Trick (Weapon) and Treat: Thoughts on Bloodborne PSX

This essay contains heavy spoilers for both the original Bloodborne and the fan game in the above title. Note that there will also be some grotesque imagery and descriptions/discussions of grotesque imagery at points.

A further note about the Noclip documentary for Bloodborne PSX: I watched this video, which includes pretty in-depth and frank discussion of the development of the game, back when it first came out but had forgotten its content by the time I played Bloodborne PSX for myself and started writing this essay. When I rewatched that documentary, I found that it either confirmed or denied some claims of mine. After some consideration, I’ve decided to leave what I said originally unaltered and unqualified since these are still my “thoughts,” objectively correct or not. There are some instances where I, in general, credit authorial intent to a greater or lesser degree, but my tendency is to look primarily at the text itself and work backwards based on what I find; however, it’s only fair to acknowledge here that the person who actually made the game is obviously correct where questions of, say, the motivations behind certain design choices are concerned. This is always implied in these sorts of discussions, but it felt especially important to acknowledge here since, between the documentary and the many Twitter threads written over the course of Bloodborne PSX’s development, there is a perhaps larger than usual amount of documentation available that can offer definitive, official answers.

 

The fan game “demake” Bloodborne PSX addresses a very particular “What If” so specific and odd that it might be some impression from beyond the stars: What if 2015’s action RPG Bloodborne, which was so polished and precise thanks to years of prior experience on developer FromSoftware’s part, was instead the rough-edged, fascinating little cult title in place of 2009’s Demon’s Souls and/or the King’s Field titles released throughout the 90s and early 2000s that laid all that development groundwork in our reality?

In writing this piece now, so long after the initial release of Bloodborne PSX, I realize I risk retreading a lot of the same ground as other Bloodborne enthusiasts who have commented on it, so I’ll try to dispense with some of the more obvious stuff quickly: What’s so great about this game, and what I was most looking forward to as I watched its development on Twitter, was how Lilith Walther (b0tster on social media) was clearly bringing more to her interpretation of FromSoftware’s massive hit (a literal console-seller in my case) than just a coat of retro-colored paint. This is not a dig against any other projects of this sort, as I haven’t played them. It’s just to say that I think it would be easy for a fan of Bloodborne to conceive of something like this, but just at the surface level—though that would still be compelling to an extent.

The OG PlayStation aesthetic is one that fits the horror-tinged Bloodborne like the proverbial glove: the darkness and uncertainty of a lower draw distance, the subtle body horror of character models with just the shadowy suggestions of faces and whose geometry looks shifty and malleable (along with the environments). The low-poly suggestion of greater detail and of possibly unseen secrets and horrors feels in some ways like the more compelling medium with which to adapt a work of horror in general and a work of horror that taps into the oft-only-gestured-at terrifying contours of cosmic horror in particular than the high-gloss look of the original version. The first time a basic rat enemy came darting at me from across a sewer in Bloodborne PSX, I was scrambling and sweating like I hadn’t against that creature in a FromSoftware game in a long time. The distorted sound effects have a new sharpness and power as well. I found the friendly NPC Gilbert’s constant coughing genuinely hard to be around in this version of the game for how the distortion created something even more painful-sounding. And I actually jolted in my seat the first time a massive bell tolled somewhere in the game’s gothic-tower-filled city of “Yharnam” and startled me as I was poking my nose into every dark(er) corner.

 

While the original Bloodborne has what I might call “horror elements,” it mostly touches on the themes and motifs of horror while relying on the typical Souls­-like tension created by an uphill struggle against the difficulty to create a lot of the actual fear it evokes. I wouldn’t say that it never manages to do more than that (the eerie chanting that swells and fills the streets of the “Yahar’gul” area, in place of the typical nothing or ambient sounds of these games, certainly has some impact), but this demake much more often struck me with its atmosphere: both the more passive presentational elements and some more clearly “constructed” things I’ll get into as this piece goes on. The mood is much thicker in some areas thanks to more oppressive shadows and more vaguely-defined character and environmental detail.

One great example is the Grand Cathedral tower with its giant circular window or clock face. It’s there in the original game but has a significantly stronger presence here, where it dominates the much more barren and dreamlike skyline from multiple angles. It’s also less a cathedral than just a… titanic blob, absent almost all discernible features except for the eerie green window near its peak that stares down like an unblinking eye. When basically every distant element of the skyline is just a blotch of fuzzy darkness, this shock of color really sticks out. With barely any of the original version’s late-game cosmic horror monstrosities present, Bloodborne PSX creates a new one from something familiar. The cathedral is the focal point of the new ending as well. In this take on the game, you never reach it and find what lies within. It remains inscrutable and threatening in its placidity and distance, just watching you…

The way that it specifically looms large in the stairway-alley that funnels you onward in the above image feels especially noticeable and deliberately “crafted,” as you’re headed into what was publicly presented as the end-point for the demake, the boss battle with a crazed fellow Hunter, “Father Gascoigne,” that you’d normally complete to access the cathedral area in Bloodborne. By contrast, as I said, the church remains forever out of reach here, a looming and unsolvable mystery. The emphasis on it that’s created by framing it with the environment on the way to the previously mentioned boss battle lends a climactic element to what otherwise, in the scope of the full original game, amounts to just your final, hardest tutorial. Here, it feels more like The End, especially if you have some meta knowledge of the scope of the demake.

 

I don’t want to undersell the work that Walther put into creating this new visual and aural take on the original game’s world. As I suggested already, I read the development threads on Twitter pretty regularly, and I watched the process of, for example, meticulously recreating enemy attack animations and behaviors. That Bloodborne PSX has this compelling surface layer of visual credibility that I’m kind of blowing right past is still worth acknowledging. However, what I was saying before about this reinterpretative first pass being “easy” to conceive of is that it could have been easy enough to just do a one-for-one recreation of the game in a new style but while treating the core elements of the original as sacrosanct by virtue of their being so (supposedly) great already.

              What’s so engaging about Walther’s project and what makes it worth talking about at length is the degree to which she not only adds new content to the game (something like a cardinal sin in some corners of the internet, no doubt) but also reinterprets existing areas, items, mechanics, and so on, on top of redesigning even the basic controls, to try to create something that is both much closer to an actual PlayStation 1 game and that is also, itself, a valuable creative work in its own right, with its own identity. Again, I’m not setting out to throw shade at anyone else’s fan projects, Souls­-related or otherwise, but the degree to which Bloodborne PSX feels like a Real Game is one of its most notable qualities. It feels Designed in many ways, though one of the most obvious is how Walther set a hard limit on how much she was willing to adapt instead of taking on the obviously doomed task of doing the entire game like an enthusiastic fan who was less of a game designer might. And then, instead of just ending abruptly once that limit was reached, she found new ways to squeeze some extra depth out of what she had in order to create both a new ending for the game and to work in certain mid- or late-game elements she wouldn’t otherwise have gotten to play around with when she limited herself to what essentially amounts to just the first sprawling zone of the original Bloodborne.

 

There are some great little flourishes added to Bloodborne PSX that bring out more of the game’s “charm,” as weird as it might feel to use that word to describe such a bloody thing. For example, there’s a cool finger-snapping sound that plays any time you manually save your game, which takes just a little bit to happen while a small animation plays to make it that much more satisfying when you complete a circuit of the world and reach an old or new checkpoint and get to bank your progress. Or consider the little inserts that pop up occasionally, like the above shot of the Workshop homebase’s upgrade bench, that further liven up certain interactions. In the above case, rather than just having the player stand in front of the older Hunter Gehrman and listen to his pretty vague tutorializing, you get a brief, carefully-framed look at an important element of the area. It draws your attention to this critical interactable and also breaks up the monotony of the dialogue. It’s stuff like this (like how the generic Hunter figure on the main menu changes to reflect the character data you’re about to load) that gives the demake so much character of its own. It’s not content to just be Bloodborne But Crustier. It has these flashes of creative fun or charm as well that characterize it as more than just a novelty. The idea of letting you alter the exact level of retro crustiness on display through the game’s graphics options is certainly another notable one of these.

 

This brings us back to that “What If” I described originally since making Bloodborne feel like a PlayStation 1 version of itself means either regressing or mutating it to create a plausible experience. It means taking off some of the polish and precision and convenience of the original’s game feel and controls, in part to better align with the design trends and hardware limitations of the time period being emulated. Rather than get into truly exhaustive detail in what will undoubtedly already be a long piece, I’ll describe just a couple of representative examples.

One obvious design limitation is how the original PlayStation controller didn’t have analog sticks. This meant camera control might be put onto the two “triggers” like it is here (which limits its movement to simply rotating left and right, without the ability to manually shift the view up or down), leaving two fewer input methods for other actions. Additionally, moving the player character with the directional pad instead of a stick means that the pressure-sensitive versatility afforded by the latter just isn’t there. You can’t instinctively adjust your pace by pressing gently or harder, so there’s just one movement speed by default, and moving more precisely (along a narrow beam, for example) or more quietly (to perform stealth attacks on enemies) now requires holding an additional button to walk. Thanks to the button scarcity and to that effort to capture the style of the time, transforming a “Trick Weapon” between its two modes now requires going into a menu. Additionally, the three types of standard melee attack in the game—light, heavy, and charged—are all performed with a single button instead of two, “primitivizing,” in a sense, the way that the game feels to play so that it does operate like some sort of alternate universe first (or early) stab at the Souls-like style.

