Even as someone who had never played one of From Software’s Souls games for any significant length of time, I recently caught some of the infectious enthusiasm from some of IGN’s Dark Souls superfans, who’d been counting down the days to Bloodborne’s

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Keep in mind that if you already know how to play a Souls-style game, my experience as a new player probably won’t relate to you – and I have no intention of convincing you that you don’t actually like it as much as you think you do. You definitely like it exactly as much as you think you do. Reading this, you might find it infuriating that I was playing Bloodborne “wrong,” and that I didn’t have the patience to stick it out longer. Likewise, if you believe there’s no such thing as a game that starts out too difficult to be enjoyable, then we have a fundamental disagreement on game design. That’s fine; just like Bloodborne might not be “for me,” this article isn’t “for you.” We have lots that are, though: Plenty of people around the office are really digging it, and our Bloodborne review (currently in progress) by Brandin Tyrrel and Lucy O’Brien’s new-player experience both offer much more positive perspectives.My experience with From’s games up to this point had been a brief dalliance with the first Dark Souls, just long enough to figure out that I found the combat clunky and unappealing. Yes, I understand that the idea is to read the enemy animations and time your strikes so that you can score a hit before they do. My issue is that I have always absolutely hated feeling locked into attack animations for a second or more at a time – generally, I want my character to react as fast as I do. I’d heard that Bloodborne’s combat system was faster, though, so I figured there was a fair chance I’d be more into it.And, to its credit, I do enjoy Bloodborne’s fights far more than Dark Souls’. Attacks are much more responsive, and I felt like I could reliably get out of the way of an incoming pitchfork stab when I needed to. It’s still extremely demanding, of course, and I wouldn’t want it to be easy – I was promised challenge, and I got it. To be very clear, individual fights were not what drove me away.Where it lost me was primarily in the repetition, due to outrageous amounts of enemy-filled space between save checkpoints, and the equally outrageous 40-second load times every time I was sent back to the beginning. To be clear, there are no checkpoints between the start of the first area, called Central Yharnam, and after you kill the boss. Tough games are great, but when I triumph over a significant enemy or obstacle and make progress, I want that progress recognized and rewarded. The last thing I want is to be told to do it again and again and again, until it loses all meaning. As a new, inexperienced player, that’s exactly what Bloodborne does: it takes the achievement of killing a big group of evil villagers or a couple of werewolves and reduces it to tedium by making me kill those exact same enemies so many times it becomes more chore than challenge.This led to a downward spiral of impatience and frustration. Bored by the prospect of running through the same level again and again just to get to the part that was giving me trouble, I’d try to take shortcuts – mostly by diving into combat and biting off more than I could chew. That usually ended about the way you’d expect. That setback – and resulting loss of items, BloodBux™ (I refused to call them “blood echos” because how does that even make sense?), and another 40 seconds of my life – would make me even more angry, and the cycle would repeat. After a few hours, I knew exactly how Bill Murray felt in Groundhog Day. Yes, I do understand that the style of these games demands careful planning before diving into combat, and I can appreciate that. However, that appreciation has limits that were soon overwhelmed by monotony; after that, it’s boring and annoying and I just want to get to something I haven’t seen before.Don’t mistake this for wanting my hand held – it’s more about not having my hand slammed in a car door and being told to like it. Let’s compare Bloodborne’s design philosophy to Super Meat Boy, the notoriously difficult old-school 2D platformer that kills you so often it turns it into a great end-of-level gag by replaying all of your failed attempts, showing an orgy of dozens (or more) of meaty deaths at once. I love that game. What’s the difference between Meat Boy’s punishing difficulty and Bloodborne’s? Meat Boy’s challenges are bite-sized, requiring only short bursts of perfect execution. They might be super tough, but when you get past one, you’re past it - you don’t need to play it again unless you want to. They also ramp up in difficulty, introducing new players to its brutality quickly, but with the understanding that the first few levels should feel reasonably surmountable.Let’s compare it to another vicious game: FTL: Faster Than Light. Where Bloodborne and Super Meat Boy have the virtue of being difficult but “fair,” in that a skilled player can avoid death reliably, FTL is a roguelike, which means randomization – and that means you’ll sometimes run into no-win situations where you will certainly die. I love this game even more than Super Meat Boy. Why? Because the randomization means that every time I play through, I get something new. I’ll get a different weapon or upgrade for my ship, or I’ll have a random encounter that leads to a memorable experience. The same goes for the likes of The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, and to a lesser extent for XCOM: Enemy Within (which I typically play on Classic difficulty in Ironman mode, and recently with the ultra-hard The Long War mod installed).Progressing through the first area of Bloodborne, on the other hand, means getting past at least 15 minutes’ worth of extremely nasty, lethal creatures that never change from one attempt to the next. If you imagine stringing several Super Meat Boy levels together, where one mistake sends you back to the very beginning, that’s what Bloodborne felt like to me. Forcing me to get past several challenges I’d already figured out how to beat just to get back to the one I haven’t is, as far as I’m concerned, an absolutely terrible design choice that makes Bloodborne openly hostile to new players.