Rating: A+
Bloodbourne was released in March of 2015, and I realised that it was the best game that I would play for a long time. Its bloody Gothic aesthetic and notorious difficulty made it both an excellent action-adventure game and a scary survival horror game. The Kafkaesque plot involves a traveller to the haunted city of Yharnam finding themselves recruited as a Hunter of Beasts. The story is unsettling in its utilisation of stock horror tropes to create a deep, Lovecraftian mythos. Now, we have the only piece of Bloodborne DLC, The Old Hunters, and an already scary game has been made absolutely terrifying.
The expansion is enormous. The content of the DLC is equivalent to about a full third of the base game’s content. This takes the form of new weapons, new armour sets, new bosses, and new locations. The only downside of this is that any new weapons you find will be all but useless in comparison to whatever you have already fought through the base game with. You will still need to put in a few hours to upgrade anything new.
One marvels at the variety of horror The Old Hunters adds. There is cosmic horror wrought from the sense that now the universe itself is against you, Lovecraftian horror in the feeling of being a very small ant compared to the gods you are fighting, and – most prevalent and disturbing – body horror. Many of the enemies used to be human, but are now warped and torn into monstrosities by sickness, madness and experimentation – the perpetrators of which are some of your allies. Rivers of blood flow through the streets of Yharnam, with barely-alive victims lying in piles, pathetically pawing at gates leading to nowhere. The overwhelming helplessness imbued by the environment is almost nauseating.
After you install the DLC, you are given a new item that grants access to what the game refers to as “The Hunter’s Nightmare.” The locations that make up the nightmare will be recognisable to Bloodborne veterans, only twisted and morphed, as though the landscape itself was infected. This is an area where the consciousnesses of Hunters are transported after their deaths in the real world. Their presence makes the game exponentially more difficult. They are just as fast as you, have weapons that you are unfamiliar with, and are more aggressive attackers than any enemies in the main game. The same can be said of the new bosses: they are a challenge by any measure, and their identities are tragic for anyone who knows Bloodborne’s lore.
All of these features are tied together by the plot of The Old Hunters, which is as sparse as ever. In Bloodborne, you spend most of your time working for a Hunter named Gehrman, who looks after you and points you in the vague direction of the elder god whose birth into the city of Yharnam you are trying to stop. In The Old Hunters, you dive into the backstory of Yharnam, and how the elder gods first started paying attention to the smaller city. You learn snippets of the figures and events that led to Gehrman breaking away from the rest of the religious and scientific institutions in Yharnam, why he is wracked with guilt, the significance of his servant doll, and why on occasion you can hear him crying with a desire to wake up from the blood-soaked nightmare that you are both trapped in.
If I was to describe Bloodborne in one word, that word would be ‘nightmare’. In the case of The Old Hunters, that word is now ‘holocaust’. Bloodborne was already my favourite game of 2015. The Old Hunters turns it into one of my favourite games ever, and by far the scariest game I have ever played.