Critically, Walther is willing to inconvenience the player with these changes in service to a more perfect execution of her vision. But the inconvenience, if you can really objectively call it that, has a spirit of its own that isn’t strictly just nostalgic. Bloodborne PSX feels an extra little bit like a horror game, for example, because the increased time you spend in menus managing keys and transforming your weapon and swapping items out of a more limited number of quick-use slots more effectively recalls the sort of inventory-based puzzling of classic survival horror titles like the Resident Evil or Silent Hill games that got their start during this era.

Furthermore, there’s an argument to be made that the control oddities actually better capture the eccentricity of FromSoftware’s Souls controls by making the weirdness fresh again in a way that it hasn’t truly been since this approach started going mainstream years ago. I’m not going to claim that Demon’s Souls was the first game to feature all its quirks of control, but I do still think it’s safe to say that the concept of executing combos in an action game using primarily the “bumpers” and triggers of the controller, with all of your actions limited by a stamina bar, while you used the d-pad to adjust your active inventory in potentially up to four directions at once in real time while possibly trying to also move around with the left analog stick and adjust the camera with the right was not exactly… comfortable back then. But now the Souls style is just another acceptable way of controlling a game that a lot of players are familiar with and can instinctively use. Bloodborne PSX reinvigorates the old feelings of wrongness and discomfort in ways that diverge from what was actually in Demon’s Souls but that still take the feeling backward in an experiential sense with a certain broad accuracy, recreating the awkwardness of that specific title and also harkening back to a time in gaming at large where things were not yet so standardized: where, for instance, the rules for first-person or third-person aiming and shooting with a gun weapon were still being written. Returning to horror once more, making the action of playing the game that little bit less fluid and intuitive grants Bloodborne PSX a similar amount of tension-via-awkwardness that you can find in early 3D horror titles’ use of “tank controls,” where the player character was adjusted in relation to their facing rather than the camera perspective—a bit of design commentary that I feel obligated to make since it is true here but that has also been so often noted that it’s basically passé to mention it at this point.

Bloodborne PSX makes its divergences from the original version of the game felt pretty quickly. Of course, there’s obvious stuff like the character creator being much simpler or, once you’re actually playing, the buttons you’re being tutorialized to use. At the risk of belaboring a point, the fact that the interact button is also the input to lock the camera and the player character’s facing onto enemies in this game is such a fun-annoying quirk, and I sometimes found myself accidentally picking up items rather than targeting my next opponent in some encounters. Leaving the initial clinic area at the very start of the game now requires additional exploration and key use as well. This makes the player aware of some important things—It teases the fact that the game will diverge from the original in terms of level design and also introduces the concepts of holding a button to walk and needing to more actively manage and actually equip keys to use them on doors, something that happened automatically in the original Bloodborne. The slight new unfamiliarity of the tutorial zone is an excellent foretaste of the greater novelty to come, not all of which I will directly address here. Suffice it to say that the smaller divergences continue to mount as the player makes their way out into the blood-mad city of Yharnam proper and heads toward the original game’s first big encounter with a horde of partially-transformed bestial townsfolk gathered around a large bonfire.   

The backstreets area on the path to the big bonfire is one wholly new addition. It has the tight corners that merit watching and the looping pathways that require mental mapping of a legit FromSoftware area and, with its focus on narrow street-level paths and back-alley violence, conjures up some of the mystique of the 2014 “Debut Trailer,” which the actual Bloodborne does tap into but that is also, I would argue, an under-explored vibe overall—a sort of, if you pardon the probably unnecessarily lurid real-world association, Jack the Ripper scenario, with the Hunter as a not exactly heroic figure as they pick the diseased citizens of Yharnam off in and from these narrow byways. Meanwhile, the surprise expanded sewer area further into the demake serves a “classic” Souls function despite its newness within the “Central Yharnam” frame: that of The Poison Swamp. It’s not too expansive and is actually fairly generous with giving you bits of land to stand on to let the poison build-up fade (as long as you aren’t forced off them by poison-infused rats!) after a fairly harrowing initial straight dash that puts on some pressure and teases you with a slimmer margin for error than you’ll otherwise have navigating the other sections. This is a smart inclusion as an area since the limited scope of the project was going to necessarily essentially remove poison from the game otherwise, and it also gives Walther a chance to show off her level design chops again. As with the backstreets, the results are quite good. The design of the area, with the threat of poison slowly draining the health bar, strains the player in a recognizable enough way, and the actual looping pathways are also satisfying to map out once again. I ultimately wish it was a larger poison swamp than it is, in fact!

 

The poison sewer area has a vibe all its own—both different from other Souls-like sewers and poison swamps. It fits sensically within the environment of Yharnam the city, but there’s a special lushness to it thanks to the sporadic bits of greenery intruding upon the stone foundation of the civilization and thanks to the particular shades of purple and green used for the danger water and vegetation, respectively. It’s dank but not at all unpleasant to look at.

 

I would say Bloodborne PSX has a fair balance of old stuff, old stuff that’s been redone to some extent, and new stuff. The previously tiny “dark house” from the original game—now the larger “Derelict Estate,” with its own shout-out via text pop-up when you enter it—which used to just be a quick sort of liminal space between the main checkpoint of Central Yharnam, another path, and both of the run-ups to the area’s two bosses, now sprawls a bit more, straddling the area physically like it metaphorically straddles the line between the various “stuffs” I outlined above. On the one hand, it’s technically old (or part of it is), while other parts have been slightly redone in the sense that what used to be open street has been enclosed and made part of the house (without further significant changes), but then there’s also a new, openable door you can find that takes you somewhere that doesn’t exist in the original game and that has some really excellent horror atmosphere thanks to great pacing of various grotesque tableaux through smart use of surgical curtains and doorways.

Walther knows when to pull back and just let the environment and mood mess with the player, like in the case of a particularly long and straight hallway that comes on the heels of a singularly upsetting room that gestures toward the inclusion of an enemy and status ailment from the original game that players might reasonably have thought would be excluded here due to the limited scope. Like the poison sewer, the basement zone is another smartly-designed area that manages to fit more of the greater scope of Bloodborne into significantly fewer blocks of space. Even though I said something like “full spoilers” at the start, and despite the fact that my instinct is to try to describe and evaluate as much of the new stuff as I can, I think I’ll leave this one somewhat vague. That locked door is a mystery if you find it early on that is solved some time later and that not only ultimately poses an answer regarding the origins of certain late-game enemies in the original Bloodborne but also loops back through this version of the iconic city to meet up with a previously inaccessible path I had been wondering about for a while, absolutely nailing that much-beloved Souls-like element of recursive map layouts that only fully reveal themselves over time.

The degree to which any given bit of the Central Yharnam landscape will be subverted varies, and not knowing what you’re going to get—whether your previously existing Bloodborne knowledge will help you or trick you—is a big part of the fun of this experience for familiar players. For those who are unfamiliar, Bloodborne PSX’s new content and altered old content are so good that they’re just good, and I don’t think you could easily tell the two categories apart (much less somehow compare and contrast with FromSoftware’s original material) without knowing already. 

If anything, seeing even the fairly insignificant changes, like enclosing some streets to make a bigger house, made me hungry for even more properly new stuff. There’s definitely part of me that hopes for a spiritual successor to Bloodborne PSX that’s wholly Walther’s, where she can make her own things and not have to balance preserving the old like she does here, though I’d also respect never revisiting this particular style of game again in favor of other things. What’s fun about even just the possibility of a smidgeon of new content snuggled in amongst the old, though, is that it dovetails nicely with the design choice to make basically every door in the game examinable. In the original Bloodborne (and in other Souls games), only doors that can be opened can usually be interacted with at all. In the exceedingly rare cases where you get something like the door in Bloodborne’s “Cathedral Ward,” that is interactable and claims to be “Closed” but is never openable by normal, non-hacking means, it creates an enduring mystery for the community because of the oddity. In Bloodborne PSX, though, any given door offers the chance of something, even though the vast majority of them still can’t be opened and just tell you that they’re locked. It’s very much like Silent Hill now, where you check every door in your path because there might be something to find this time but you mostly find nothing except for a succession of dead ends. Still, once you know this game has new content, and once you figure out you can check all the doors, you’re basically committed to turning every knob and pulling every handle in Yharnam, and it’s thrilling.

