I. Limits
It’s September, 2021, and I’ve decided to play a game that, on paper, I shouldn’t like.
I skip past jump scares in movies. I look away from body horror and gory violence. I get sympathetic pain and nausea from any depicted injury worse than a scraped knee—actually scratch that, just thinking about a scraped knee made me wince a little.
So why would I want to play a gory gothic horror game that’s also famously difficult?
The answer is…I don’t know. This is the problem with reviewing a game it’s taken me nearly 4 years to actually finish, I don’t remember what drew me to it in the first place. I think I vaguely remember wanting to try a FromSoft game and thinking “well, the one with the gun will be easier, probably.” Maybe I read about the trick weapons and thought that was interesting, maybe someone said it was more accessible than a Dark Souls; also, apparently in my Nioh review I swore I would never play a Dark Souls, so maybe I felt like if I had to play a FromSoft it was this or Sekiro, and this was cheaper.
Regardless of the reason, I find myself in Yharnam. I have, of course, died to a beast and come back from the Hunter’s Dream armed and ready to take on the world (and then died again but let’s not talk about that). I open the front gate of Iosefka’s Clinic and step out.
And that’s when Bloodborne gets its hooks in me.
It turns out I can stand horror, even appreciate horror, when the world is so immediately compelling. The panoramic view of irrational, sprawling, all-consuming Gothic architecture that greets you outside the clinic, the immediate knowledge that this world is huge, and the immediate desire to explore every possible inch of it. And then there’s the sound design, scary, sure, but it feels organic, almost diegetic, like these sounds and this music are simply in the air. And the narrative framing gives the whole thing a sort of dreamlike quality that undercuts what might otherwise seem like a harsh, nasty world. Rarely have I been so instantly immersed in a game.
It’s a struggle, at first. What I think I know about games is that you can always brute force them if you need to, so I’m using the axe, which deals the most damage out of the three starting weapons, but it feels like the game isn’t designed for it, as just a random villager is fast enough to get past my guard and shank me with a pitchfork. I try the gun parry and pretty quickly give up on it as too unreliable. I try my hand at what I would think would be a relatively easy enemy given it’s just down the stairs from the 2nd lamp, and I die in two hits. I suffer some demoralizing blood echo losses. I aggro a character I later find out is actually an important NPC. Oops.
But I do start to find a rhythm. I grind a bit, find enough Blood Stone Shards to level up my axe and start doing serious damage. I molotov through the Cleric Beast, I hack through Father Gascoigne. I work my way up to Vicar Amelia and I beat her on the first try. I’m feeling pretty good about myself.
Slightly dampened when I get got and sent to Gaol and of course lose all my blood echos trying to get out, but these things happen. Apparently. Am I ok with that? Not sure.
Hemwick Charnel Lane has some annoyances, and the environment is all rocks and dirt and hovels now which I’m less awed by, but the Witches are even easier than Amelia, and now I’ve got the Rune Workshop Tool, one of the biggest upgrades in the game. So I’m riding pretty high as I head to the Forbidden Woods. And I actually do pretty good there. In the first half. It’s the 2nd half that’s the problem.
FromSoft games, and indeed soulsbourne-likes more generally, have always been surrounded by difficulty discourse. Are they too hard? Should there be an easy mode? Are people who don’t like them wusses and not real gamers (laudatory)? Are people who say that snotty assholes and real gamers (derogatory)?
But rarely, if ever, discussed is the fact that in almost every one of these games there comes a point when you find yourself somewhere that is not only difficult to navigate but also deeply unpleasant to be in. Any positive aspects of the game that have been mitigating the difficulty frustration have been removed, and you’re faced with the prospect of continuing to spend an unknown amount of time in a place you don’t want to be that is making it as hard as possible for you to get out. This is where I stop having fun.
The 2nd half of the Forbidden Woods is possibly the least interesting, most grating, most unpleasant area of the entire game. Visually it’s all dank, dark woods and swamps. Enemies are hidden in every nook and cranny and all of them can and will kill you quite easily. It’s difficult to navigate. And most importantly, your ears are filled with the constant sound of hissing snakes.
After I don’t know how many failed attempts to get through this area, never even finding another lamp to make it feel like I was making some progress, I simply did not want to exist in this world anymore. I had hit my limit. So I left.
II. Loops
It’s January, 2024. Since moving to a new apartment I’ve developed insomnia and have been spending 3 am to 6 am playing games. I try some Elden Ring and weirdly bounce off it even though it seems like it was made specifically to appeal to me (inasmuch as a FromSoft game could be). What’s this itch I’m feeling? Do I…want to go back to Bloodborne?
I guess I do.
What I think I know about games is that you can’t just brute force them, you have to lean into their design choices, and Bloodborne is clearly a game about speed and technique, the give-and-take, the dance. So I start a new game, with the cane.
Immediately I think, yes, this is how Bloodborne was meant to played. Sure I’m doing less damage, but I’m so much more agile, more responsive, and the transformed cane might be even better than the transformed axe for crowd control.
