Bloodborne PSX - Fascinating Demake in Remake Era

Lilith Walther, after thirteen months of work, made Bloodborne demake available online and I must admit that I do not remember any similar initiative (bringing a modern production to hardware when running a VHS rental seemed a reasonable business) gaining so much publicity. It doesn't surprise me at all – this game is absolutely phenomenal and downloading it for free feels sort of immoral. In-between traversing Yharnam's angular, "boiling" textures, I wonder how two versions of the same game, which are technologically almost two decades apart, can be so similar to each other.

90% fewer textures, just as many quirky, disturbing pictures.

Twenty years in such a dynamically developing industry is more than a whole era. This is the period between the release of Pong on arcade and the release of the original Mortal Kombat, between the small, grayish world of Fallout 2 and the gigantic Red Dead Redemption 2. It is roughly as many years as have passed between the release of the first PlayStation (December 1994 in Japan) and the release of Bloodborne (March 2015). The Lilith Walther project, given its technological limitations, should be a nice nostalgic nod to the fifth generation of consoles at best, and a lame parody of one of the best games of recent years at worst. Meanwhile, it's an experience that's not only extremely interesting, but, most of all, it's genuine fun.

Vibe from a few textures

The developer managed to fully maintain the gloomy atmosphere of Yharnam, even despite the fact that the werewolves, devoid of sharp textures, look like stuffed animals for eight-year-olds going through the stage of goosebumps fascination, and the people with bloodlust resemble sloths. In Bloodborn PSX, there are probably even fewer light sources than in the original, the reduced field of view means that we can rarely notice what awaits us in a dozen or so meters, and dark alleys are full of enemies that are easy to miss. Due to technological limitations in the demake, it's often the case that we hear opponents long before we see them, which works really great for the imagination.

The sound of stunning an enemy and delivering the fatal blow still makes me euphoric.

I'm a cautious enthusiast of the theory that less detailed graphics are not necessarily a hindrance, and sometimes they even help create engaging experiences. The human mind has a great propensity to creatively fill in the gaps, such as in literature – when reading books, we all automatically create visual representations of heroes and events – are we not subconsciously doing something similar when playing games? And there's no shortage of things that stimulate our imagination in Bloodborn, and Lilith Walther's demake confirmed it. Disturbing, opaque plot, enigmatic characters, dialogues that raise more questions than answers... And above all, the sound design.

In some locations, veterans of the Yharnam hunt will find themselves right away, while others will confuse them a bit in the new versions.

Bloodborne PSX also allowed me to appreciate the phenomenal audio setting of the original even more. I'm not even talking about the soundtrack (neatly converted in the demake by the composer Evelyn Lark into MIDI format), but about the sounds of Yharnam: bells ringing in the distance, cruel laughs of lucky people hiding in houses, delirious whispers of maddened residents roaming the streets. Flightless ravens may be glued together from four polygons in Bloodborn PSX, but when they pounce on the player, desperately flapping their wings and uttering sounds on the verge of mad yelling and agonizing shouts, I feel like taking to the heels and running back to Iosefka's Clinic.