 

In keeping with its “classic” style, Bloodborne PSX’s design trends Big in ways that feel pretty authentic—big, blocky models, big rooms and big paths, big button prompts and big text, big rotating items to pick up…

 

Pictured above is another “smart” game design trick from Bloodborne PSX. The “Insight”-granting consumables of the original game have been reworked into collectibles more in line with what you might find in a conventional platformer or action adventure game. The first of these that you encounter in the backstreets can be seen above—pretty clearly visible but still spinning just out of reach. It tantalizes familiar players with its subversion of their expectations and draws newcomers down a nearby side route to find this critical item more easily than they likely would have in the original game. Gaining at least one point of Insight is required in Bloodborne to level up, and the original game was a bit more sly, or even mean, with how you went about doing that. If you were thorough, you could find Insight in the environment (via a usable item), but the more accessible route to some was to attempt to fight a boss, which would grant Insight upon triggering the encounter. The catch there, however, was that you would then need to win the fight to take your accumulated experience out of the arena and spend it. If you died to the boss instead, your (potentially substantial) points would be stranded in that sealed battleground, at risk of being lost permanently if you happened to die trying to retrieve them and defeat a tough major enemy: unusable, at the very least, in the short term, and a bitter irony since you could now actually use them thanks to the Insight you’d gained…

In this regard, Bloodborne PSX is altogether more accommodating toward new players than the original version, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing! This isn’t to say that the game has lost its bite, though. The run-up to the Father Gascoigne boss is still a fairly long one if you have to do it over and over, for example, but then there’s a bit of care taken with how elevators now reset themselves when you reload an area, so there’s no empty time spent waiting for them. Meanwhile, there’s only a single enemy outside Gascoigne’s arena (versus the more dangerous two in the original) that can be easily backstabbed to death without risk and that seems guaranteed to drop a higher than usual number of healing items to take a bit of the sting out of burning through resources in the fight and having to potentially farm for more… assuming you don’t just reload a save to avoid the necessity. The apparent regression to manual saving here actually proves to be both a minor inconvenience and a potentially major time-saver. 

 

While Bloodborne is certainly a… bloody game—with probably the most gore per NPC of any Souls-like—the tone and weight of the violence in the “Debut Trailer” from 2014 is quite different. The actual game is frenzied and fast. Bloody, yes—But it often pushes you to fight so hard that you can easily miss the violence itself. Weapons have great heft and create a sense of impact, but they still practically glide through enemies. The critical attacks you can launch against fully stunned opponents, known as “Visceral Attacks,” don’t involve your weapon at all and just have the Hunter plunge their hand into the creature instead. There’s nothing like getting the “Saw Cleaver” stuck inside of a gross dog monster like there is in this trailer. Certainly, there’s no voyeuristic POV shenanigans like in the above still from that trailer, where the (here) exceedingly threatening Hunter player character impales somebody while someone else apparently hides and watches.

Avoiding the crowds patrolling the main streets while dragging bodies into alleyways and dispatching the infected in brutal one-on-one, seemingly one-sided encounters in the backstreets is an experience that the “real” Bloodborne doesn’t capture so much. As backhanded as it might sound, the extra layer of jankiness (both intentional and not) in Bloodborne PSX kind of temporarily brought me something like that experience, where I felt simultaneously powerful and fragile and where fights typically played out a bit more slowly as I relied less on timely evades and speeding around right in enemies’ faces in favor of luring them to me and more methodically dispatching them. I did eventually adjust enough to this version’s quirks that I started playing it just about as vicious and fast as the original, but elements like the low draw distance and greater darkness do still make you pull up short a bit more often and behave like a hunter instead of a Hunter. Changes to gameplay like how you can only transform your weapon from a menu further push something like a more considered approach (where you pick the right tool for the job in advance, in this example). You’ve now got to rifle through your keys like some kind of… physical being.

            Difficulty in Souls-likes is always a hot topic of discussion, and, if nothing else, I think it’s safe to say that it’s highly subjective. You can pretty easily confirm this with each new release by searching the name of any given boss online. In doing so, you’ll typically find a more or less equal split of players calling it the easiest or hardest fight ever. My experience with the difficulty of Bloodborne PSX was kind of fascinating for how I simultaneously found it both harder and easier than expected and for a variety of reasons that make it a little tricky to pin down an exact measure of what even my subjective final assessment of the difficulty would be. I died a number of times playing this game, more than I typically do playing the original Bloodborne these days, I’d say. On the one hand, there’s a precious bit of unfamiliarity and New Souls-like flavor here, and new areas and encounters are certainly bound to cause some deaths. On the other hand, I also found that my go-to gun, the “Hunter Blunderbuss,” was much less capable of flinching and knocking back enemies than it usually is, which led to me not using it much at all and which made the game harder for me. On the other other hand, I didn’t feel like trying to parry enemies very much because I found them much twitchier and prone to unpredictable and sometimes rapid attacks—behaviors that feel decidedly unintentional—and they also seemed harder to burst down with melee damage thanks to maybe having a bit more “poise” and being able to tank hits during their attack animations—something that feels more intentional, I think.

I beat the “Cleric Beast” boss on my first attempt, in part because of a certain new passivity on its part, though moderating aggression to deal damage effectively, while either recovering health during the “regain” window after getting hit by attacking further or else backing off to actually use a healing item, certainly felt very much of a kind with the original version of the fight, and I came away from it satisfied-ish. Meanwhile, Father Gascoigne seemed about an even match for his console counterpart in terms of behavior and aggression (give or take a couple of instances of the AI getting stuck/being strangely idle), and he kicked my butt up and down the street a few times before I had gone through the usual Souls­-like process of learning the fight and getting to the point where I could dodge around and deal damage confidently. There’s an altogether different feel to combat in Bloodborne PSX that’s still very satisfying and visceral once you adapt but that is also different from the original game.

 

A big part of the difficulty of any Souls-like game, in my experience, comes down to weapon selection. Finding a weapon that feels right and that has a move set that works for the individual player is part of the learning process and also presents an opportunity for self-selected challenges on new playthroughs. My Bloodborne PSX run didn’t start in earnest (read: I didn’t feel like I stopped floundering around and smacking into a metaphorical wall) until I got the “Blood Spear,” a demake mutation of the original “Saw Spear,” which was itself a somewhat modified Saw Cleaver favoring the dexterity stat “Skill.” Here, this weapon scales most strongly with the stat normally reserved for determining bonus gun damage, which was pretty high for me because of the slate of starting stats I chose. Because it’s so similar to the Cleaver, the Spear was an economical addition to the demake (just like it undoubtedly was even for FromSoftware themselves) that didn’t require as much work to create as one of the more unique weapons from the original game that normally scales with “Bloodtinge” would have been. I liked the fast slicing attacks of the one mode and the distance-creating pokes of the other, and, also, I absolutely loved the new little detail of the blade constantly being covered in blood, with an occasional droplet falling from the weapon during gameplay. This was such a fun, macabre, cool design choice that I had to use the Blood Spear.

Frankly, the original Bloodborne under-serves players who might want to use Bloodtinge or the magical “Arcane” as their primary stat, with few melee options total that privilege the former and a very slow start in terms of options for the latter, so this modified weapon, with its relative accessibility somewhat near the start of the game, is actually genuinely nice to have, even if the “blood” aspect is just a (very rad!) cosmetic element. It’s just fun to cosplay as someone who is maybe losing themselves to the frenzy of the hunt with this weapon.

             Part of my experience of Bloodborne PSX’s difficulty and a major contributing factor to my appreciation for how it “feels” to play was my choice of control scheme. My feelings were undeniably shaped by the fact that I played the whole thing with keyboard controls. I discovered that the game apparently wouldn’t recognize my controller unless I ran it through Steam, but then Steam wanted me to verify my log-in using an email address I don’t often log into, so I’d have to look up the log-in credentials in the early hours of the early morning and go through those multiple layers of multi-factor authentication just to further fiddle with getting the game to recognize my controller so that I could maybe play for an hour or two after that, so I ultimately decided I’d try the keyboard controls… just for the night, I told myself. I also reasoned that since I was pretty good at Bloodborne, maybe the keyboard experience would give me more of a challenge. I was initially playing on a single monitor but ended up using my second one to display the itch.io page for the game so that I could see the list of keybindings at all times, since I found them to be kind of unintuitive to figure out, as well as not reflected in the game’s tutorial prompts.

Having player movement on WASD just makes sense, but the thing that interested me, in a very tactile way, was how main weapon and side-arm attacks were mapped to the up and down arrow keys, respectively, while camera rotation was on the left and right arrow keys. I had envisioned a keyboard control scheme that tried to somewhat emulate a controller set-up, but this was quite different and was very awkward at first. While I realized that the positioning of the two pairs of four buttons (WASD in a cardinal-ish cluster on my left and UPLEFTDOWNRIGHT on my right) was somewhat visually reminiscent of a classic analog-stick-less controller and fitting for a PlayStation-1-styled game, the actual mapping of camera movement and attacks was still odd, and the notion of using the arrow keys to attack still fascinated me. I always associated them with character movement, so using them in this new way was the equivalent of using an analog stick to attack, which some games have done. The way that I had to angle my left hand somewhat and reach down with my pinky to access the left CTRL key so that I could hold it and then use WASD to stealth behind enemies further engaged me because of how mechanical it felt, more like controlling a machine than a person and in a way that was perhaps mech-like in much the same way that the original Demon’s Souls control scheme was unnatural and robotic before everyone adapted to it. There was an extra layer of awkwardness to this set-up that I ultimately found engaging and learned to work with, though some feeling of fiddliness certainly persisted and definitely contributed to my sense of difficulty. If nothing else, a controller has significantly fewer buttons I could accidentally reach for and smash in a panic during strained moments.

