son was six months old, and I was at home on paternity leave, wading through the intense mental fog of early parenthood, I found myself buying a white b-stock PS4 and a full-price digital copy of Bloodborne. It made total sense at the time.

I've been playing it on and off ever since, sometimes dipping in for few weeks, sometimes fully immersing myself for months. I've gone through it start to finish three times now, and I've seen pretty much everything there is to see, but I'm not done with it. I'm not sure I'll ever be done with it. There's nothing else out there that hits me in quite the same way.

I just thit's neat.

Hey look mum I finally played and completed a Castlevania!

Savestate'd my way through (because who has the time to git gud at brutal NES difficulty these days) and had a pretty good time. Excellent credits roll too.

Enjoyed it enough that I will continue on to 2.

It feels like an extremely foolish thing to do, buying a game on a machine that has gamepass, especially when I already own it on another platform, but here's the thing: it kicks ass. Also it's on sale right now, and it's had a next-gen performance boost patch, and my PS4 is little more than a noisy dvd player these days.

Sure it's not perfect; starting fresh means earning all the fancy guns again, the menus are a labyrinth, it's got that stupid circular cursor interface that these games seem to be obsessed with etc. But see when you're in the bayou? Listening for gunshots and footsteps? Bracing yourself for a frantic, messy, panic-filled gunfight? Heart-pounding stuff. Nothing else quite like it.

Ride Bionis

Life good

Bionis fight back

KILL BIONIS

An already great game polished to near perfection.

Starts off simple yet somehow a bit stressful, first day on the job and getting used to things, everything's taking too long

Aaaaaand then it settles into a smooth routine. Yeah I know where that is, I rearranged it myself. I put this next to that because my brain said so. It's cool how you're basically getting a visual map of your association reasoning, plus the music is nice and chill, and it looks pleasant and easy to read

Aaaaaand then more and more stuff starts coming in and you have to tidy it up and then you start to think "maybe I should tidy up some of the real things I have in my home instead of imaginary things"

It's nice! But after like 90 minutes I think I'm done. Or maybe I'll dip back in. It is nice.

I dug this out with the intention of traveling to another country to play the co-op mode with someone I've barely had any communication with, but then I got covid and had to stay home and play it myself.

I never had a PS1, got no nostalgia, but even so this still holds up as a solid little adventure with bags of weird charm. And it's so well suited to the DS, visually, structurally, atmospherically, it feels right at home. Shame we never got 2 and 3 on here as well, this would be my ideal way to replay them.

Also it's nice that I'm actually way more familiar with the remake, as this still holds a fair bit of mystery for me. I've probably got a few months before my next chance for co-op, so I'll be slowly battering through the various modes and going for all the endings and unlocking all the cool guys until then.

Is this a five star game? Of course not. It's pretty po-faced, nobody in it is interesting, and it's not exactly a looker.

BUT

Am I having a five star experience? Yes, absolutely. Sneaking around a huge map, finding a secluded vantage point, tagging everyone and everything through binoculars, checking the map, making a plan, and eliminating a hundred Nazis over the course of a couple of hours? Rrrrrrright up my street. I am fully absorbed, and I have yet to tire of exploding a bad man's balls from 200 metres away.

WHEN WHAT USED TO EXCITE YOU DOES NOT, LIKE YOU'VE USED UP ALL YOUR ALLOWANCE OF EXPERIENCE

This is a game about a guy who's bored senseless with everything. The action is hypnotic rather than exciting, the activities in-between are merely ways to pass time. There's every chance you'll get nothing out of this. I thought it was beautiful.

At the start you have to choose a date in November to circle on a calendar, and the game takes place in the couple of weeks running up to that date. My birthday is in November, so I picked that, and you can probably guess what happens when you get there.

Also it's rock hard.

Pick it up if you see it cheap, it's an experience.