Game reviews: Bloodborne and Hard West - welcome to hell, and to gunslingers
Bloodborne: The Old Hunters will lead players deeper and deeper into hell, while Hard West takes a new trail through some familiar terrain
FromSoftware
When we first reviewed Bloodborne back in April this year, we called the PlayStation 4 game “an incredible experience” but one “only obsessive, multidecade hand-eye coordinators will truly delve into”. That still holds true, and it’s highly likely that eight months later, those who took our advice are still grinding away at its challenging hell of a virtual world.
Now, just in time for Christmas, comes The Old Hunters, the first and apparently only expansion pack for the game, available as a sizeable DLC release or a special edition disc alongside the original game. It supposedly clocks in at a hefty 15 hours, but developer FromSoftware seems very cruel, and those who dare enter its sprawling world will no doubt spend much of the holidays stuck in Sisyphean agony, dying endless deaths at the hands of its demon bosses.
The Old Hunters doesn’t follow the tried-and-tested expansion method of a couple new missions, a few new challenges. In classic Dark Souls fashion, it truly expands on the Bloodborne world, throwing players deep into a purgatorial realm called the Hunter’s Nightmare. It’s here that those whose bloodlust is never sated are sent, a Dantean labyrinth that recreates the original Bloodborne’s settings as half-remembered nightmares while pushing the boundaries of fear.