Take that Father Gascoigne fight I’ve mentioned a couple of times now—I came agonizingly close to beating him multiple times but usually died because of a combination of the awkward control scheme I’d elected to use and my hands getting shaky going into the final phase against his transformed beast self. I’d lose the lock-on and flail around trying to find it, and one time I even opened the menu because I was trying to swap my quick items but missed the Tab key and pressed Q instead and ended up dying a really embarrassing death as a result. The decision to take away the dedicated healing button and make healing just one other usable inventory item that needs swapping to from anything else you might be mixing into combat regresses the game’s controls in a way that makes sense (introducing a bit of inconvenience) while also unifying them to a degree, by not treating healing items as somehow unique from most other things you might have in your inventory. It’s one of those tweaks that also could contribute to a more methodical feel or a certain new slowness in the gameplay that makes the classic Bloodborne reflexes not quite seamlessly translate in ways that feel fun and interesting.

Bloodborne PSX is unique, is what I’m ultimately saying—and it is worth playing even if someone has already as good as mastered the game it’s based on. There are quirks and extra wrinkles of novelty to discover and deal with that differentiate (and distinguish) it.

 

PHASE TWO: THE STORY OF GILBERT

There are even heavier, end-game spoilers for Bloodborne PSX beyond this point.

As previously mentioned, Bloodborne PSX introduces some new visual flair at points, including some new cutscenes in place of the default, less dynamic conversations you have with certain friendly NPCs, like a lonely young girl. These add a certain extra emotional oomph.

         Over the years, the friendly NPC Gilbert, who lives at the heart of Central Yharnam, where the zone’s main non-boss checkpoint is located in the original Bloodborne, has become my favorite side character in the game. The reason why is that he is genuinely helpful to the player, but only up to a point. He has a “questline” like other NPCs, so his usefulness doesn’t exactly disappear entirely in terms of the potential rewards he can provide, but his relevance to the overall narrative of the game fades quickly.

Like the player character, Gilbert is an “outsider” who came to the city for the treatment of some unspecified disease, so the implication is that he takes pity on them and offers directions to the Grand Cathedral because of their mutual state—both outsiders, both (presumably) sick. When the first route, past the Cleric Beast, proves to be blocked, Gilbert suggests another, which leads to Father Gascoigne and, in the original game, access to the Cathedral Ward. It’s at this point that Gilbert ceases to be useful, having no knowledge of areas beyond his own neighborhood and certainly being unable to follow the player into the depths of greater and greater horror that they encounter. Physically, he’s incapable, but, spiritually, he’s also just a Guy, who gives you the best directions he can (and then, later, a weapon) but otherwise doesn’t have anything else to offer if the player thinks to continue returning and speaking to him. He’s audibly sick already when you first converse with him through his window, and eventually his ultimate fate is to transform into a small, frail beast and die at the player’s hand… if they even think to return to the spot where their adventure began and keep checking in on someone who never leaves his house and whose “quest” seems potentially finished.

Gilbert’s ultimate smallness in the grand scheme of things and how he has little knowledge of or relevance to the growing concerns of cosmic horror that start to creep into the game from the Cathedral Ward onward is precisely what I love about him. I said it before, but let’s do one more for good measure: He’s just a Guy. In a city that seems fit to burst with weirdos, zealots, cranks, liars, and monsters (of all shapes and sizes) who have more interactivity and/or presence in the game, Gilbert stands out to me as perhaps the purest representation of the normalcy that’s being consumed by the bestial plague. He's another person just going about his business who you asked for directions a couple of times—maybe, as you can just scoot right past him in the original game without interacting at all. In Bloodborne PSX, Gilbert’s role is expanded. You now must talk to him to get him to open the gate by his house so that you can proceed deeper into the area. A later conversation, pictured above, is now rendered as a cutscene instead of just the usual, very dull Souls­-like approach to speech where characters sort of stare in one another’s general direction and very rarely gesture or something while the player spins the camera around or runs in circles to occupy their time as the NPC mutters and chuckles their way through their cryptic dialogue. The clear goal in Bloodborne PSX is to make Gilbert feel like he matters, and the reason for that is because it’s foreshadowing for the fact that he does matter now, a lot.

Once Gascoigne is dead and you examine the gates that lead to the Cathedral Ward, the game world undergoes a transformation as night comes down in earnest. This is another change to the Central Yharnam area for the demake that works in a concept (the progression of evening into night) that would otherwise have been removed if the game stopped where it seems like it will. Instead, there’s this new end-game state of the world. If you try to warp to any checkpoint other than the one in Gascoigne’s arena, you find that they’re all deactivated. Returning the way you came on foot, the world has visibly changed.

It’s not just darker: Enemies have disappeared, replaced with bloodstains. Killed by the player, or by something else? The rolling boulder trap nearby has seemingly malfunctioned and shut down after blocking the bridge with massive rocks, forcing the player back into the aqueduct/sewer below where there is normally a giant boar to fight. The boar’s most dangerous move is to charge from mid to long range, so it’s usually best to time your rapid approach carefully and then stick close to the enemy to prevent it from performing the charge. There’s a narrow doorway and a sharp turn you have to take before you can race down the waterway to reach the boar from this side of the bridge, however, so you might (as I always do) pause at the door and listen for the sound of the boar’s movement in the water of the sewer before springing forward and rushing straight ahead… 

 

           Except—Something has killed that boar and pinned it to the ceiling of its old arena. The spears lodged in the creature are the distinctive otherworldly manifestation of “Frenzy,” that you potentially glimpsed before in one of the torture-surgery rooms in the basement of the Derelict Estate alongside some ominously quivering bits of flesh. Below the dead boar are “Sedative” items used to cure Frenzy build-up, and, after the next loading screen, the tell-tale singing of a “Winter Lantern” can be heard, emanating from the darkness of the sewer somewhere up ahead. Another grotesque enemy normally only encountered in later game areas that are part of the cosmic horror nightmare planes, the Winter Lantern inflicts Frenzy with just its gaze and primarily attacks by grabbing and holding the player so that the meter has time to fill up and take out the majority of the health bar in one burst. They’re unsettling and difficult to deal with and, thankfully, appear only rarely. One might reasonably have assumed that the demake wouldn’t include them because it’s “only” focused on Central Yharnam, but maybe the poison swamp and basement zone were enough to get a player thinking and worrying about what might not actually be off the table after all.

            I know I just keep heaping praise on this game, but I loved the build-up to this moment with the Winter Lantern. I’d been spoiled on it already, but there’s still such an effective progression of imagery and moments leading up to the full reveal. The long and ultimately empty hallway I mentioned before branches from that basement room where this enemy type is first teased, and a player might logically expect to find it down there somewhere in the dark, coming right at them, maybe after they had to move through a partially collapsed little tunnel of bookcases standing in their way, but, instead, the game waits. It gives you enough space to think that maybe this is just a little tease or reference, but then you unlock Sedatives for purchase with the badge key item dropped by Gascoigne, and then you find the boar hanging from the ceiling, and then you hear the ominous, somewhat atonal, singing. It’s great stuff that makes this version of the game that much more actively horrific and that turns an unnerving but ultimately pretty simple enemy into something that feels much stronger and more menacing and significant than before. As someone whose love of Bloodborne arises principally from its horror elements, this version is just all the more delightful because it incorporates stuff like this and like the detached crow head lying on a table in the surgery basement that suddenly roars to life again after you’ve been lured in by a readable note just to its side. Bloodborne PSX has these much more explicit moments of horror in the style of a game intended to frighten the player.

            The first meeting with the Winter Lantern is easily the best in every way. You’re funneled right to it and are almost guaranteed to aggro it without realizing and to then hear and likely be startled by its unsettling shriek of recognition, which is followed almost immediately by the very unpleasant squelching, bursting sound of its preternaturally, disproportionately long arms emerging from within the mass of brains and eyes that sits awkwardly (almost comically if not for all the menace) atop a slender woman’s body. Just like in the original Bloodborne, the Winter Lantern’s gimmicks here are deadly—It can inflict Frenzy from a distance and which might kill the player outright all on its own, but then the grotesque figure can also catch and hold (and gnaw) as well to make sure the combined damage is lethal. What familiar Bloodborne players are going to quickly discover, however, is just how resilient this new version of the singing brain monster also is. In keeping with the heightened horror imagery leading up to its reveal, the improved Winter Lantern seems to be completely invulnerable. Locking onto it like any other enemy reveals a chilling subversion of expectations at the bottom right of the screen, which also functions as a warning: A name appears as usual to identify the enemy, but without an accompanying health bar to deplete. Avoidance is the name of the game here, and this initial encounter in a narrow sewer channel provides some useful ways to at least break the creature’s line of sight and recover from mounting Frenzy build-up in the form of a side path that briefly runs parallel alongside the main waterway on the other side of a wall and in the number of boulders from the previously mentioned trap up above that have stalled out down here.

