From Software had been around for over two decades creating hit series like Armored Core and King’s Field before releasing Demon Souls, the first of several games that defined the “Souls-like” subgenre. These games are known for precise and challenging combat, elaborately laid out levels and finely-tuned boss fights. While it may be easy to look at Dark Souls and Demon Souls side by side and see the lineage, when it came to making the jump to the PS4 From decided to change things up stylistically with Bloodborne. What makes this transition most interesting is their ability to keep the core of the game the same while creating an experience that feels wholly unique.
Even though the setting has been transplanted from dark fantasy castles to Gothic horror streets, you can still see some through lines in the way the worlds are built. The levels are still impeccably laid out, featuring nooks and crannies that need to be explored to be able to find items and weapons that will be useful on your journey.
These items and weapons are still the way the main story is doled out throughout the game, giving you a double incentive to explore the twisty streets. Bloodborne also continues the tradition of building in several shortcuts that reward you for your progress, creating satisfying moments where you discover how different areas loop back on themselves to connect. One particularly inspiring example of this comes when you find an area in a midgame area that loops all the way back to the very beginning of the game.
While exploration may feel similar, Bloodborne immediately sets itself apart from Dark Souls through its combat. It still emphasizes precision and timing in its execution, but the pace of it is completely different. There’s a much talked about moment early in the game where you find a corpse with a wooden shield, and the description of the shield includes “Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity.”
This communicates the ethos of Bloodborne‘s combat perfectly: passivity will get you killed. You can no longer hide behind a shield to wait for the right moment to strike, but rather need to be actively dodging attacks while moving in for the perfectly timed kill. The game includes a health regeneration mechanic that heals you if you hit the enemy within a certain window, encouraging aggression by rewarding you for not backing off in a fight.
One controversial change in the transition from Dark Souls to Bloodborne was the lack of “character builds.” in the latter. Despite having some magic that is introduced in the back half of the game, Bloodborne doesn’t really have much in the way of a viable range build; even the guns don’t deal significant damage. Rather than explicit character classes, the game instead has you pick from an incredibly diverse set of ‘trick weapons’ that all feel meaningfully different. These trick weapons each of an alternate mode, allowing you to perform devastating combos while mixing it up in combat.
It’s interesting to look at Bloodborne as a midway point between Dark Souls and Sekiro, which did not have a wide variety of character options, despite featuring several other Souls-like mechanics. They took the wider build variety of Dark Souls and filed it down a bit, giving Bloodborne players a fewer number of weapons that had a greater amount of depth to them. In the move to Sekiro, FromSoftware narrowed it down more by essentially creating the character build for the player, then gave them some upgrade options to fine-tune it while still forcing the player to play how the developers intended.
Themes of cycles and renewal permeate Dark Souls and Bloodborne games, which is appropriate given the way the series has been evolving. Each game they take lessons they’ve learned and iterate on them, keeping familiar concepts and making them feel fresh again. Fans of Dark Souls could jump into Bloodborne and simultaneously feel comfortable with the similarities and challenged by the differences. While they have been narrowing their focus recently with Sekiro, it will be interesting to see what lessons they take into the forthcoming and highly anticipated Elden Ring.
