Bloodborne: The Aggression Cure

There’s a problem buried in Dark Souls that its fans learned to stop noticing. The optimal way to play it is to walk everywhere behind a raised shield with a hundred per cent physical block, poke once, and raise the shield again. It works. It works on most bosses. It is also, minute for minute, the dullest way a person can spend forty hours, and the game’s own design keeps trying to make it uninteresting without ever quite removing the option.

Bloodborne, which FromSoftware shipped for PS4 in March 2015 with Hidetaka Miyazaki directing and Sony’s Japan Studio co-developing, removes the option. There is technically a wooden shield in the game, and its item description warns that shields breed passivity. That’s the whole thesis printed on a joke item. What makes Bloodborne the best combat system From has built is that it doesn’t stop at taking the shield away — it pays you, in the currency you care most about, for doing the thing you’re frightened to do.

Rally: the health bar as a bet

Take a hit in Bloodborne and the lost chunk of your health bar doesn’t vanish. It goes orange, and for a window of a couple of seconds you can win it back by landing damage. Hit the thing that hit you and the orange fills in. Back off, and it drains.

That single rule rewires the whole encounter grammar. In Demon’s Souls, taking a hit was a pure loss you paid for with grass. In Bloodborne, taking a hit is the opening bid in a trade. Your reflex — retreat, breathe, heal — is now the expensive choice, because retreating is what forfeits the refund. The frightened option costs you money.

Recoverable damage was already old news elsewhere. Street Fighter IV’s focus attack, in 2008, let you absorb a hit and earn the health back if you cashed in the follow-up. Fighting games have been running variations on white health for years. What From did was take a mechanic designed to make a two-minute round more aggressive and drop it into a forty-hour RPG, where its effect compounds: every trash mob in Yharnam is now teaching you the same lesson, over and over, for the entire runtime. By the time you reach a boss you have been trained, at a level below argument, to step in.

This is why the blood vial economy stings so badly. Bloodborne heals you with consumable vials that stack to twenty, drop from enemies, and can be bought — which is Demon’s Souls’ grass problem returning after Dark Souls had already solved it with the Estus flask. Run dry on a hard boss and the game sends you back to farm village mobs for ten minutes, which is the single worst thing in it and the one place where the design contradicts its own argument. A game about pressing forward should never make you go backwards for supplies. The 2015 patches trimmed the load times around it; they couldn’t fix the loop.

The gun is a parry, and that changes what a fight is

The other half of the cure is the firearm. You have a pistol or a blunderbuss in your off hand and roughly twenty quicksilver bullets. The gun does derisory damage. What it does is stagger: shoot an enemy in the correct frames of its wind-up and it reels, and you walk in and rip its spine out with a visceral attack.

Dark Souls’ shield parry does something similar, and it is a fundamentally defensive act — you’re holding a wall and waiting for the wall to be hit. Bloodborne’s gun parry is a ranged interrupt with a limited magazine, which means it is a resource you spend to attack a wind-up. You have to read the animation, commit a bullet, and be wrong sometimes. It turns the defensive skill into an offensive one while keeping the timing window that made it satisfying, and it does it without a single line of tutorial.

Add the quickstep — the roll replaced with a short, fast lateral hop that stays inside the enemy’s reach — and the geometry of a fight changes completely. Dark Souls asks you to roll through an attack and get out. Bloodborne asks you to stay in the blender and move around inside it.

Trick weapons and the two-in-one problem

Every weapon in Bloodborne has two forms and transforms with a button. The Saw Cleaver folds out into a longer, slower blade. The Hunter Axe becomes a polearm with a spinning charge attack that is still one of the best moves From has animated. The Threaded Cane turns into a whip that hits everything in an arc. Ludwig’s Holy Blade hides a greatsword inside a silver sword.

The design trick is that the transform is itself an attack. Mid-combo, the transformation button fires a transform attack — so switching forms costs no tempo, and the weapon becomes a two-state machine you’re expected to oscillate through rather than a mode you set at the start. It’s an elegant answer to a real RPG problem: a weapon list is usually a menu you commit to before the fight, and Bloodborne makes weapon choice something you do during it, twelve times a minute.

The cost is arithmetic. Two forms per weapon means half as many weapons, and Bloodborne’s armoury is genuinely thin next to Dark Souls’ — around two dozen trick weapons across the base game and The Old Hunters, against Dark Souls’ hundreds. That’s the trade, and it’s the right one: two dozen weapons that all feel different beats two hundred that are stat blocks with a model attached.

What it fumbles

The Chalice Dungeons are the honest failure. They’re procedurally assembled ritual dungeons, gated behind materials, built out of a small kit of stone rooms, and they exist to give the game a bottomless endgame. What they actually give it is a beige corridor generator bolted to a game whose greatest strength is hand-made place. The Defiled chalice halving your health is a difficulty stunt rather than a design idea. Skipping them costs you almost nothing except a couple of bosses.

The 30fps cap is a real constraint on a combat system this fast, and the frame pacing at launch made it worse. Play it now on PS5 hardware and the loading is bearable; the framerate is what it is, and the game was built around it.

The real ancestor

The lineage everyone reaches for is Gothic horror — Yharnam as Victorian London, the Healing Church, the slide from werewolves into Lovecraft. That’s the skin. The systems ancestor is the arcade, and specifically the idea that a defensive option should always be worse than a good offensive one. Bloodborne is From’s most arcade-shaped game: short combat vocabulary, high execution ceiling, a scoring system disguised as a health bar.

Follow the line forward and you get Sekiro, which takes Bloodborne’s argument to its end point — a game with no dodge worth using, where the posture bar makes pressing forward the only strategy that exists. Bloodborne is the hinge. Everything in the soulslike genre that gets called “aggressive” is quoting it, usually without the rally system that made the aggression pay.

It’s a PS4 exclusive and Sony has never moved it. That’s the where-to-play answer and it’s an annoying one: you need Sony hardware, and the game is still, eight years on, the sharpest thing on it.

Spoilers below

The Insight stat is the joke that took me two playthroughs to hear.

Insight is a currency you spend on co-op and items. It’s also a counter of how much you’ve seen — bosses, Great Ones, the Amygdalae hanging off the cathedral roofs that are physically present from the start and invisible until your Insight passes about forty. The game has been showing you an accurate world all along and gating your ability to perceive it behind a number you raise by looking at horrors. Frenzy, meanwhile, hurts you more the higher your Insight goes. Understanding is a debuff.

Then Rom dies and the sky opens, and it turns out Yharnam’s beast plague — the thing the entire first half frames as the crisis — is a symptom. The real event is a failed pregnancy: Mergo, the Wet Nurse, the Moon Presence’s stake in it. Micolash’s cage-headed choir have been trying to reach the Great Ones through spinal fluid and are, in the game’s flat comic register, mostly just annoying.

And Gehrman. The Hunter’s Dream has been the safe room — the workbench, the doll, the level-up screen, the one place in Yharnam where nothing wants you dead. It’s a leash. Gehrman offers to free you with a blade across the neck and he means it kindly; refusing him means fighting the best duel in the game against a man who has been sitting in that garden for a very long time, followed immediately by the Moon Presence claiming you as the next host. Eat three umbilical cords first and you get the third ending, where you’re an infant Great One in the grass and Gehrman’s chair is finally empty.

The rally system is the ending in miniature. Everything Bloodborne gives you back, you have to be bleeding to earn.