The recontextualization of the value of this side path that the player likely found earlier is great, and the use of the boulders as obstacles blocking your way and then as shelter from the Winter Lantern is perhaps even better for how, for one thing, it answers the question of why there was a boulder-spewing trap on that little bridge when the original game had a much more subdued, sensical single boulder rolled by one larger enemy. The increased number of boulders might have seemed at first like it was just meant to force confrontation with the boar under the bridge, but the Winter Lantern encounter gives the trap’s presence even greater significance. And when you do make it past this new enemy, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t actually have the necessary key equipped to open the (re)locked gate standing in your way, resulting in some panicked fumbling around in menus, perhaps behind another conveniently placed boulder, while an unkillable monster creeps up behind you. All of this is, again, excellent stuff.

            Unfortunately, re-exploring Central Yharnam beyond this point isn’t as rewarding as I had hoped. What I envisioned was a tightly orchestrated tour of all of the various areas, using obstacles like the boulders to steer the player through a specific route backward that would give the old areas a new functionality and novelty as a more straightforward gauntlet where there used to be free-form sprawl. The reality isn’t anywhere near as exciting. After that first bit of funneling that introduces the Winter Lantern, you’re more or less free to pick your path once more, albeit with the consideration that there are some changes to manage: some more powerful bloody variants of old enemies (including souped-up werewolves with a great stock sound effect wolf howl), as well as one disturbing Bloodborne PSX-exclusive opponent; some revised enemy configurations in at least one spot; and, of course, the presence of either a single Winter Lantern or multiple of them as a fairly consistent threat.

I wasn’t entirely clear on the intention there at first—Just one Winter Lantern would have been more intimidating, but it also seemed like it could just be a particularly powerful new enemy type that happened to appear in some areas, and somewhat randomly in certain cases. I did experience a couple instances of the Winter Lantern being aware of me and following along into an adjoining area, and I also found that some areas could sometimes be Winter-Lantern-less and sometimes not (Winter-Lantern-full instead). Given that you only ever see one at a time, you might take that as proof that there’s only one chasing you, though you might also reason that that limitation could just as easily have been for balance instead. It’s only if you puzzle out how to actually kill this enemy that you get a firm answer, as the Yharnam streets are (somewhat) safe for you to roam again after that point, implying that there was only one after all. In any case, the obvious PS1-appropriate point of reference for the revised Winter Lantern is 1999’s Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and its titular “Nemesis” monster, a boss-class enemy that would follow you throughout the game, introducing a sometimes unpredictable-feeling element of horror that might or might not appear in some places. You can’t stand your ground against the Winter Lantern like you can against Nemesis, but the near-complete disempowerment here feels more impactful in the context of this being a take on Bloodborne specifically since it completely turns the tables on the player more thoroughly. While Bloodborne and Bloodborne PSX are arguably more “action” than “horror,” with the player being the most powerful entity in either game normally (with the right hands on the controller, at least), the wrinkle of the Winter Lantern’s invulnerability pushes the tone harder into horror and forces the player to adopt a different playstyle if they need to explore areas where the Winter Lantern is present.

 

The Winter Lantern’s presence in the end-game of Bloodborne PSX requires a player to think more carefully about how they progress through previously explored areas—by making new use of cover that might have felt less meaningful before, for example. Going back through the game world in this state is particularly tense the first time you enter each room, as you’ll almost certainly hear the Winter Lantern’s singing before you see it and might not ever be able to see it if you aren’t willing to push into the blackness at the edge of the pocket of detail that you inhabit. Trying to pin-point the creature’s location using sound and/or maneuvering around it through careful positioning, bursts of movement, and use of environmental obstacles to stay hidden feels great… at first.

             The operative word there is that “if,” however, as there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to actually engage with the Winter Lantern. I can see how it might work, though—either if the player doesn’t know in advance where they need to go (or even that there is anywhere to go) or maybe if they didn’t fully explore the game prior to beating Gascoigne and progressing the night and now have to finish their exploration with this new pressure. I see how it might work with a more free-form structure under those circumstances. And there’s no denying the initial presence that this creature brings to the game. It’s hostile toward other enemies as well as the player, so you can hear and find its bloody handiwork as you try to avoid its gaze and work your way through an area. There is something kind of haunting about the way the Winter Lantern can reduce a segment of the game’s map to complete silence and then go about its way singing to itself. The vibe this transformed Yharnam gives off is that of a dying party. Before, the hunt was a blood-soaked revel. Now, the number of huntsman enemies that have been killed already, presumably during the transition from one time of evening to another, or that die beneath the gaze of the Winter Lantern in real time, gives off the sense of the last remnants of normal life in the city being swept away. Pockets of human-like enemies persist in some places, but they’ve been wiped out in others, like at the big bonfire, where the flames are now out and powerful werewolves prowl. The selectiveness of the changes makes them feel all that more meaningful, like chaos at work and the city dying in a disorderly sort of way. The celestial (if not exactly heavenly) look of the Winter Lantern gave me the impression of a sort of avenging angel, emptying the streets for good, leaving the barbs of Frenzy stuck in the ground where each victim fell, judged and executed.

            Of course, the issue is that this impression starts to wear thin if you find yourself lost or stuck and having to constantly deal with the patrolling Winter Lantern in the same ways over and over again and/or to face off against the particularly strong bloody werewolves that further complicate the return trip. I was attempting a thorough re-run-through of the city, re-lighting every lamp checkpoint and looking for any new items or encounters, both because I was writing about the game and because I’m just compelled to do that sort of thing, and I found myself getting inoculated to the horror of it all thanks to the mounting frustration. There was a particular stretch of sewer, for example, some distance from a lamp, with a one-way path through it, where I died first to some rats because I was over-confident in my racing around, and then, every other time I attempted to explore it, the Winter Lantern was strolling along the one path through. It just felt especially impenetrable as an encounter, and I got pretty frustrated trying to work my way back to the sewer just to find it more or less unexplorable (and only got through it on a subsequent day when I tried visiting and found just the normal enemies present). The fact that I was convinced by this point that I almost certainly wasn’t going to find anything after all my trouble just compounded those feelings of annoyance. On the one hand, this is a free fan game, so expecting even more from it is pretty objectively unreasonable. The fact that there are any alterations to the city at all (never mind a shake-up as novel as the Winter Lantern enemy) is a great treat; however, I was so taken with that first meeting and how it paid off so many elements of the level design and environmental storytelling that I got my hopes up for more of the same going forward.

            Again, though, someone who didn’t know where they needed to go to actually progress further or who still had treasures left to acquire might have felt differently. As it was, I already knew where I needed to go at this point in the game before I played Bloodborne PSX, and this location was incidentally right next to the first lamp I re-lit as well because of how I ended up worming my way back through the city as I was pushed down one path or another by the Winter Lantern lurking just out of sight beyond the limits of the draw distance. In a way, this would actually have been a fittingly natural revelation if I hadn’t already known—and if I didn’t then feel obligated to double back and put off true progression in favor of exploring every other inch of the city first. If I had pressed on instead, I would have probably had a more satisfying experience, overall but also specifically with regard to the Winter Lantern situation since it’s within the halls of Gilbert’s now accessible house that you can finally get it off your tail permanently…

            In the end, then, it all comes back to Gilbert. In a very literal way, everything that you do in the end-game is for Gilbert’s sake if you consider that the only way forward is through his house. Bloodborne PSX preserves the original’s storytelling style for the most part, so there’s little present-tense guidance or sense of anything so concrete as… worry for the guy. You could, if you wanted, imagine that you’re reporting back once more to see if he knows any other ways into the Cathedral Ward since the second suggested route also seems permanently barred. Whatever the player might imagine, having returning to Gilbert be the one way forward—and centering the new climax of the game around him—raises his position in the “story” significantly. And given that he’s the new final boss, there’s an argument to be made that this is actually primarily his story now as well. The revised version of Gilbert’s story isn’t actually that much more substantial than the original one, seeing as it just takes up several old conversations and (now) several notes within this final new area, but there’s also still a clear attempt to make it more of a focus. To proceed further than the entrance hall within “Gilbert’s Estate,” you need to read a note he left for you in order to get a key. The note, like the interaction requirement much earlier that would allow you further into Central Yharnam, forces engagement with what amounts to the demake’s main story: “Kind hunter, please forgive me. I have one final request.” Gilbert is asking you to kill him as a kindness.

            While I think the interior could arguably have been darker in order to create a moodier atmosphere more befitting of the situation, this zone is yet another fine little bit of new content that shows off Walther’s ability to both mimic the Souls design and subvert it in fun ways. As the name implies, this “estate” is a fair bit larger than Gilbert’s old quarters. While you couldn’t go inside before, you could technically see through the shattered window after his bestial transformation late in the game, and what you could see was just an empty box—a closet, more than a house, and completely unfurnished in a way that suggests it wasn’t actually meant to be seen. Which was an unintentional oversight, probably, and just one of many ways in which the original Bloodborne’s technical limitations and graphical rough edges can be discovered if you’re willing to poke around the edges of any given scene.

