INTERVIEW – Rogue Star

Rogue Star is a shamelessly retro mobile game brought to us by Redbreast Studios, a tiny development company with significant experience in the field. It aims to evoke games like Elite, first-person spaceship piloting and dogfighting. I interviewed Redbreast’s creative director, James Duncan, about the game and the state of mobile indie gaming.

PH: Who are Redbreast?

JD: I’ve roped in several friends within the industry to help out over the years but RedBreast is essentially myself and programmer Martin Bell. I started Rogue Star nearly 5 years ago and Martin came on board around the 2 and half year mark. We work from our respective homes remotely. Occasionally meeting up to discuss and plan etc. We’ve both worked in the industry for a number of years, helping create games as varied as DieHard Trilogy, Dungeon Keeper and the Fable series.

PH: What do you think the state of the industry is for indie developers like Redbreast?

JD: Incredibly tough. However I do think there’s a distinction to be made now, between a ‘studio’ of two people like RedBreast, and others who also use the indie moniker. For that reason, I sometimes refer to us with the old term ‘bedroom developers’.

In the main however, the industry is tough because the expectation level of an indie title has moved considerably. Gamers’ expectations, the medias’, the market’s, they’ve all exploded exponentially – understandably so in many cases. This makes it an incredibly difficult challenge to even consider embarking upon.

PH: When Redbreast isn’t making games, what games are they playing?

JD: Sadly I don’t get as much time as I’d like to play other games! But when I do it’s usually on the 3DS. I love portable games (naturally!) and Nintendo are the masters at them. Ironically enough however, the games I’m most enjoying at the moment are Sega’s 3D Classics range. I used to stare through my arcades window at Afterburner, utterly transfixed. Playing it in the palm of your hand, in 3D, is a delight. Oh and not having to pay £1 a pop helps too!

PH: What can you tell us about the world (well, galaxy) of Rogue Star? How would “elevator pitch” the setting?

JD: ‘Challenging and risky close-up dogfighting ‘n’ trading amongst the stars!’

In more detail, Rogue Star places the player in a fragile space ship and asks them to master its controls to earn credits, ships, missions and notoriety. This is wrapped up in a unique, colourful and engaging world full of aliens, auctions, quirky stories and explosions. Lots of explosions.

PH: Who is Rogue Star “for”? Who were you imagining as your player as you made it?

JD: Me! I think for a first title that was a really important decision. I knew it would be a long slog so I needed to ensure that my passion would carry me through to the end. It’s unfortunately become an overused word, but passion is what ultimately shines through in any creative endeavour. You can see it there splashed across the screen. I hope this is true with Rogue.

That’s not to say that other players’ desires weren’t considered, far from it. Every gameplay decision was seen through the players’ eyes. However, as soon as you start to second-guess the market’s needs too much, you invariably lose sight of what you’d originally intended. And down that path leads a whole mess of confusion and compromise.

PH: Why did you go mobile for Rogue Star? Elite-style space-pilot games are more commonly associated with the PC.

JD: There are a number of reasons.

• A clear gap in the market for the genre.
• The App Store has exposed a huge potential market for developers.
• Ease of development and deployment.
• Touchscreen tech and constraints provided a challenge which appealed.
• Mobile market suited the ‘pick-up and play’ design philosophy of Rogue Star.
• Properly designed mobile games upscale easily. Not the other way around.
• Unity3D development platform allows flexible porting process.

PH: A lot of the user feedback has talked about the difficulty of Rogue Star’s combat. Do you worry the game might come across as inaccessible?Absolutely. The game was designed to be a challenge, but never unfair. I come from a generation who grew up with those types of games. If you failed, yet you knew it was your fault, you dusted yourself off and tried again. The challenge to succeed is infectious.

What appears to be the case currently is that players are encountering a difficulty spike at the games beginning. After/if they push past this, usually by upgrading to a new ship, they find the difficulty level far more appropriate and engaging.

There’s a number of reasons for the spike; loss of (developer) perspective, funding for more playtesting, time etc. But ultimately if Rogue hasn’t met the players’ difficulty requirement, then I accept full responsibility for it.

