Review

How do you follow up Bloodborne? Apparently, you don’t

The River of Blood, the Beast Cutter, the Surgery Altar, the Astral Clocktower, the Blood of Adeline, the Nightmare Church, the Underground Corpse Pile, the Holy Moonlight Sword, the Beasthunter Saif: the settings and armaments that furnish The Old Hunters will certainly sound familiar to veterans of Bloodborne. So too will its macabre menagerie: the Bloodlickers and the Parasites, the Winter Lanterns and the Nightmare Executioners. One can well imagine a brainstorming session at From Software, the developers trying to think gloomily as they thumb a dog-eared thesaurus. The Despairing Cutlass? The Infirmary of Sorrow? You half-expect to wander into…

News

New Bloodborne trailer shows horror is better with friends

I’ve always thought Bloodborne is what might happen if the raw brutality of Dario Argento merged with the insane hellscapes that must populate the mind of Clive Barker. The new trailer takes us to some spaces generally familiar to horror buffs, but does so beautifully. It even lets me do the thing I love the most about horror: share it with a friend. The new trailer shows off not just one but two cloaked slayers of the accursed. Ignoring how awesome it would be to literally hack and slash one’s way through large, fleshy, blood-splattering foes, consider the state of…

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Bloodborne is dragging Demon’s Souls forward by pulling from its past

Dark Souls II definitely earned the numeral in its title, whatever you thought of the game proper. It reworked and remixed Dark Souls but there was little in it that felt unfamiliar to series veterans. But the mastermind of misery himself Hidetaka Miyazaki, absent from Souls II, has returned with Bloodborne – a game leaked a few weeks ago as Project Beast. In the tradition of Miyazaki’s Demon’s and Dark Souls, Bloodborne is a spiritual successor. The games all share DNA, but as is perhaps evidenced by Bloodborne‘s title, Miyazaki is not holding himself to those conventions. He has mentioned Demon’s Souls‘ Tower of…