It’s essential to preface this with a note that I’m certainly no Soulsborne master. In fact, Bloodborne was the very first FromSoftware game I ever actually owned, and my first hours with it weren’t exactly a joy-filled romp.
I spent longer than I care to remember eating pitchfork, sword, gun, every weapon the early Yharnamites wield. I was also crushed by the Executioner’s ax around a dozen times, when I foolishly attempted to fight them with precious little idea what I was doing.
My dodges just weren’t quick enough, my flailing attempts to parry terribly timed. I couldn’t manage crowds at all, and so the wandering groups in Central Yharnam just tore through me when I inevitably aggroed a whole extended family’s worth of them at once.
When I could focus on a single foe at a time, I thought that I fared rather better, which is why I surprised myself by defeating the Cleric Beast first time. It was just that the journey to it, the first area of the game and the ‘tutorial level’ if you will, felt like an absolute gauntlet of death and shame.
I could have dropped the game right there, and anybody who’d...