Thoughts on Bloodborne PSX

This post is part of Agora Road's September 2024 Travelogue.

I never played any FromSoft game in my life. Well, I technically played Dark Souls III. I say technically because the game crashed during the tutorial for me. I later installed a mod to move the camera freely as to observe the architecture of Irithyll of the Boreal Valley (using a 100% save I found on the internet). That's not really what I'd consider "playing a Dark Souls game" though.

Yesterday, I remembered that Bloodborne PSX is a thing - a game my computer could probably run. Although this is a fan-make demake, I decided that it's probably the closest thing I will have to experience a Soulsborne game, so I gave it a shot.

For starters, I will state the obvious. The art in the game is gorgeous. As I never played a PlayStation 1 game in my life, the game instead reminded me of 3D games on the Nintendo DS, specifically the LEGO ones. The game has a very good CRT filter. I never used a CRT (or was too young to remember), but for a brief instant I thought I was in the early 2000s.

Most of my playthrough was spent configuring my weird Logitech gamepad properly. That was not a fun time. The game is based on the PlayStation controller, which I never used in my life. I was trying to make the game control like a 3D Zelda game. I succeeded for the most part, but there was something I could not fix. The game pretty much has two different "confirm/action" button. I.e to talk to an NPC, you need to press "A" but to end the dialogue you need to press "Start". This was so weird.

Anyway, now unto the actual game. I started in some kind of clinic and got killed by a monster. This seems to be some kind of scripted death as I wake up in a place called "Hunter's Dream". I got a weapon here. Getting out of that place took me a while to figure out. Turns out you need to talk to an NPCs.

I was now back in the clinic, I killed the monster that previously killed me. I eventually stumbled upon a locked door. Finding the key took me more time than I would like to admit, but that was just me looking at things too fast and missed the upper section.

Opening the door was the real challenge. I noticed that the door did not open despite me getting the key. I opened my inventory, but could not use the key from here. After a solid 20 minutes, I gave up and closed the game.

As I was preparing to put my controller away, I decided to give the game another try. This time I looked up the solution using a longplay on YouTube.Turns out you need to access a special menu and equip the key. What. This a very dumb design decision.

Now that I could open the door, I finally reached the big city. All the monster I encountered died in like 3 hits. I suppose the game actually get though later on. To my immense disapointement, the city is pretty much only consisted of locked doors. I tried to find a key or a place to go, but I just wandered endlessly for 20 minutes. This was not fun. I just stopped playing.

I dislike games that don't respect your time like this. I wanted to experience though battles, but all I found were locked doors. Very disapointing. I skimmed through a longplay of the actual Bloodborne game which just left me wondering how people tolerate this sort of time wasting.

Written by manpaint on 16 September 2024