I played Demon’s Souls at launch in 2009 and bounced off hard (many such cases). I finally fell in love with Dark Souls in 2014, running it back over and over again on my giant laptop in college with dsfix on the awful Games for Windows Live version. Elden Ring was the first major game launch I covered professionally. But Bloodborne is still my favorite of all these games.
I decided to finally take fate into my own hands. Bloodborne is one of my favorite games of all time, and it is the only one I have spent a significant amount of time playing on the Sony PlayStation 4. I resent that. I hate that horrible little box under my TV with a passion. I think it’s only good for watching Gilmore Girls—I don’t like playing videogames on it. I am a PC man through and through.
Enter the shadPS4 emulator and BB Launcher, two wonderful tools for running this wonderful game on PC. I followed YouTuber Retro Renew‘s guide to emulating Bloodborne, and we were off to the races.
Blood boy
Sekiro, Elden Ring, and Armored Core 6 are all-timer games for me. Crucially, they’ve demonstrated continued growth and a willingness to experiment on the part of FromSoftware. I don’t think the studio “peaked” with Bloodborne by any means, or that its best days are behind it, but there is nothing else out there like it.
Latest Videos FromPC Gamer
The atmosphere and aesthetics of Yharnam are still so striking and odd, like if Nosferatu (pick your version) and Lovecraft were chopped and screwed into black metal album art. It applies the surreal, mythic sensibility of FromSoftware to the modern world, resulting in the most dreamlike, alienating narrative the studio has yet created.
The Healing Church and Byrgenwerth are simultaneously ancient and right there. Master Willem, the primeval progenitor of Cthulhu Studies in this world, is still chilling in a rocking chair on his front porch. Byrgenwerth, a distinctly modern-feeling Cthulhu University, predates the Healing Church. There’s this feeling Yharnam regressed from science and study into religious dogmatism, clad in modernity and enlightenment the entire time. But the scientists who created this sickened modernity are hardly blameless, no matter their intentions. Does this remind you of anything?
One reading I had never heard before tuning into the recent Chapo Trap House Players Club episode about Bloodborne is that it’s a game about motherhood and mothers, and men ruining the world by doing terrible things to them. It seems so obvious to me now. Kos and her orphan, Queen Yharnam and her child Mergo: The crimes committed against these mothers are the inciting events of the story. You can do the same to Ariana and her child, in the hopes of becoming a god.
God the combat. I fought Ludwig the Accursed earlier than I ever have this playthrough, and it taxed me like little else I’ve played recently—I felt weirdly shaken afterward. While this is the smallest arsenal of the post-Demon’s Souls FromSoft catalogue, every weapon is fully distinct from one another—with the exception of one baffling, fighting game-style moveset clone. Nobody playing Elden Ring would go to the mat for the Highland Axe or Torchpole, but every weapon in Bloodborne has at least one freak out there who will say it’s their favorite—I’m a Chikage/Saw Cleaver man, myself.
Madman’s Escort
Bloodborne emulation has been better than the original console experience for some time, but it’s still slightly janky. I find “unpatched multiplatform Unreal Engine 5 triple-A port” to be a good comparison point: Basically, the hitches and glitches reminded me of playing Jedi Survivor.
You’ll need a beefier rig than for other PS4-era games, and it isn’t like there are minimum and recommended specs online anywhere. But I’ve been surprised at the GPUs I’ve seen people running Bloodborne on, with one Reddit commenter claiming it was playable on a GTX 1650. I don’t have a way of testing, but my wager would be that the RTX 3070 (or equivalent) is the point where you could start expecting reliable 1080p 60fps gameplay.
Digital Foundry demonstrated 4k 60fps gameplay on an RTX 4080 earlier this year, while I’ve had a pleasant experience at 1440p 60 on an RX 9070 XT from AMD. There’s only one glitch that has really spat in my coffee, and I don’t have a fix. I’ve run into two loading zones—the entrance to Yharnam’s Grand Cathedral and the elevator depot shortcut in the Forbidden Woods—where, seven out of 10 times, stepping through a doorway turns my field of view into a neon nightmare until I quit and reload.
Reader, I have tried nearly everything to troubleshoot: Tweaking resolution, VRAM use, shadPS4 versions, lighting settings, FSR use, the gamut. I don’t know if it’s a Bloodborne on PC thing, or a fromsoftserve BB Remaster mod thing. The only option left is doing a full reinstall, and that just doesn’t feel worth the effort for this edge case annoyance. I simply choose to accept it as a quirky old friend now, like having to slam the dashboard of an old car just so to get it to run.
Poison Chalice
I have always refused to be the kind of sucker who pays Sony to let me use the internet I already pay for (the PlayStation Network), so I never really interacted with Bloodborne’s online-only procedurally generated dungeons. The PC BB Launcher has a function to force-add procgen dungeons to your save file, and comes with a library of popular ones for loot/experience farming.
I didn’t even realize there was a whole sequence of story-based, set Chalice dungeons to explore prior to now—it’s possibly FromSoftware’s least intuitive, most poorly explained system in any of its games, putting Demon’s Souls world tendency to shame.
I’m conflicted: This is an astounding bit of nontraditional, asynchronous, and ephemeral online game design like nothing else out there. Swapping tips about choice dungeons on forums and the collective mapping out of optimal seeds is the sort of schoolyard rumor, collective discovery experience FromSoftware is so good at cultivating. I’m sorry I missed it in 2015. But they also really muck up what is otherwise one of the tightest itemization and upgrade systems FromSoftware has ever made.
I got a little bit hooked on some of the more difficult dungeons, and have grinded out the most powerful character I’ve yet made in Bloodborne. I’m worried the final story areas will be a little too easy with all these extra levels. But hey: At least it’s more Bloodborne.
Free Bloodborne
You can play Bloodborne on PC right now, and I recommend the experience. It’s a difficult ask for a layman (much less a normie), and accessing the game files of your legally purchased copy is the biggest hurdle in the process. Playing Bloodborne at acceptable framerates and resolutions on a modern system should not be so needlessly challenging and potentially DMCA-infringing, but it’s difficult to imagine the situation improving in the near future.
Sony has largely turned its back on PC gaming after a brief, early 2020s dalliance, and it also recently put down remaster studio Bluepoint for no good reason. While that has spared us from anything like the Demon’s Souls Remake being inflicted on Bloodborne, the commonsense, light touch PC port it should have received at any point in the last decade has never felt further away—even though Miyazaki himself told us he isn’t against the idea.
