Since Dark Souls and Bloodborne came around, the games industry found the courage to be hard again, to be niche again, and to be weird again. Our 2011 Zelda was Skyward Sword, our 2017 Zelda was Breath of the Wild. One of those games takes an hour to get started, has a trillion tutorials, and sticks you with an annoying helper who will repeat all instructions twice. The new game just dumps you naked and clueless in the woods and is so much better for it. I never directly played a From Software game before, but I have played games with Dark Souls influence and loved them. Shovel Knight and The Witcher 3 are two of the best games of the decade, and Hollow Knight made my Top 5 in 2017. I am grateful to the Soulsbornes of this world.
And yet, I've never liked what I've seen in Dark Souls. It is an entirely personal problem, I admit. I don't know how useful this post is going to be for anybody other than myself. There's a blank misery to these games that really puts me off. A lot of it is the color pallet. Dark Souls games are gray and muted, and Bloodborne has one color: brown. The game worlds are truly joyless. The developers do not create characters or really much of a story, so there's no personal connection I can draw from whatever I'm doing. Everything is doomed anyway it seems, so why should I bother? Plus the difficulty is "fair" but also incredibly cruel. I said before in my Celeste post that I have a low tolerance for cruelty. I like a proper testicle cruncher of a hard game, but not one that's actively against me.
So having played Bloodborne now (thanks to it being free with PS+ in March) my opinion is unchanged. I still don't see the charm to the atmosphere or the design. Bloodborne has no story progression and no arc, everything looks the same no matter where I go. There's incredibly vague lore, but since this setting is full of jerks who hate me, I don't care. Youtubers make hour long posts to decipher the lore, but lore only matters if I care. The mystery is just a mystery for its own sake, not any kind of depth. Hollow Knight was dark but full of cutesy bug people and friendly NPCs with personality. Bloodborne has one personality: deathly dark death dark, which then mutates into deathly dark death dark but now with an H.P. Lovecraft theme.
However the combat is good, which only tortures me more. Because I haven't mentioned the real problem here: the grind.
And yet, I've never liked what I've seen in Dark Souls. It is an entirely personal problem, I admit. I don't know how useful this post is going to be for anybody other than myself. There's a blank misery to these games that really puts me off. A lot of it is the color pallet. Dark Souls games are gray and muted, and Bloodborne has one color: brown. The game worlds are truly joyless. The developers do not create characters or really much of a story, so there's no personal connection I can draw from whatever I'm doing. Everything is doomed anyway it seems, so why should I bother? Plus the difficulty is "fair" but also incredibly cruel. I said before in my Celeste post that I have a low tolerance for cruelty. I like a proper testicle cruncher of a hard game, but not one that's actively against me.
So having played Bloodborne now (thanks to it being free with PS+ in March) my opinion is unchanged. I still don't see the charm to the atmosphere or the design. Bloodborne has no story progression and no arc, everything looks the same no matter where I go. There's incredibly vague lore, but since this setting is full of jerks who hate me, I don't care. Youtubers make hour long posts to decipher the lore, but lore only matters if I care. The mystery is just a mystery for its own sake, not any kind of depth. Hollow Knight was dark but full of cutesy bug people and friendly NPCs with personality. Bloodborne has one personality: deathly dark death dark, which then mutates into deathly dark death dark but now with an H.P. Lovecraft theme.
However the combat is good, which only tortures me more. Because I haven't mentioned the real problem here: the grind.