We’re currently implementing an update which will offer a gentler introduction based on feedback. This, along with an Easy/Hard setting, should address players’ difficulty criticisms and allow them to experience and enjoy Rogue as it was intended.

PH: Rogue Star is proudly billed as not free-to-play and having no in-app purchases, which is a minority strategy in mobile games. Why did you adopt that strategy?

JD: It probably won’t come as much surprise to learn that I don’t like F2P (free to play) nor IAPs (in-app purchases). In their most aggressive forms they damage a hobby and pastime which I love dearly. Therefore I set out to initially provide players with a full gameplay experience offered for a competitive price. Given my background, it’s a business model I understand and offers a solid jumping off point for a new start-up.

The freemium market is extremely competitive and aggressive. It is terrifying to see the strategies developers need to employ, if they’re to stand a chance of success. And that is just for huge companies with suitably large budgets. However the bottom line sadly is that, if you can get your details right, freemium does work and a lot of players are prepared to buy into it.

Therefore, it’s a risk to go premium but one which I felt was necessary given our resources. As we move forward we’ll monitor the situation and act accordingly. However for now, I’m hoping players will buy into my vision and support Rogue Star and other games like it. Hopefully with a fair wind, the premium mobile segment can grow into a sustainable model.

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Rogue Star is available on the App Store.

Falling Silent: The State of Silent Hill

It was recently confirmed that hotly anticipated survival horror game Silent Hills has been cancelled by Konami. The news has been the source of great disappointment from horror fans as some major talent was attached to the project: Hideo Kojima, designer of the Metal Gear Solid series; Guillermo Del Toro, visionary horror director; Norman Reedus, breakout star of The Walking Dead TV show. A pants-browning demo, P.T. (Playable Teaser), did the rounds in 2014 and prompted a lot of anticipation about the finished game.

With this latest offering being torpedoed, things don’t look good for horror in mainstream gaming. The Silent Hill series was one of the big dogs of the genre and its main rival to the title, Resident Evil, jumped over from horror to “action against gruesome enemies” years ago. With games development becoming a longer, more resource-intensive and more expensive process, it’s a simple matter of sales figures: horror doesn’t sell but action does. At least that’s the conventional wisdom for mass-market, triple-A console and PC games. The indie scene shows strong appetite for horror, with smaller games like the Five Nights at Freddy’s series or Amnesia: The Dark Descent fostering dedicated cult followings.

So, while horror is not dead it certainly seems to be losing its way in the mainstream industry. Let’s take a look back at the Silent Hill franchise to see what made them the behemoth they were and where things began to decline. These overviews of the main games of the series will be very general; if you’d like a more detailed breakdown of everything, including all the spin-offs, by people who have Silent Hill basically written across their front lobes, I highly recommend the Youtube series “The Real Silent Hill Experience” by TwinPerfect.

Silent Hill (1999)

Debuting on the Playstation 1, the first game in the series put players in the polygonal shoes of Harry Mason, a single father. When driving with his daughter Cheryl, Harry swerves to avoid a girl in the road and crashes. He’s knocked out briefly and when he wakes Cheryl is gone. Walking to the nearby lakeside resort town of Silent Hill, Harry finds it plunged into a dark, occult nightmare that he must survive to save his daughter.

The game was designed by Team Silent, a small but dedicated development group within Konami Tokyo. Artist Takayoshi Sato reportedly lived in the development office and would spend his nights rendering 3D models and environments while the others were going home to sleep. Much of the game was spent with the player surrounded by cloying, suffocating darkness; this was initially used to get around the PS1’s limited draw distance while still allowing them to create large 3D environments.

The game’s horror worked heavily on atmosphere and pacing; the contrast of mundane environments and extreme, grotesque monster designs became a staple of series. Limited visibility and tense audio scoring meant you might spend long periods of time hearing monsters but never seeing them. Like most survival horror games, combat was often better to avoid, with limited ammo.

Silent Hill 2 (2001)

The sequel did not directly follow the cult-heavy plot of the first game and instead focuses more on Silent Hill as a location and the mental states of the people within it. James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife Mary inviting him to Silent Hill, where they spent a romantic vacation several years ago. The only thing is that Mary died of a wasting illness three years ago. Exploring the town which has been plunged into a deep fog, James encounters a new batch of monsters but even more dangerous are the other people trapped in the fog with him..

