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D-pad controls and fuzzy textures everywhere.
Bloodborne has finally made its way to the PC in the form of a fan-made PlayStation-style demake. The free to download game is a fuzzy, CRT vision of FromSoftware’s gothic horror action game, but with careful changes to make it as authentically retro as possible.
I played it on a gamepad with D-pad controls and rotating the camera on the triggers, which was a hassle—but in a good way. BloodbornePSX requires some patience before you start to see how far its developers went to make it not feel like a modern game. Characters and objects jiggle in place like my computer can’t quite handle the graphical fidelity and Bloodborne’s Central Yharnam is cut up into separate rooms, complete with an exit animation where you watch your character walk off before a loading screen fills your screen.
The opening of Bloodborne is notorious for its abundance of enemies, but BloodbornePSX keeps the number small, as if the game couldn’t handle that many effects at once. The combat remains largely the same: enemies swipe at you and you swipe back, hopefully regaining some of the health you lost. Although BloodbornePSX uses a lot of the same level layout as the original, it’s shifted around and downsized a bit to match the scope of games at the time of the original PlayStation.
BloodbornePSX: NOW AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD➡️Get it here: https://t.co/40oWAplt4yThank you for the support over the 13 month dev period. It means so much to me💜➡️Discord: https://t.co/kzxCUCCn44➡️Extended Launch Trailer: https://t.co/qUn6qLdkhi#BloodbornePSX #Demake pic.twitter.com/FTxl8YlFVCJanuary 31, 2022
Lilith Walther, one of the demake’s developers, said the project took over a year to make. Throughout its development, clips from the game were shared widely on social media. One of the videos features a comparison to the cutscene for the Father Gascoigne boss fight, which demonstrates how much care was put into it matching its inspiration. It’s impressive how much everything lines up, but with elements like a massive UI and a memory card save system on top to make it feel old.
The game is available for free on the developers’ itch.io page. It uses much of the same dialogue and sound effects as Sony’s game. Hopefully, the company doesn’t force them to take it down, and appreciates a surprisingly faithful ode to a particular era of games.
Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He’s done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He’s interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.
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