I never played Souls games before, but I heard from a few friends that Bloodborne is a new Dark Souls clone. Personally, I tend not to label new games as clones since every game is different, but the fact that it might have something worth cloning was encouraging. Dark Stone was often described as a Diablo clone, but I truly believe that is much better than Diablo despite having a lot of good things in common.

That said, I don’t know if Bloodborne is worth your time or if it’s better to play something more original. What I can say for sure is that Bloodborne is fucking amazing. It has this tough love appeal: it’s absolutely merciless to the player, and it’s terrible at explaining how to play this damn game, but it makes it even more interesting somehow.

Bloodborne aesthetic is extremely dark and gothic. Religion and church are the common themes which is rather unexpected from a Japanese studio. What I like about video games is the fact that they keep innovating. I get that this game is just a part of the Souls genre but this genre by itself is pretty new. I can’t name any new and interesting literary genres since cyberpunk, for example, and cyberpunk was invented many decades ago. Video games tend to have stories, but they give their authors many other tools to experiment with, leading to a crazy amount of wild combinations which are sufficiently different from each other.

I don’t want to spoil the story, but you have to fight a lot, level up in an unusual way, and you should be ready to die countless times. All of that wrapped in bizarre gothic world, what’s not to like about it?