That being said, I do find myself missing the damage output of the axe a little bit. But here’s the thing about being awake at 3 am: I’m not really that awake. Like, I haven’t had that much sleep, I haven’t had breakfast yet, it’s still dark out. You know what’s perfect for that time of day? Grinding. Mindless, repetitive, calming, grinding.
So I establish loops. At first the loops are fairly small: maybe down to the house, out to the dog alley, back under the bridge. A little bigger: down the stairs to the street, up to the bonfire, back down through the gate and up the ladder. That’s not loopy enough though, so then once you hit the bonfire you go through the courtyard and up to the bridge, through the beasts, which you can actually handle at this point, and down through the house, then back up to the lamp. Or maybe you go the other way and do the perimeter: up through the house, across the bridge, down to the courtyard, jump down into the dog alley then back under the bridge.
Bloodborne is a horror game. It runs on tension, uncertainty. Loops undo all that. To establish a loop in Bloodborne, to run it over and over, is to master the game, in the most oppressive sense of the word. Nothing is unexpected, everything is controlled.
This is not how Bloodborne was meant to be played. But I don’t know that yet.
I move into the sewers, creating new loops as I map them out, tracing each enemy’s position and movements (I don’t aggro Eileen this time, though it won’t matter). But it’s not enough. I must show this game who’s boss. I twist and expand the loops until eventually I can clear every enemy between Iosefka’s Clinic and Father Gascoigne—who I haven’t even tried to fight yet, because as with all oppressors my secret is that I’m scared. “I’m probably nearly ready to fight him,” I think. “Just one more loop.”
I do eventually get past Father Gascoigne, rather easily in fact (one might even say unsatisfyingly easily), but the Cathedral Ward proves immune to my loops. Too many dead ends. Too many big enemies for my little threaded cane. Frustration creeps in.
What really kills my run, though, is how I try to solve the problem. Desperate to reclaim the feeling of power I got from my loops, I do the unthinkable: I look up best blood echo farming spots. This it turns out, is a bad idea.
I don’t know why the Chalice Dungeons exist, except to break the game. Procedurally generated modular dungeons with no bearing on the main story of the game, within them one might find weapon variants of weapons one doesn’t even have access to yet, upgrade items in greater rarity and quantity than those found outside, and gems that actually make a noticeable difference when you slot them into your weapon. And, in a special dungeon available from the moment one gains access to them, whose heinous name shall not besmirch this document, one can find upwards of 80,000 blood echoes from one enemy that you don’t even need to fight and that starts dying as soon as you enter the dungeon.
What happens next is not a loop, it confers no mastery. It’s a binge, a thoughtless indulgence, the illusion of power without the right or skill to wield it. Over and over I load in, I wait, I leave, I level up, I come back. The game tries to stop me, to warn me this is not the way, as I quickly find the requirements for the next level scaling well past what is reasonable, but that just means I have to do it more, do it longer, put on a podcast, scroll through Bluesky with one hand, god if this were on PC I could probably script this, ugh I still need 270,000, back in I go, over and over—
The shelf before rock bottom is when you realize you’re not even playing the game anymore. Rock bottom is when you realize you can’t play the game anymore. You have destroyed what you sought to master.
Sometimes limits are there for a reason.
III. Learning
It’s March, 2025 and Luke Westaway (NormalAdultLuke on Youtube) has uploaded the first video in a new series: “Bloodborne with bosses & enemies RANDOMISED.” I enjoyed his randomized Dark Souls series, so I click on the video with a fair amount of enthusiasm, but also, perhaps, a hint of trepidation, a la Dean Pelton watching a video of an anthro Dalmatian: “This better not awaken anything in me.” I’m still in Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3, and in the middle of all the games I’ve started while procrastinating on Baldur’s Gate 3, I cannot justify adding another game to that list. But you know, I never did try a playthrough with the saw cleaver, and after all it is the one on the cover…
What I think I know about games is that “knowing things about games” is less important than being willing to learn about the game you’re playing. So this time around I try to let Bloodborne teach me.
The first thing I learn is you can’t go by the numbers, which is somewhat counterintuitive because there are so many numbers. But the saw cleaver apparently deals extra damage in its untransformed state that is simply not accounted for, and it actually makes it arguably the best, or at least most balanced, starting weapon: neither the slowness of the axe, nor the weakness of the cane. Going forward, I make a note to try out every weapon in familiar conditions to see how it actually feels to use, rather than just compare numbers. The loops return, but now as testing grounds rather than mindless killing fields, their slaughter now serving a purpose that drives me forward rather than holding me back.
I also finally learn how to parry, which is only unreliable if you try to generalize it, but is quite reliable if you take the time to learn each enemy and find their weakness, which of course is what the game wanted you to do. This makes being “underleveled” (a somewhat meaningless concept in a game where that is your natural state of existence) far less precarious. While I do explore Central Yharnam thoroughly, I do not overstay my welcome, and when I get to Gascoigne I am rewarded with a challenging fight. That is until I figure out his move set and manage to parry almost every single one of his attacks.