Silent Hill 2 is often cited as the pinnacle of survival horror, one of the best video games ever and one of the best game stories ever written. It’s been highly influential for its use of metaphor, its story tropes and narrative structure. Spoiler warning: if you’ve played a game in the last 20 years that was built around a story of “someone important died, probably because you killed them, and you just forgot”, it’s probably ripping off Silent Hill 2. Double-spoiler warning: the later (non-Japanese) Silent Hill games do exactly that. It ends up with Silent Hill being less a ghost town and more a magical therapy adventure park.

While Silent Hill 1 used overt darkness and supernatural evil, up to and including literal demons, as a source of horror, Silent Hill 2 is much more about banal, mundane horrors in the everyday world. Themes of sexual violence, mental illness, self-loathing and suicide are key to the game’s story and even its monster designs. The “mascot” of Silent Hill 2, Pyramid Head (or The Red Pyramid Thing), originated in Silent Hill 2 as an expression of James’ guilty burdens, his self-destructive desires and his repressed sexuality; James literally cannot defeat Pyramid Head until he comes to terms with these issues and overcomes his amnesia.

Silent Hill 3 (2003)

The second high of the series, Silent Hill 3 carries on the occult plot from the original title after a significant time-skip; players take up the role of Heather Mason, Harry’s now-teenaged daughter. Plagued by horrendous visions and hunted by the cult her father grappled with, Heather returns to the town to face up to her true nature and confront some part of the evil behind the town’s manifestations.

Silent Hill 3 was praised for being a strong continuation of the original plot and the mechanics of the previous game, as well as a doom-heavy atmosphere and great character models. The graphics, audio and production values were better than ever though a few critics pointed out it wasn’t really doing anything new with the base formula.

Silent Hill 3 wrapped up the main elements of the series storyline and mythology; the nameless cult that secretly ran the town had been gutted, its main operatives slain and even their half-born God slain. Many Silent Hill fans consider this the beginning of the series’ slow decline, especially since the atrocious second movie draws on the plot of the third game.

Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

The last game developed by Team Silent, work on Silent Hill 4 began shortly after Silent Hill 2 was released; it was initially developed under the title Room 302 and incorporated into the Silent Hill series later. The game is about Henry Townshend, who lives in the next town over from Silent Hill; he wakes up to find his apartment sealed, preventing him from escape, and it becomes increasingly haunted. A hole in his apartment wall leads to a strange supernatural world populated by the victims of a serial killer, whose vengeful spirit stalks Henry.

The game was met with some mediocre response; while there were some disturbing scenarios, the level design was uninspired and required lots of backtracking. The story leaned too much on small, insignificant parts of previously-established lore and generally felt a bit like reading fan-fiction.

Silent Hill 4 was the last of the Japanese-developed games in the series. After that point, Team Silent was split up and either placed on other projects within Konami or went independent. From there, development was passed to Climax Studios – developed initially in the US and then work was transferred to the UK.

Silent Hill Origins (2007)

A prequel to the series and developed for the Playstation Portable system, the fifth installment in the series returns to the core cult elements of the series. A trucker named Travis Grady sees a house burning and runs inside to aid the residents. Inside he finds a psychic girl named Alessa who has been burned horribly. After he saves her, he loses consciousness and when he awakes Alessa is gone. He ventures into Silent Hill to find the missing girl, only to find the town succumbing to a nightmare.

Responses to the game were mixed. Some people liked the story, others didn’t. The gameplay was rated as average to slightly above; the ability to use a wide array of everyday objects as weapons was generally praised but the weapon degradation and quick-time events were criticized. Some monsters were seen as being too much like Silent Hill 2’s, including an enemy that’s clearly supposed to be another Pyramid Head.

The game also began the trend of ripping off Silent Hill 2’s amnesia twist; Travis had apparently forgotten his father’s suicide and mother’s attempt to murder him and it required a trip to the psychiatric therapy town to help him come to terms with his repressed childhood memories. TwinPerfect accused the game’s story, which was supposed to answer questions left by the first game, of just adding more confusion to the mix and that the so-called questions were answered in the first game anyway.

Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)

Often considered the low point of the series, Homecoming was developed by Double Helix games. When soldier Alex Shepherd returns home to the Silent Hill-adjacent town of Shepherd’s Glen, he finds it swallowed by fog and the people going missing. Also, monsters. (Obviously.) In searching for his missing brother Joshua, Alex delves into the secret history of his town and it’s connection to Silent Hill.

The game was generally criticized for uninspired enemy design, bad levels and obvious story. In places, it overtly ripped off the horror movies Saw and Hostel. It even features Pyramid Head, which makes no sense in the game series’ lore. In some versions there were awful technical problems and glitches. During the marketing for the game put focus on a more developed combat and enemy-wound system, reasoning that a soldier would be better at fighting than most survival horror protagonists – which led to some fan criticism that the survival horror genre wasn’t supposed to have “fun” combat.

And we return to the amnesia rip-off train; Alex’s brother Josh, who he spends the whole game searching for, has been dead all along. Alex killed him accidentally while vying for their father’s affection and in doing so doomed the town, as Alex’s father was supposed to sacrifice him and not Josh to the cult’s god. Alex went to a mental hospital and became deluded that he was a soldier, like he believed his father wanted him to be. Meaning the combat system had no justification – Alex wasn’t a soldier, so why was he good at fighting?

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2010)

One of the few Silent Hill games on a Nintendo platform, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is neither sequel nor prequel but a “re-imagining” of the first game. The game alternates between two modes, the first being a psychiatric patient answering a series of psychological tests and the second being Harry Mason exploring the town of Silent Hill to find his missing daughter.

The game was decently received. The graphics were considered some of the best on the Wii – not that the Wii was a graphically powerful system – and the total absence of combat – instead Harry must flee from enemies in chase sequences – was a welcome departure from the previous games relying quite heavily on melee. The story, which returns to Silent Hill 2’s focus on psychological horror, was fairly well received.

As the name suggests, someone forgot about an important death. In a semi-decent variation on the twist, it is revealed that Harry is the one who died. The psychiatric patient is actually Cheryl, Harry’s daughter, in therapy to cope with the trauma of losing her father. Harry himself is something like a hallucination, a symptom of her delusion. All the monsters he was being chased by seem to also have been creations of Cheryl’s mind. All in all, of the modern Silent Hills this was probably the best.

Silent Hill: Downpour (2012)

The last game in the Silent Hill franchise, Downpour’s development moved to Czechoslovakia. Players take on the role of Murphy Pendleton, a prisoner on a bus taking him to a new jail which crashes on the outskirts of Silent Hill. On the run from a police officer who also survived the crash, Murphy heads into the haunted town in the middle of a rainstorm to try and find his freedom.

Downpour has probably been one of the most divisive Silent Hill titles to date. Some felt the atmosphere and story were intriguing and engaging while others thought it was bland and formulaic. Some critics praised the large areas and exploration focus while others felt there was not enough of note to “do” in the area. The way it used multiple endings was seen as messy and causing the characters to be so inconsistent as to be unrelateable.

Downpour’s multiple endings make it unclear whether or not it rips off Silent Hill 2, but in some places it does with a lot of the endings being “it’s all in (someone’s) head”. Murphy may (or may not) have murdered his son, may (or may not) have crippled a kindly and honest prison guard while he was in jail and may (or may not) have murdered a pedophile (who killed Murphy’s son if he didn’t) in the prison showers and didn’t know it until confronted with it. This confusion detracts Downpour’s story, as it makes it unclear whether or not certain characters are meant to be sympathetic or not, and also makes character motivations extremely unclear. Is Murphy a serial murderer or wrongly accused? Is he seeking to escape justice or clear his name?

And we come to the end. Downpour was the last “proper” Silent Hill to date. P.T, the playable teaser, promised something interesting and unexpectedly deep from Silent Hills, but unfortunately this is apparently not going to happen. As it stands, the series ends up almost symmetrical, nearly half bad and half good. Future entries might tip the scales entirely but perhaps it is for the best that the series ends. As Lovecraft and King teach us, fear comes from the unknown and franchises create familiarity. Horror dwindles as a series lengthens because recognizable patterns and rules form.