 Houses in Yharnam have always felt so indistinct and interwoven to me, like a massive, endlessly connected apartment building styled after a pointy breed of church. Bloodborne PSX, in the manner of other fan works, takes what was previously ill-defined, implied, or unexplored and focuses its attention there, at the seams, adding texture. Gilbert is now the proud owner of a large (but not too large) game level. You can find his abandoned wheelchair beside the window you once spoke to him through, and while the trail of blood spreading from the wheelchair is pretty easy to follow as the crow flies, you, on foot, have some traversing to do. At the risk of reaching too much, it feels kind of fitting that a section of the game with a Nemesis-style enemy might borrow another iconic bit of Resident Evil: the mansion zone with its puzzles. Like the other new areas, this one is also more of a tantalizing hint of novelty than a fully-realized experience, and it’s over pretty quickly, but there is a clear attempt to make this more of a puzzle-focused situation to differentiate it from Bloodborne’s normal rhythm of play. There’s a boss on the third floor and several familiar enemies out back, but mostly you collect a couple of keys and route your way through a little maze of doors spread over the first two levels of the building.

            Aside from the boss fight upstairs, the real centerpiece of the estate (set appropriately enough around, on, and above a long banquet table) is the final showdown with the Winter Lantern. It bursts through the rubble-filled doorway just in front of you as you pick up the second-floor door key at one end of the table, forcing a mad scramble back along the length of the room and out one of the other available exits. If you wondered why there were so many routes weaving together such a small space, here’s one good answer: It’s to facilitate working around the Winter Lantern to get where you need to go (with “it’s meant to be a maze” coming in at a close second for me). You could theoretically never kill your pursuer and could just get to the second floor, walk around the edge of the banquet room’s upper level, take the small flight of stairs to the third floor, unlock the ladder shortcut back to the first, and go finish the game by fighting the final boss. If you venture out onto the narrow beams above the banquet table, however, you can find some chandeliers conveniently within slicing range, and if you hang out up there long enough, the Winter Lantern will come gliding along below, allowing you to drop a chandelier on it, smashing a hole through the table and the floor while dispatching the enemy decisively and permanently. It’s a move that recalls the defeat of a much larger invincible brain monster in the final nightmare level of the original Bloodborne—There, you had to avoid the tower-bound monstrosity’s Frenzy-inflicting gaze until you could reach a lever to drop it into a pit to defeat it. This feels like a potentially intentional echo of that encounter, which would make it another instance of Walther creatively working in late-game elements of Bloodborne.

 

Gilbert’s “house” in the original Bloodborne was never anything more than an empty box, which feels kind of fitting for his role in the story that I described before—small, ultimately inconsequential. By contrast, the “estate” of Bloodborne PSX is an actual place, conferring importance.

            In an optional room on the first floor of the estate, you can find two additional notes that help fill in Gilbert’s story. The second of the two just concerns his meeting with the player character and is more about sharing his perspective and making the meeting more human and less mechanical. The simplicity of its two lines, the second of which simply says “They seemed kind,” offers a clear emotional appeal through that emphasis. It cuts through the fog of lore that obscure’s the game’s (and series’) narratives and offers something humble, universal, and straightforward to latch onto. Meanwhile, the first note has the sort of teased-at lore implications that fans of the “real” installments in this loose-knit series love to pour over, while still also being very clear about the events it discusses in a way that might, more obviously than choices regarding level geometry or environmental detail, mark this as Walther’s work rather than FromSoftware’s.

In this note, Gilbert shares his experience of receiving Yharnam blood as a treatment and then, in his own words, being “whisked away to this parsonage,” which he claims seems to have been previously inhabited despite being empty now. Somehow, he arrived at the conclusion that these previous inhabitants were other outsiders like himself (and the player), and while “[n]o one has come to check up on [him],” he “[suspects] that they are waiting for something to happen.” The clear implication is that Gilbert is involved in another experiment conducted by one of the sinister factions in Yharnam, and given the prominence of the cathedral in the sky and the fact that this house is called a “parsonage,” the obvious choice (which would be incredibly obvious even without those details) is the church. What I find interesting about “parsonage” specifically, though, is that it’s usually a house belonging to the church in which the current minister/reverend lives—someone of importance within the church structure and not some random individual. So despite the fact that there have seemingly been others before him, Gilbert’s placement here, rather than in some corpse-clogged surgery elsewhere in a world positively filled with such places, suggests something special about him and/or the treatment he received. Within a less strictly lore-focused context, and just looking at the literal text itself, this positioning gives Gilbert even more authority within the game—as the last boss of the last level and as the strongest beast you have to fight. It further makes him feel important this time around. He’s a figure of importance, so it makes sense for him to be in a parsonage.

The climactic battle against the final boss on the estate’s top floor takes place during a storm. You could hear some occasional rumbling during the return trip to Gilbert’s house, and the rain begins in earnest as you explore the halls. The effect is spoiled a bit if you backtrack out of the house since it’s no longer raining in any previously visited areas, but assuming you go straight onward, it’s a nice bit of largely superfluous-feeling flair that adds to the sense of impending climax. For what it’s worth, this weather condition is unique to Bloodborne PSX, I believe, and it does add an extra obscuring layer to the small outdoors area attached to Gilbert’s estate that makes the slight amount of combat you engage in there marginally trickier. As something with mechanical impact, the rain is ultimately just another idea I wish had had more space to breathe.

This storm is masterfully used as part of the atmosphere of the last boss fight, however. You must approach the arena along a hallway first, giving you time to listen to the rain and the sounds of something monstrous up ahead. In the center of a massive library-esque room is a transformed Gilbert strapped to an operating table. Occasional lightning flashes add to the impression of mad science run amok. The first phase of the battle is just you hacking at Gilbert while he’s somewhat helpless, dodging away as he pulls an arm loose and starts alternatively swiping at you and trying to free the other limb. When Gilbert has finally had enough of this restrained state, he smashes the table apart in a lavishly animated sort of way, rolling around like an animal on the floor, breaking free as the music simultaneously increases in intensity. Once he’s on his feet, Gilbert lets out a howl that shatters the large windows in the room, raining down glass and causing the curtains to start blowing dramatically in the stormy winds as the music gets properly climactic and the real fight starts. An aggressive player can almost chop away at least a third of Gilbert’s total health during this opening bit, and I think it’s great how well mood and mechanics are balanced here. There’s a certain confidence on display with how the fight is willing to let you have those “free” strikes in the name of atmosphere. And it kind of makes a player worry, probably. If the designer is letting you get in those cheap shots early on, how much tougher can the actual fight be to compensate?

 The answer is reasonably tough: “reasonable” in the most literal sense. Gilbert killed me a few times (once because I got combo-ed to death while trapped between two bookshelves on the edge of the arena), and in the manner of most Souls-like bosses, there’s a trial period involved in learning how to effectively dodge and deal damage before the fight feels truly winnable. It’s not one of the harder bosses in the series or sub-genre, but it’s very good for a non-FromSoftware designer doing a fan project, especially when you also consider that this new fight needs to match with the specific characteristics of Bloodborne rather than being a wholly original creation within a wholly original creation. The old staple of Bloodborne beast-fighting strategy definitely holds true here—dodge to the side, not back, unless you want to get mauled to death—which is one good sign of the fight’s authenticity.

Beast Gilbert attacks with basic melee swings, a gap-closing leaping strike, and a high jumping slam that I found especially hard to dodge consistently for a bit. The general twitchiness of everything in the game is augmented here by how Gilbert dodges or quick-steps (much like you can) around the arena. His behavior is obviously intentionally erratic in some ways, like how he’ll sometimes choose to walk all slow and menacing in your direction and other times dash right at you or come at you in a sort of zig-zag. There’s a legitimate challenge to be found in just trying to slip in hits against him before he moves away again, and the arena is a good one because of how it facilitates some level of strategy in that regard.

You can fight Gilbert in the center of the room, which gives you a lot of space to get away from him to heal or catch your breath, but it also gives him lots of room to move and freely dance around outside of your reach. There’s a narrow-ish raised walkway around the perimeter of the arena that can restrict his movement if you take the fight up there, but you have to be willing to stay in closer quarters with him for longer, and there are gaps in the railing at either extreme end of this walkway that seem designed to serve as an escape route in case this pressure ends up being too much. I kind of compromised in the end and tried to maneuver back and forth relatively near to the far wall of the room so that there was a little restriction on how Gilbert could move but I could still use the rest of the open space if I needed it. In some ways, it’s a fight that recalls some of my favorite encounters in the series, in that it has something of a puzzle element, though it’s kind of elective too so that the people who just want nothing but duels in obvious arenas can have it their way as well. The boss’s evasiveness creates a fair amount of pressure on the player no matter where they choose to do battle since knowing when you’re safe to heal is a lot harder with the fast and random movement, and trying to “burst him down” when his health is low is made even more dangerous because of how he can race away from you and then come right back to deal damage of his own, which is much more likely to hit you and be potentially lethal if you over-extend yourself to try to end things faster.