This is, finally, how Bloodborne was meant to be played.
In Old Yharnam I learn that you don’t have to kill every enemy in your way, especially when there’s a gatling gun shooting at you. I then learn that you do have to kill the enemies that can run faster than you. Context, as always, is king.
After defeating the Blood-starved Beast and gaining access to the chalice dungeons, I am brought face to face with my shame from the last attempted playthrough. I cannot simply pretend I don’t have the knowledge that I have. There is a fast and easy way to gain a vital resource, surely I would be a fool to ignore it? At some point the realization hits me: blood echoes are not the key resource in Bloodborne—the key resource is time, and the goal is to spend that time playing the game in as enjoyable a way as possible. So grinding through the blood echo mine over and over to needlessly level up? That’s a terrible use of time. Popping in once just to get enough to buy a weapon you just unlocked that you’re not sure you’ll even like? That’s just being smart. It’s with this new attitude I’m able to justify buying the Kirkhammer, even though I’d used it before and found its damage didn’t outpace is slowness. Trying it out again I discover that it may be slow, but it hits hard enough to stagger some of the bigger enemies, at which point its damage output doesn’t even matter. Is it possible that you’re actually supposed to carry two weapons that are useful in different contexts? Is that why there are, you know, two weapon slots? (Yes, obviously, but eventually I find Ludwig’s Holy Blade which can stagger most enemies depending on which mode it’s in, and that’s what I use for the rest of the game. So it is possible to find your one-and-only.)
Eventually I make it to my old nemesis, the Forbidden Woods. And I learn that actually it’s fine to not explore every nook and cranny and kill every enemy. Why make yourself spend more time there than you need to? Fairly quickly I find my way to the next fog door, have a bit of a Sam Gamgee moment (“If I take one more step it’ll be the farthest into Bloodborne I’ve ever been”), and then I immediately get destroyed by a 3-person boss fight because Bloodborne is hard, guys. It doesn’t stop being hard just because you’re having this zen epiphany about it.
But it’s fine, because something I learned from Elden Ring is that it’s ok to use walkthroughs so long as you don’t actually follow them. Which is to say, if you’re stuck look something up. But don’t then immediately look up the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So I learn about the pitfalls of the Shadow of Yharnam fight, and I try it again. And I die again. So I learn that there’s a summon you can do that I missed because I went a different way through the level, so ok exploring some nooks and crannies is probably good, but I go back and find that and I try again and I die again but then I try again again and this time I barely manage to get through.
Anyway, I don’t need to narrate the whole game, so we’ll skip to the next turning point. The blood moon has risen, and Yahar’gul, Unseen Village is kicking my ass. Cainhurst Castle is kicking my ass. Fine. I grit my teeth, I bear down (for midterms), I get through them. Then Upper Cathedral Ward is kicking my ass, because I have forgotten to not be afraid of the dark. The Nightmare of Mensis is kicking my ass because I have forgotten to not try to kill everything, especially when there’s a giant brain shooting frenzy build-up at you. God this is exhausting. The spiders dropping from the ceiling are a particularly cruel joke. Also I apparently missed part of Eileen’s quest chain and now she hates me again and she’s kicking my ass and I’m sad about it. All of my enlightened equanimity has gone out the window and I’m starting to think I will never finish this game.
Then I play Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. As mentioned in my review of that game, it also kicks my ass, to the point that I actually have to turn down the difficulty. I return to Bloodborne battered and bruised, sure that if I can’t even handle Wolfenstein II on normal difficulty then I clearly can’t handle Bloodborne on the only difficulty. And then I kind of just waltz through the end of the game. The Host of the Nightmare, the Celestial Emissary, Mergo’s Wet Nurse, Gehrman, Moon Presence—all fall after just a few tries. Well, except Moon Presence. Moon Presence I beat on the first try.
It is May 16th, 2025, and I have just rolled credits on Bloodborne.
Bloodborne does not have difficulty levels, which means how hard the game is is how hard it is supposed to be, and you need only accept that. At some point, if you truly commit to playing Bloodborne, then you can and should believe that it is possible for you to do so. Wolfenstein II is daring you to play it on a higher difficulty, mocking you for taking it on at even a normal level. Bloodborne does not dare, it does not mock. Bloodborne invites. And if you receive that invitation then know that it is not in error. Bloodborne is for you, if you want it to be.
p.s. And then of course it took over a month to write this essay. Nothing’s ever easy with this game.
p.p.s. Section II may have actually taken place in late 2023 rather than earlier 2024, it’s hard to tell. But I have a post from January 2024 where I say “My hot take on Elden Ring is it makes me want to go back to Bloodborne” so that’s what I’m going off of. If anyone knows how to extract the date created from individual Bloodborne save files let me know.
Certain of Eventual Failure 