TL;DR: Greatly exceeded my expectations. Lovecraft + Dark Souls + guns = very good. Worth buying a new console for. Buy the DLC.

Let me tell you a little story about me and Bloodborne.

Around this time last year, I started really getting into Souls. I beat the trilogy, got all the achievements, picked up (and put down) Sekiro, I was really sinking my teeth into everything I could get my hands on. However, throughout all of this, I was really itching to play this one. H.P. Lovecraft is my favorite author and I'm a huge fan of gothic art styles, so mix those together with the Souls formula and add in a little gun parrying as a bonus? I was immediately sold from the get-go, and I spent a year feverishly trying to find a way to play it. I tried sucking it up and playing on the delay-plagued PS Now, but it gave me a headache. I tried getting a PS4 off of eBay, and it turned out to be a scam (got my money back though). A PS5 was low on my list due to how hard it was to get, but it remained a distant option. Come November, and I was planning on opting out of any Black Friday sales due to my bitter realism about getting a PS5. However, the night before, I had a dream that I had managed to get one! I was playing Bloodborne and absolutely loving it, it had lived up to all my expectations... and then I woke up. Out of frustration of my situation, I went back to sleep and had the dream again. When I awoke the second time, I was so overcome by my need for the game that I re-bought a subscription to PS Now only to play for about an hour, the delay still giving me a headache, but it was the fix I needed to keep me stable. After months of tracking and a few weeks of hard watching, I finally managed to get a PS5, Bloodborne already bought from a sale a couple months ago. I eagerly settled in and started my journey through Yharnam.

Now, with all that said, you might be wondering why I brought it up. You're probably thinking that I'm going to say this was a letdown, though seeing my score, you probably won't. I'm making all of this known so you can truly understand what it means when I say this game not only lived up to my expectations, but exceeded them. This game managed to do what no other game in the Souls franchise had managed to do: recreate how I felt with Dark Souls 1.

It's not a perfect 1:1 ratio, and I still prefer DS1 over this (barely. they're pretty much tied), but the way the game focuses on exploration within the levels themselves is something that, again, I hadn't felt since the original. The extreme conservatism with lamps gave me the same feeling of needing to explore, to find shortcuts or other possible routes to make it back to a safe place if I needed to. In later games in the series, bonfires/graces tend to be much too frequent, leading to a very linear experience with how you go through areas; the worst offender of this being DS3. My favorite part of DS1 when I first played was finding the shortcuts, like riding down a giant elevator to get to the hub world or finding a hidden path that linked two different areas together, and it was an incredibly rewarding and satisfying feeling to have that experience back again. But enough talking about DS1, let's look at Bloodborne as its own beast.

My lord, the combat is unbelievable. A common complaint I hear from people on both sides of this game is the lack of weapon choice, and while I haven't replayed it enough to find out if that holds water, I had an extremely fun time using just the Saw Cleaver and imagine that subsequent replays will prove the other weapons to be fun to use as well. The rally system, combined with the seamless gun parries, actively encourages you to play aggressive and get in your enemies' faces. No more worriedly circling around bosses hoping they'll do that one attack that you like, you're right in their chest hitting as hard as you can and only backing up to get your stamina back. Needless to say, that feels amazing, and leads you to experiment with how much you can combo. In the other games, it was more about how much you could do before having to roll away, but here, you might try to find a way to finish off your attacks with a stagger of some kind to perform a visceral and keep the damage going. It all feels very rewarding and exhilarating in a way that words can't describe, it's really something you have to play to feel.

As mentioned before, I am a huge fan of Gothic art styles, and the game does not disappoint in that field, either. Every little structure feels so textured and real; the complex designs webbed into clock towers and chapels, talking to NPCs via knocking on lantern-lit doors, climbing up long ladders to get an aerial view of a village below you, it all breathes life into the world of Yharnam and makes it feel more like a truly lived-in place, more than any other world in Souls. Not only does it succeed in the Gothic style, but at times might throw a complete left-field speedball into dream-like surrealism. The way the world changes as you progress through the game and the sun starts to set fills me with such a delightfully eerie dread is just great, not to mention how cool it is that the game constantly changes depending on your Insight as well, it encapsulates that feeling of Lovecraftian insanity really well.

Speaking of Lovecraft, the lore is so rich for what's essentially a one-off game. One might think that this being completely disconnected from Souls might make its story a bit lesser in regards to the three-game overarching lore, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm not a bookkeeper on all the information just yet, so I won't act as though I know everything, but what I do know has really dug its claws into my brain and has had me discussing meanings and theories with my friends for this entire playthrough. The Souls dichotomy of light vs. dark being paralleled by man vs. beast is so instantly compelling and just evolves into something so much greater as the game continues; I don't want to say too much since I don't want to spoil anything, but the way the gameplay itself reflects that concept is absolutely brilliant.

As a bonus, since I don't like rating individual DLCs (in Backloggd's current state, anyways), I figure I should mention The Old Hunters. #1 DLC in Soulsborne, easily. To a degree that feels genuinely unfair. My previous favorite, DS1's Artorias of the Abyss, does a good job at expanding on what that game has in terms of lore and area design, and in fall fairness is still a great expansion, but pales in comparison to what TOH brings. Three mind-blowingly good areas with some of the best bosses the franchise has to offer, incredible additions to the lore and expanding on concepts old and new, and such a sense of scale in terms of what's being given. DS3's The Ringed City was definitely big, but was plagued by shoddy enemy placement which bogged the pacing down some, while TOH keeps that size while making the enemies both very fun to fight as well as the perfect level of frequency. All of it is so good, not to mention the last third basically being a playable version of Shadow over Innsmouth.

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge my one problem with the game, and I do mean one. In comparison to what came after it, I do feel like the bosses are somewhat too quick and over with. Saying this not to humblebrag, honest, the fact that I beat the final boss on my first try doesn't sit right with me. I'm not sure if that's a reflection on how quickly I picked up this game's mechanics or the game's difficulty being lacking, but regardless, I think I might enjoy my NG+ playthrough more, if only for longer boss fights. For the record, the reason why I dislike how quick they are is because they're such good fights. A couple of times, I threw the match just so I could have another try and keep fighting the bosses I loved.

I've said so much about this game, and I honestly feel like I could say even more. It's an indescribably rewarding feeling, down to my core, to have another FromSoft game fill me with the same sense of wonder and intrigue that Dark Souls 1 did, and I feel like it very well might step up to be the next game in my #1 throne for the franchise. I'm really looking forward to replaying this with different weapons, and I would love to see it get remastered or, better yet, remade in the future to let more people in on this absolute masterwork.