// PC GAMER — GAMING
After mainlining 30 hours of 1440p Bloodborne, I know in my heart it belongs on PC
You can force it, but it shouldn't be so unapproachable.
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I played Demon's Souls at launch in 2009 and bounced off hard (many such cases). I finally fell in love with Dark Souls in 2014, running it back over and over again on my giant laptop in college with dsfix on the awful Games for Windows Live version. Elden Ring was the first major game launch I covered professionally. But Bloodborne is still my favorite of all these games.
I decided to finally take fate into my own hands. Bloodborne is one of my favorite games of all time, and it is the only one I have spent a significant amount of time playing on the Sony PlayStation 4. I resent that. I hate that horrible little box under my TV with a passion. I think it's only good for watching Gilmore Girls—I don't like playing videogames on it. I am a PC man through and through.
Enter the shadPS4 emulator and BB Launcher, two wonderful tools for running this wonderful game on PC. I followed YouTuber Retro Renew's guide to emulating Bloodborne, and we were off to the races.
Sekiro, Elden Ring, and Armored Core 6 are all-timer games for me. Crucially, they've demonstrated continued growth and a willingness to experiment on the part of FromSoftware. I don't think the studio "peaked" with Bloodborne by any means, or that its best days are behind it, but there is nothing else out there like it.
The atmosphere and aesthetics of Yharnam are still so striking and odd, like if Nosferatu (pick your version) and Lovecraft were chopped and screwed into black metal album art. It applies the surreal, mythic sensibility of FromSoftware to the modern world, resulting in the most dreamlike, alienating narrative the studio has yet created.
The Healing Church and Byrgenwerth are simultaneously ancient and right there. Master Willem, the primeval progenitor of Cthulhu Studies in this world, is still chilling in a rocking chair on his front porch. Byrgenwerth, a distinctly modern-feeling Cthulhu University, predates the Healing Church. There's this feeling Yharnam regressed from science and study into religious dogmatism, clad in modernity and enlightenment the entire time. But the scientists who created this sickened modernity are hardly blameless, no matter their intentions. Does this remind you of anything?
One reading I had never heard before tuning into the recent Chapo Trap House Players Club episode about Bloodborne is that it's a game about motherhood and mothers, and men ruining the world by doing terrible things to them. It seems so obvious to me now. Kos and her orphan, Queen Yharnam and her child Mergo: The crimes committed against these mothers are the inciting events of the story. You can do the same to Ariana and her child, in the hopes of becoming a god.
God the combat. I fought Ludwig the Accursed earlier than I ever have this playthrough, and it taxed me like little else I've played recently—I felt weirdly shaken afterward. While this is the smallest arsenal of the post-Demon's Souls FromSoft catalogue, every weapon is fully distinct from one another—with the exception of one baffling, fighting game-style moveset clone. Nobody playing Elden Ring would go to the mat for the Highland Axe or Torchpole, but every weapon in Bloodborne has at least one freak out there who will say it's their favorite—I'm a Chikage/Saw Cleaver man, myself.