This is especially true in Silent Hill, a game so strongly rooted in one place. Each game maps out Silent Hill and fleshes out the history of the location a little more; that’s why Homecoming and The Room both felt the need to introduce new areas with new histories to explore. By removing oneself entirely from the Toluca Lake region, setting up a new town and new mythology,

And let’s not even get into the HD Remake..

F’Yharnam: Lovecraft in Bloodborne

Something that made me really excited about Bloodborne came a few hours in to play. I’d gotten used to the Hammer Horror aesthetics of the werewolves, the angry villagers with torches and pitchforks. Strange as it may be to say, I saw a statue. And I freaked out because that statue was… Cthulhu? No, not quite. But very similar, something like a Virgin Mary figure with a face that was vaguely melted into an almost octopus configuration.

Then things got even more explicit and I got even more excited because far from merely making a few visual references, Bloodborne went on to draw heavily on the works and ideals of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. (Obvious spoiler warning here for people who haven’t gotten very far in Bloodborne; this is mostly about the latter half of the game)

Who’s H.P. Lovecraft?

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer of “weird fiction” – a term which at the time somewhat encompassed but predated all of what we’d consider the now-distinct genres of horror, fantasy and science fiction. In his life, Lovecraft was a virtually unknown pulp writer but has now become known as one of the most influential figures in the history of horror. His writings were extremely personal, channeling his anxieties, fears and nightmares into a new form that he could share with all of us. Thanks, Howard!

Key themes in the writings of Lovecraft’s writings are degradation (moral, physical, mental), the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the ultimate insignificance of human endeavor in the face of a vast, uncaring cosmos. This last point is absolutely central to understanding it; Lovecraft’s cosmology does not place value on human ideas of good or evil, nor do his deities even much care about being worshiped. They are immense beyond our comprehension, operate on parameters we literally do not have the neurology to comprehend without aneurysm and to describe them as “evil” is inappropriate simply because that would imply too much humanity to their mental processes.

If you haven’t read any of Lovecraft’s writings, it’s worth checking out the following: The Call of Cthulhu (arguably his most famous, an investigation into a strange sea-stone idol), The Shadow Over Innsmouth (concerning the dark secrets behind a small seaside town), The Color Out Of Space (incredibly bleak, about the fate befalling a farming community after a meteorite lands nearby) and At The Mountains of Madness (about an academic exploration of the Antarctic). Cheery stuff, so how does Bloodborne work in Lovecraftian ideals or themes?

Insight: Going Mad From The Revelation

Everything that  draws on Lovecraft at some point has to work in the theme of madness; games like Amnesia or Eternal Darkness have “sanity meters” or other mechanics that somehow represent the mental health of your character. Usually, it works like a health bar counting down from full (sane) to empty (insane) with usually the same consequences; for instance, Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy game-overs when you run out of mental health as your character commits suicide. In pen-and-paper Call of Cthulhu, you go so insane as to no longer be playable and are relegated to NPC status. Being exposed to the horror, often looking directly at the impossible creatures or reading eldritch tomes, is damaging to sanity. In the pen-and-paper Call of Cthulhu, Sanity is derived from willpower and is directly opposed to Cthulhu Mythos, a knowledge skill connected to understanding the awful truths of the cosmos; the higher your Cthulhu Mythos, the lower your maximum Sanity can be.

Bloodborne’s representation of this goes in the opposite direction with Insight; rather than “counting down” like most Sanity mechanics, this is a positive value that counts up over the course of the game. The in-game description of the Insight stat reads “The Insight stat represents the depth of inhuman knowledge. Needed to ring special bell, but induces frenzy.” Insight is gained the first time you see bosses, entering new areas and on being subjected to certain attacks and revelations, such as being snatched up by the monstrous Amygdala’s unseen hands. Having higher Insight allows you to see invisible monsters, unlocks certain features of The Hunter’s Dream and changes other environmental features; you are closer to the awful Truth and see more of the world like it really is.

