Bloodborne
This will be the dumping ground for all my various thoughts related to Bloodborne, released in 2015 by FromSoftware for the PS4. I'll try to keep spoilers light, mostly for the first area or two, but this is a pretty loose rule so heads up.
Preamble
I've wanted to get around to playing bloodborne for a long time now, probably because of this hbomberguy video. I had never tried any of the FromSoft games before, and was a bit less intimidated by Bloodborne than the mainline Souls games, having heard it was a smidge easier for a newbie to get into. However, I didn't have a convenient way of playing it until I recently bought a PS4 Pro off a friend and saw Bloodborne on sale for maybe $20. It seemed like the right time to finally get around to it, and whoo baby the game did not dissapoint.
As of this writing (June 2023) I put just over 50 hours into the game (which should put me well on my way to 100% completion according to howlongtobeat.com, but I'm slow and bad so it'll likely take me a fair bit longer), and have reached level 65. I have been playing in offline mode (I don't have an online subscription), so I won't really touch on the online elements of the game. I think its also important to note that I have not finished the game, so keep that in mind when it comes to my thoughts here. I probably should have waited to complete the game before writing about it, but I don't have the patience for that. I'll come back here as I continue the game to add or revise things if my thoughts change with more playtime.
Yharnam Gothic ~ Atmosphere and Vibes
This game's atmosphere is unreal. Even more so than the combat or lore, the aesthetic and mood of Bloodborne was what immediately cemented the game as something I would love. I think that the opening sequence is a great case of this. After an inscrutable and unsettling opening cutscene for which you have no context, you are left alone in Iosefka's clinic. Abandoned, seemingly for years, cluttered with papers and ripped cloth and vials of who-knows-what (probably blood given how the rest of the game turns out). The stairway down from the first room is in and of itself very visually striking. Orange light angling through a prominent window and framing a chandelier, surrounded by rising gothic architecture. This opens into a wide, low room cluttered with glittering Victorian-styled operating tables. Ahead, a pool of light, and a pool of blood. And the freaky dog you saw in the opening cinematic, chewing on a body. The way this single, simple sequence is set up produces a wonderfully thick sense of dread and anticipation. On a gameplay level, it's just an introduction to some basic controls and an excuse to kill the player and explain the hub world (your basic FromSoft fare) but on an emotional level it establishes immediately the vibe of the game you’re about to play.
I love Yharnam. Right from the get-go it conveys a sense of environmental complexity past what I expected from a city setting. The city twists in on itself, forms layers, and loops around to form an intricately nonsensical web of buildings, staircases, and alleyways. This is not practical city, but a nightmare labyrinth hallucination of a city, and I love it. The view from Central Yharnam especially reminded me of The Round Tower by Giovanni Piranesi (pictured below). Structures far beyond typical human scale or practicality overlapping and interweaving forever into the horizon. In Yharnam, it feels like there's always another staircase at the end of an alley, going down below what you had initially thought was ground-level, into some totally unknown and decrepit neighborhood. It feels like it could go on forever.