 

The lead-up to the fight with Gilbert is another example of how the game’s “PSX” limitations—specifically how the black fog that clings sometimes claustrophobically close can hide details up ahead—are used to great effect to create mood. On that topic of creation, this is also as good a place as any, as I’m talking about the final boss, which represents the clearest example of brand-new content in the game, to acknowledge a couple of Walther’s collaborators who helped make the project happen. Evelyn Lark (@TheNobleDemon on Twitter) is credited with “Music & Audio,” while Wes Wiggins (@funnywes) provided the voice for Gilbert’s beast form. Obviously, this fight—and the game—wouldn’t have as much authority as it has without the help of other people. Which is like the circumstances of the original Bloodborne’s production in miniature, basically. When you’re playing it, it’s easy to let it blend together as just an “experience,” and it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over during the lengthy credits (which are all preserved here following the Bloodborne PSX-specific names), but, as with film, a video game is a massive undertaking, and the credits attest to just how many hands it takes to make something on that scale, and it shows just how foolish anyone asking Walther if she’s going to “make the rest” (or something along those lines) is being. One person—or several people—could not make such a thing for free. I know there are bigger fan-game-adjacent projects like this out there that make what I just said untrue, but it is still true enough that I feel comfortable leaving that initial statement unqualified.  

              One element of the classic survival horror series Silent Hill that makes those games so notable is how the enemies are supposed to have elements of symbolism to their designs, reflecting either the protagonists’ psyches or something else. Without getting too far off the beaten path here, that symbolism has been both a subject of praise and of criticism with that series because, while it’s an excellent approach to creating weird and interesting monsters, the re-use of certain iconic creatures in subsequent games causes some problems: Like, why are these different people all seeing the same sexily-dressed, gross-faced nurses? The answer is Money (and Marketability), of course, undermining the artistry. Bloodborne does something similarly symbolic with some of its monster enemies, to a degree. An early key item called the “Sword Hunter Badge” that you acquire from the Cleric Beast in the original game says, as part of its item description, “[C]lerics transformed into the most hideous beasts.” The implication is that something about their profession and/or character as humans led to a more dramatic corruption of their original form. You can see evidence of this with other enemies as well: Vicar Amelia’s transformation is distinctly clerical, with long white fur that drapes her giant antlered wolf body in a manner reminiscent of holy vestments; Laurence, “the First Vicar,” is another Cleric Beast but also strangely on fire; and Ludwig, a legendary Hunter figure whose place in the more honorable-seeming, legendary past of the hunt, before things were quite so degraded, has become a human-horse hybrid, blending together the knight and the steed that might have borne him into battle. Or maybe the steed never existed and is just a manifestation of that symbolic knighthood, like Laurence was perhaps “on fire” with religious fervor?

            Gilbert’s beast form is possibly less explicitly symbolic in these ways. There is a cruel irony present with his transformation, however, as where he could not stand and walk on his own while human, he is now one of the least hunched and most distinctly bipedal of the beasts, while also being the fastest, capable of dashing so quickly that it can almost look like teleportation. While his attire as a human is never seen in the original Bloodborne, here, his beast form is wearing the stretched, tattered, blood-soaked remains of the same starting outfit as the player, which creates some extra resonance.

The player and Gilbert aren’t just sort of closer to friends in this game—They are more clearly parallel figures. Both of them are outsiders (wearing the same clothes, even), and both of them received blood as a form of treatment; however, they’ve undergone divergent transformations. Gilbert has become the strongest of the beasts, while the player has become the strongest Hunter. They fight beneath the gaze of the cathedral, “looking” in at the shattered windows, as close as it’s ever felt, in a manner that’s almost gladiatorial in tone. If this is some kind of experiment (on Gilbert and maybe on the player character), then this is the conclusion, where the results are observed and evaluated. While Gascoigne’s design in both the original Bloodborne and in this demake is very obviously that of a rival, given how he wields similar weaponry in a similar manner for most of the fight, Gilbert now feels like a rival as well, but perhaps more so in that “anime” sort of way, where a relationship arrives at a tragic conclusion as the two characters have both reached their apex of power but in different ways, one “good” and one “evil.” Of course, Gilbert didn’t choose the more obviously sinister path himself, but it’s the role he kind of slots into.

            When Gilbert finally falls, the match is decided, and after choosing to light the final checkpoint lamp that appears, the player character (in a cutscene) steps out onto the balcony in the storm, facing the Grand Cathedral to claim their “prize” as the familiar bell tolls one last time. Of course, bells are often meant to ring impersonally (“objectively,” if you like) to mark the occasion of the hours passing, but the effect here is obviously intentional—intentionally designed and meant to invoke a sense of dreadful intentionality on the distant building’s part, like this is an acknowledgement of your victory by someone or some thing. If you didn’t find all of the Insight in the game, then you’re left with just that ominous, ambiguous scene of the Hunter looking at the cathedral while the bell sounds before a cut to the title and the start of the credits. If you acquired all of the Insight, however, there is a brief flash before the cut during which several of the gigantic, distinctly Lovecraftian and somewhat fly-like, many-armed “Amygdala” creatures can be seen clinging to the sides of the cathedral itself and also regarding the player character from much closer to the balcony. Like the Winter Lantern, these creatures are mid- to late-game elements of the original Bloodborne. At least one acts as an actual boss, while others are simply obstacles during a later area. They were also present in a couple of locations reachable earlier in the game, though, and could be perceived ahead of the story-related progression event that reveals them if the player has enough Insight. Like other elements of Bloodborne PSX, the implementation of the Amygdala here is different but also clearly recalls the source material.

The ending you get in Bloodborne PSX, with or without all the Insight, isn’t exactly satisfying or all that substantial, but the real endings of these games rarely are either, in my experience. Because the Souls-like approach to storytelling prioritizes mood (and “lore”) over conventional arcs and characterization, endings are usually more about creating a sort of vibe somewhat in line with some degree of choice that the player was offered at some point, often a single choice between multiple outcomes made right at the very end. The recent Elden Ring (2022) being such an excessively long game might have thrown a harsher light on this brevity where the ostensible actual story is concerned, is my impression. Bloodborne PSX’s ending might be even more maddeningly brief and vague, but it’s at least still generally in keeping with the spirit of the game(s) it’s based on.

The Souls-es have always been a pretty perfect example of the old saying about the journey mattering more than the destination. The endings are usually just a quick capper on the whole experience and are a means to an end (New Game-Plus) for a certain percentage of players. Typically, it’s the sights and sounds and experiences that came before the end that truly matter—the stories you get to tell about how That One Thing scared the hell out of you at 3 a.m. or how you beat that one NPC “Invader” in a really silly or fun way. It’s about the visual art and the music and that sense of triumph when everything converges as you deplete that last sliver of health of a boss that took you hours of preparation and practice and repeated failure to defeat. As frustratingly, commonly replicated and increasingly rote as this design has become over the years since Dark Souls broke big back in the early 2010s, it’s sometimes nice to remember that at its core lies this downright Artistic approach to game design that, while it was fresh, represented something new and compelling: not because the games were so hard, but because the difficulty was backed up by a palpable sense of creative intention that made the experiences… beautiful. Bloodborne is an inherently “ugly” game, with all the blood and whatnot, but it’s also such a beautiful and compelling piece of art that it inspires other people to make even more art in honor of it and to revisit it both on its own and via other media.

            Myself, I did a quick run through the Central Yharnam area with a fresh character in the original Bloodborne after playing Bloodborne PSX. I was struck by how (obviously) different the mood was—how distant and hard to spot the cathedral was, how well-lit the streets were—and by how small the city felt. I didn’t time my playthrough of the demake, though I’d estimate my completion time to be somewhere solidly past the 10-hour mark. But that’s a first playthrough, of course, and one conducted with the knowledge that I was trying to see and do as much as possible to write about it, and so the game can absolutely be completed much more quickly. I also don’t actually think there’s some kind of salient statement to be made by contrasting that playtime with the two hours and not-quite-thirty minutes it took me to thoroughly clear out the other version of Central Yharnam, which happens to be a version of the game I’m more intimately familiar with, on top of it just literally having less to explore than in this alternative take. Still, the contrast is interesting for how stark the differences really are. There’s crossover here, like how Bloodborne PSX made me better at dealing with the fully-transformed werewolf enemies head-on when I went back to Bloodborne HD, but trying to play the exact same way as I did in the demake just didn’t feel right in this other, different context. Obviously, the two are different works in terms of things like controls and the number of areas you go through, but they also feel fundamentally unique in ways that are a bit harder to qualify.

 

For fun, I tried to create the same character in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne that I used for Bloodborne PSX, just to further compare and contrast the two for myself by enhancing the similarities between my experiences.