Mechanically, Insight changes two stats; it decreases your Beasthood value and your resistance to Frenzy. Having a high Beasthood increases your physical damage both received and given; it represents giving into mindless violence and bloodlust; as your Insight Sqincreases you become more intelligent and aware of yourself, thus further from the beast. Frenzy is a dangerous status bar that, when filled, causes massive damage to your character; the higher your Insight, the faster Frenzy bars fill up. Things that cause Frenzy are commonly Lovecraft-like horrors; the deformed nightmare-creatures such as the Mi-Go Zombies (I’ll get to that name later) or Brain Trusts; the more knowledgeable you are, the more susceptible you are to succumbing to insanity or psychic assault.

Just like in Lovecraft, as you plumb the depths in search of forbidden knowledge, you become more and more sensitive to its effects. In Call of Cthulhu, it is those most psychically attuned that are most strongly impacted by the titular Call – a telepathic impulse from the sunken behemoth plagues the sleeping minds of every artist, poet and medium in the area. This strongly fits in with the way Insight works, both mechanically and in the lore of Bloodborne.

Polypheman Abominations

Perhaps the most overt ways you’ll see Lovecraft’s influence throughout Bloodborne is in the monster designs and names. While at first you’re fighting rather normal creatures – men with hatchets and torches, werewolves, giant crows – things get stranger and stranger the deeper you go. As you progress beyond the blood-curse and into matters of the cosmos, you begin to encounter things more strange and awful than mere men.

Some creatures are more overt references to Lovecraft, such as the Mi-Go Zombie, a man whose upper torso has swollen out into something multi-eyed and instectile, halfway between a fly and a spider. In Lovecraft’s writings, the Mi-Go were Plutonian aliens that mined on Earth and were capable of extracting human brains and mimicking human speech. Brainsuckers in Bloodborne are men who leech the Insight from you, their physical forms long-limbed and with facial tentacles strongly reminiscent of Cthulhu; they also seem to be references to the Mindflayer or Illithid monsters of Dungeons and Dragons – who are themselves references to Cthulhu.

The Great Ones, Bloodborne’s cosmic deities, seem to be a conflation of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods of Lovecraft’s pantheon; Rom, the Vacuous Spider’s mindless nature seems to be a reference to Azathoth, the nuclear chaos and “blind idiot god”. The Brain of Mensis’ Nightmare strongly resembles a shoggoth, a formless mass of staring eyes and confused mouths. Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos’s many limbs and general shape are evocative of the time-travelling Yithians. The Moon Presence, who moves and fights like the many wolf-like beasts strongly parallels to the god Mormo, referenced in Lovecraft’s story The Horror At Red Hook. See if this sounds appropriate: “O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!” Anyone who’s walked through Yharnam knows how often the barking of dogs is heard, how tombs seem to pervade all parts of the city and, well, the focus on blood is right there in the name! It also works because Gorgo and Mormo seem to portmanteau into Mergo, the surrogate child of the Wet Nurse, one of the final bosses of the game.

There’s a lot more to dig into about where Bloodborne draws on Lovecraftian tropes, but I felt these were the two most important elements to discuss from lore and gameplay perspectives. If you want to know more, leave a comment!

Bloodborne: Questions and Answers

This Bloodborne entry is going to be a little different from before. A friend of mine has never really played the Souls games and has come to Bloodborne quite fresh. He’s been struggling with it and turned to me, as I’d completed the game, with quite a few questions about getting by in the hard streets of Yharnam. In the end, I decided to turn some of these questions into material for a post. Hopefully these will help my friend and anyone else struggling to get by in the hunt..

1. What’s the best way to learn the battle system?

It would be glib to say “by battling”, but there is some merit to that answer. The fundamentals are presented to you by Messenger notes in Iosefka’s Clinic and in the Hunter’s Dream – turn right when you wake up and explore the gardens to get read them.

But there’s a lot of difference between being told something and learning it. Get stuck in. Each weapon has a subtly different move-set that suit them to different circumstances so take some time wailing on empty air to learn those moves. Figure out what tactics work for you and what doesn’t by carrying them out. Watch enemies to figure out their attack patterns and how they telegraph. If you want to get the hang of the parry mechanic, isolate an enemy and try to parry it as many times as possible.

