Bloodborne (2015)
Bloodborne is a 2015 role-playing (rpg) video game made by FromSoftware and Sony Computer Entertainment.
Yharnam is a gothic city sick with its own cure. The blood that once healed its citizens has turned them into beasts, and the streets crawl with hunters, plague, and worse things that watch from the dark. You play a Hunter stitched into this endless night, trading blows with towering monsters and learning that the real horror hides behind the sickness. FromSoftware swaps medieval stone for Victorian rot and cosmic dread. Combat rewards aggression over caution, punishing anyone who backs away. The lore stays buried in item descriptions and half-lit corners, waiting for players patient enough to dig it out.
Quick answers
What is Bloodborne about?
Yharnam is a gothic city sick with its own cure. The blood that once healed its citizens has turned them into beasts, and the streets crawl with hunters, plague, and worse things that watch from the dark. You play a Hunter stitched into this endless night, trading blows with towering monsters and learning that the real horror hides behind the sickness. FromSoftware swaps medieval stone for Victorian rot and cosmic dread. Combat rewards aggression over caution, punishing anyone who backs away. The lore stays buried in item descriptions and half-lit corners, waiting for players patient enough to dig it out.
When was Bloodborne released?
Bloodborne was released on 24 March 2015.
Who made Bloodborne?
Bloodborne was made by FromSoftware and Sony Computer Entertainment.
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Explore Bloodborne guides
Bloodborne in our writing
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A few thoughts on Bloodborne
The cosmic body horror shares a bloodline with Tomie, Junji Ito's tale of a beauty who refuses to stay dead. For prose that maps the same dread, Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness names the things Yharnam only hints at. Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse bottles that madness into two men and one rock.
Cosmic horror that swallows sanity whole
Yharnam's hunters learn the real threat was never the beasts but the cosmic truth hiding behind the plague, and these chase that same dread. At the Mountains of Madness sends explorers past what their minds can hold, The Lighthouse strands two keepers with something ancient in the dark, FROM traps a whole town inside a forest that won't let go, and Supernatural hunts the old evils civilization forgot.
Body horror where transformation is the real monster
Bloodborne's beasts were people first, and the game keeps circling back to bodies changing into something worse. Junji Ito's Tomie, on film and page, turns beauty into a self-replicating threat, Uzumaki spirals an entire town into the same grotesque shape, and Fullmetal Alchemist's homunculi and chimeras show what happens when flesh gets rearranged past the point of return.
Music as bleak and beautiful as Yharnam's streets
Bloodborne's gothic streets run on dread and grandeur in equal measure, and this run of records matches that same weight. King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King opens on genuine apocalyptic dread, Judas Priest's Painkiller turns aggression into something almost holy, Death's Leprosy pushes death metal toward real menace, and The Spectre Within layers gothic atmosphere over relentless metal.