             If we go back to that “What If” from way, way above one last time, a maybe 5- to 10-hour-ish game like this, with an actual ending, just feels like a complete experience in its own right. Again, it’s clearly not just a slice of Bloodborne with a different coat of paint. If the original Bloodborne ended after Father Gascoigne, it would be noticeably incomplete, but Bloodborne PSX (which doesn’t actually end there) does feel relatively complete by comparison. You can read this intent to create a complete experience in the text itself, but I’ll also allow myself to quote the Noclip documentary here and use Lilith Walther’s own words:

“It was going to end at the Cathedral Ward, and it was going to end with Vicar Amelia [the big boss of that area]. But . . . I ended up cutting it because the Cathedral Ward is even bigger than Central Yharnam, and like 90% of all the NPC interactions are in the Cathedral Ward. . . . And I had some time left over. Making just Central Yharnam was too small in scope, so I decided to kind of turn Central Yharnam into a—for lack of a better term—a big, like, backtrack, to get back to the start. . . . That side of things, like making new content, kind of grew, the drive to do that, as I worked on the project. . . . I did not want you to beat Gascoigne and then it just said ‘demake over, goodbye.’ That would be boring and disappointing, and it wasn’t an ending. It was a cliffhanger that would never get continued. I wanted to properly end the game, and I wanted to end it on an emotional high note.”

Walther’s conception of the demake as a complete experience certainly shines through in the end, as it is one. Although… It is kind of funny that she says she wanted to avoid a “cliffhanger,” as that’s sort of what the new ending is anyway. It actually kind of feels like a sequel tease—Like, if Bloodborne really did come out like this for the PlayStation 1 in the 90s, players would almost certainly be expecting a sequel in a year or so where they’d get to escalate the hunt to take on those sinister alien figures you’re introduced to just before the credits roll! It is still an ending, though, so there’s some sense of the game being Complete. What further contributes to that feeling of completeness and of independence from Bloodborne proper is the fact that Bloodborne PSX has its own retro-inspired cover art (pictured below) by Corwyn Prichard (@art_mino on Twitter). It just feels that extra bit more like a “real” game because of this inclusion and has an additional layer of credibility to it that I think makes it more compelling. It’s ultimately less a “demake” of Bloodborne and more Lilith Walther’s Bloodborne, an alternative vision of what that game could have looked like if it existed in very different circumstances. As I’ve established in too much detail already, there is enough alteration here beyond the obvious presentational differences to justify it as an experience worth having based on its own merits and not just as a novelty.

 

I like this cover art for Bloodborne PSX a lot. In this day and age, where a video game cover is usually just a depiction of the protagonist facing or with their back to the camera, I love how much “scenery” there is here. The focus is on the city, the cathedral, the night and the moon, the common humanoid enemies in their torch-bearing-mob-ly goodness, the blood and the werewolves… It’s a great encapsulation of the iconic elements of Bloodborne (either version), and I love how it effectively omits the player. Are we meant to embody one of those figures stalking in the mist? Are we meant to actually be present ourselves in the scene, in this little archway, with a killer wolf peering in at us? It both gives the audience more of a sense of the game as it actually exists while also firing the imagination more than a Hunter figure sans much of any additional context does.

          It’s fun (in a way) to conceive of this as “Bloodborne on PC” because that’s something fans want, but I think it does a disservice to Bloodborne PSX to push it too heavily—and also reductively—as just a fan doing for free something Sony and FromSoftware almost certainly will do at some point for the sake of money. In a similar vein, I once saw something to the effect that Walther’s current Bloodborne Kart project represents taking a “meme” too far, but clearly that, like this, is less about somehow making good on some sort of idea floating around out there in the culture (that Bloodborne should be remastered and released on PC, or that it would be funny if you juxtaposed such a grotesque and somber property with the goofiness of a cart racer) and more about using what already exists as a jumping off point for something new.

While I never saw it myself, I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be a variant of the start-up sequence of logos for Bloodborne PSX that includes one redone in the trans pride flag colors. You can find further evidence of “Politics” being injected into the game in its character creator, which ditches even the goofily progressive “Gender has no bearing on ability” text of the original Bloodborne and the sort of awkward, if also clearly well-intentioned, “Body A” and “Body B” approach that’s going around right now in favor of a character creator where gender is entirely omitted in any explicit form, where build and voice are presented neutrally. There are a lot of trans folks who love Bloodborne, but there are also some toxic contingents of players who flock to these games, and while I’m not saying those groups can’t overlap, I think there’s something nicely subversive about how Walther has made Bloodborne hers in ways not exclusively limited to pride colors or character creation and that make her “ownership” and/or “mastery” of it (in a sense) an undeniable fact that anyone who might have an issue with her or her “politics” just has to deal with. Even absent that angle, though, there are no doubt still controversial design choices present here, and the end-result is that Bloodborne PSX isn’t the community’s perfect “centrist” demake; it’s a “partisan” effort with tangible motivations and personality behind it, and it’s ultimately all the more wonderful for that reason.

 

At the risk of sabotaging the mood, I did do an incomplete second playthrough of Bloodborne PSX. I wanted to test and confirm more things, and I also wanted to see how the game might change with a different “build.” Specifically, I had planned to use the Arcane stat primarily and to experiment with the Arcane-scaling “Tonitrus” weapon and the various magic-like items. I ended up abandoning this attempted build, however, due partly to the (anticipated) awkwardness of fiddling with the quick slots on a regular basis to use the items in combat. I thought I might not mind their “Quicksilver Bullet” costs since I still found parrying to be harder to do with the twitchy and unpredictable enemies of the demake, but since there is no storage in Bloodborne PSX, you can’t amass extra consumables past the normal carrying limit. This likely makes sense both as a limitation of the emulated time period and in terms of simplifying programming the game, but it also makes the prospect of regularly burning multiple bullets at once to cast the game’s equivalent of spells (in order to deal the same amount of damage you could probably equivalently have inflicted with a few rapid swings of a melee weapon…) even more annoying than it already was in the original Bloodborne.

As for the Tonitrus—It is a genuinely interesting weapon here since it’s the only one still impacted by a durability system that was otherwise abandoned. It has what you might actually call an “enhanced broken state” in Bloodborne PSX, where it’s physically bent at an angle (which may impact its collision with enemies) and also deals less damage, as expected. I think there’s a seed of an interesting idea here: Since the Tonitrus will eventually break through repeated use, you have to maximize each swing, emphasizing the charged attacks which also cause this version of the weapon to spark with additional elemental damage for a period. Given that it’s an Arcane weapon, the fact that it can break also makes theoretical sense as a means of forcing a player to use their other build-appropriate options: either the aforementioned items, a flamethrower gifted by Gilbert, or possibly a torch. The Tonitrus can be infinitely repaired at checkpoint lamps (or back at the Workshop base), but it’s not always possible to do this and not essentially lose progress as enemies respawn in the path you might have already cleared whenever you (re)load a zone. In the end, I just found it all a touch too tedious and fiddly. The torch was too weak (and with consistently spotty hit detection, I felt) to serve as a reliable backup for the Tonitrus, while the other options would require consumable bullets to use. A skilled and patient player could maybe find the balance, but I felt like it was a particularly inaccessible way to play the game for me, and I gave up at the Cleric Beast, not all that long after I had eagerly acquired the Tonitrus.

From there, I decided to try “Strength” as my primary stat instead. I couldn’t get a unique Strength-scaling weapon without beating Father Gascoigne to acquire his axe, so I pretty happily did that, thinking surely this approach would work better. However, I found the axe far too slow in this version of the game, and after working my way back to Gilbert’s house with it and defeating the Winter Lantern, I got killed by the two basic dogs in the rainy little outdoors area attached to the house because even the un-transformed axe was too slow to get in a hit against them, and pinning them down with the gun proved useless too since I’d aggro’d both at once. So I gave up the axe for the basic Saw Cleaver flipped open, which I had been using prior to getting the Tonitrus… until I found that too slow- and annoying-feeling to use against the super werewolves and just switched to the basic, closed Cleaver… until I died with that and finally just decided to give up since I had essentially come back around to the same playstyle of my first character by that point anyway.

Now, what this final Bloodborne PSX experience confirmed for me wasn’t entirely negative: It confirmed that the game is still a few-ish hours in length to clear thoroughly, attesting to that sense of completeness again; it also drove home just how different the experience really is from the original Bloodborne in terms of how certain weapons, items, and playstyles function, further attesting to the originality and independence I argued for above. However, while I’ll acknowledge again that what feels “right” and what “works” in these games is largely dictated by player preference, I just found this second attempt so clunky and rage-inducing and found myself thinking of how little build variety there actually is in either version of Bloodborne. Even in the original, Bloodborne was the game where FromSoftware pared down the stats and the ways in which a player could approach playing to a precious few options, choosing to funnel all players into a similar path forward, thereby pushing a more prescriptive but also incredibly thrilling high-speed playstyle—arguably a precursor to the even leaner and meaner approach they would take with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice a few years later.

For as much as I love Bloodborne (and loved Bloodborne PSX, the first time through), it’s not a game I feel especially compelled to revisit in its entirety because doing so means grappling with its limitations. It can be fun, but it’s most fun when the gameplay feels fresh and when the atmosphere and horror elements really sing. Once the novelty fades, it’s hard to justify not just hanging up your “Hunter Pistol” and turning in your many factional lore badges at Gehrman’s nonexistent desk.