Bloodborne’s combat system is actually somewhat stripped-down compared to the Souls games. You have fewer play-styles available, no real blocking option and backstabbing is harder to pull off well. But while first-strike tactics are more rewarded in Bloodborne, the basic combat flow of “bait enemy attack, dodge, hit them in the back” will take you far.

2. When so little is told directly to the player, how do you learn the ‘language’ of the game?

Bloodborne, like Souls, is very indirect compared to most video games. There’s not really a tutorial level, no training mini-games and the difficulty won’t scale itself back if you die enough times. That’s not the same as saying nothing is there to learn, just that it expects you to dig and get it. If you want to learn what stats do, you have to use the Help option in your stat screen. This isn’t purely functional, by the way, but can also have an effect on lore – take a look at Insight’s description. That’s really integral to understanding the lore of the game. It’s also worth noting that if you approach the game paying attention to what’s around you – actively paying attention – then you’re likely to anticipate ambushes, spot hidden items or uncover new routes through levels.

I think the metaphor of a language is interesting and quite apt here because you don’t learn a language by just being “given it”. You have to immerse yourself in it and internalize it. I can tell you everything about the game but it wouldn’t mean as much as if you found it yourself. But there are some principles that might be useful to bear in mind. For instance, remember that you heal via blood and hitting enemies after you’ve been recently wounded restores your health; an enemy that is dying still has blood in it. That’s something I learned by just wailing on enemies frantically in a fight that wasn’t going well and I saw I was healing by hitting an enemy that was still doing their “woe is me for I am slain!” fall-down animation.

Just be mindful of where you are and what might be ahead of you – or just behind you. If you’re in a dark cluttered environment, that’s a great place for something to ambush you so keep an eye out for ‘dead’ bodies. If you see an enemy that doesn’t immediately attack you, don’t turn your back to it and focus on something else because then it’ll brick you.

3. How do you overcome slow progression and frustration?

This is a lot more.. personal and individual. I can’t tell you how to not be frustrated at something and if you die a lot that can definitely be frustrating. I would say that keeping a level head is important – getting angry will cause you to make more mistakes – but remember that every time something kills you, there’s a lesson to learn. Learn by dying. Don’t be afraid to take damage as the combat system (especially the restoration method) is built around damage being.. not unavoidable, but more likely. And it’s easier to get health back.

The Dark Souls fandom has a meme for when people are asking for tips on how to beat difficult parts of the game: “get good”. Not great advice, of course. But what it means is that progression is about as slow as you make it.

Remember that every enemy has limited health and move-set, that they have some weakness that can be exploited. Don’t be afraid to use items to change your damage type or switch weapons. If you’re getting swarmed by multiple opponents often, the Hunter’s Axe two-handed mode has a great area-clearing swing.

Death is annoying, but it’s also a learning experience. Think about what you did wrong. An easy mistake to make is to mis-manage your stamina bar. Remember that stamina fuels attacks and dodges alike. Don’t get greedy when you see an opening to attack – go for one or two blows and then fall back to restore stamina. And death is actually a little easier on you in Bloodborne than in Dark Souls – you don’t have to worry about going Hollow, your max health gradually winnowing away with each successive death.

FromSoft’s games are not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s no shame in just saying “this isn’t for me”. I would even go so far as saying they’re not “fun” in the typical sense. It’s more about satisfaction, overcoming and accomplishing; the spiteful aggression that certain bosses give you as you grapple with it over and over; the up-swelling rush of pride you feel on striking down your final enemy and looking back on how far you’ve come against all the odds. Getting there is hard, yes.  And if you’d rather not, then by all means take that choice. But remember, FromSoft made this game to beat you. Are you going to let it?

Bloodborne: What To Expect (Part 1)

Last week I got my hands on FromSoftware’s latest game, Bloodborne, a little early. It’s been one of the most anticipated games of the year among the more “hardcore” gamer demographic and early critical feedback has been overall extremely positive.

FromSoft’s previous titles, the Dark Souls series and Demon’s Souls before that, left an intimidating reputation for Bloodborne to live up to. The dark fantasy series is characterized by punishing difficulty, frequent player death and hands-off storytelling. It rewarded cooler heads, encouraged thought, observation, and exploration; running blindly into rooms triggers traps, attacking without thought leaves you drained of stamina and unable to defend yourself. So, let’s talk about Bloodborne and where it meets, fails to meet or even subverts expectations.

Fair warning at this point: at time of writing I’ve gone through the game once and am working on my second play-through now. This means there will likely be spoilers, which I’ll avoid where possible in this post but later posts will not be able to avoid that as much. Also it means that I don’t yet know all there is to know about the game’s lore, as FromSoft typically holds details back from players that aren’t actively rooting them out. So don’t take these as being comprehensive “everything there is to know” pieces, more descriptors. Later on I will post up some lore ideas and observations; these are intended for people to join in and theorize with, as Souls lore is more a collaborative process than a narrator giving you all the answers. But these are also likely spoilers, so be warned there.

PART ONE: THE BASICS

This first section will talk about very broad aspects of the different game series, both mechanically and narratively. The Souls games and Bloodborne here bear the most resemblance to each other. They are third-person fantasy-RPG games with a strong emphasis on melee combat, in which one gathers resources from defeated foes (souls in DS, blood in BB) to use as both experience for leveling up but also currency to purchase gear. You spend a lot of time in a hub area (The Nexus in Demon’s Souls; Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls; Majula in Dark Souls II; The Hunter’s Dream in Bloodborne) from which you travel to different areas of the world.

Thematically, these games’ stories all draw very strongly on the idea of “faded glory”. Players take on the role of some kind of a stricken outsider (or someone of uncertain origin) come to what used to be a wonderful civilization, now fallen into squalor. In Demons’ Souls, the kingdom of Boletaria was one center of industry and “the soul arts” until it fell under a deep fog and became infested with demons; the hero is trapped between life and death, and must venture in to find the missing King and put at end to the demons that feast on the souls of men. In the Dark Souls games, the player is an undead warrior in a world whose great Age is now declining; in the first game, the gods of Anor Londo have fled their city as the Age of Fire fades and the Dark looms ever greater. The Chosen Undead can sustain the fire and the light that comes with it or allow it to fade. In the second game, the great kingdom of Drangleic has suffered greatly in a war against giants and the King has sealed himself away far below the castle; the Cursed Undead must seek the King and claim his vacant throne. In Bloodborne, players take up the role of The Hunter. You have come to the city of Yharnam, a famed center of medicine, to seek treatment for an affliction. But the streets of Yharnam are not safe; men are becoming beasts and both hunt the other.

Those were all similarities; how is Bloodborne different? Well, the most immediate difference will be the aesthetics. (Not necessarily the graphics – although, yes, those are prettier thanks to fiercer hardware) But while the Souls games are decidedly medieval – knights with plate mail – Bloodborne takes a more Victorian Gothic style. The cobbled streets resemble those of old London and the sky is speared by intricate towers. Men wear top hats and button-coats. The dark-tinged fantasy is also more skewed towards overt horror, again in aesthetics rather than mechanics. Early on it’s very Hammer horror – wolfmen abound – before taking a decidedly Lovecraftian turn early in the second act.

The most immediately-apparent tweak to mechanics for me was the introduction of firearms; these replace shields almost entirely and are how you “parry”. Firearms are carried in your offhand, use a limited stock of rounds and don’t actually do great damage. Instead, your goal is to shoot the enemy in the middle of their attack animation to put them in a dazed state, where you can run them through for massive damage – in previous games, the idea was to parry enemy attacks just as they were hitting you to put them in the same state. This encourages a smarter, but still “attack-attack-attack”, playstyle by giving your defensive options an ammo counter.

So, those were the very basics about how Bloodborne fits in with previous FromSoft games. I’d like to leave you with this little musing designed to incite lore-speculation: in the beginning of the game, you receive a treatment for disease from an eyeless man. This causes you to see a werewolf pulling itself towards you from a pool of blood. It reaches out with its claws beckoning you – only to catch fire. Then the Messengers – pale, mewling baby-like gremlins – clamber over you and you pass out. When you awake, the clinic is empty and you venture out into Yharnam proper and the game begins. The area you are in is called Iosefka’s Clinic, but if you return to the Clinic then you speak with a female clinician who claims to be Iosefka. Then who was the man who gave you your treatment?

Just something to think about..