“So with this statistic Bloodborne It’s called Insight,” I’ll tell anyone who will listen. “It controls the amount of inhuman knowledge you gather from the world while you slaughter unnatural abominations. ’ So far, it’s been video games; you kill something, or you use an item, and the numbers go up. So what?” But Insight isn’t just for summoning other players or something—it changes the world. It’s maddening. scary. By this point, strangers at the bar I was in had gone far away, circling their fingers around their temples to signify that I was crazy about their giggling friends. Maybe they’re right – Bloodborne really came into my head.
But that Insight stat… I’ve never had anything like it. Every major boss you kill gives you more insight, and if you take the time to explore the game and break the loop, deviating slightly from the expected path, you can quickly gain a ton of lore about Bloodborne’s dying, messy world.
It plays out passively–perhaps certain enemies grow stronger as you start to understand their true role in the world. Maybe some NPCs start mumbling apparently innocent nonsense. Maybe you start seeing beings who actually run the world, clinging to cathedral bell towers or wandering around in the shadows. Whenever you’re around, maybe the otherworldly abomination starts singing, sadly out of key – crooning those horrible bastard hymns we can’t really see.
You’d never know this without the online guide, for example, pushing you towards new things that start happening when you accumulate 40 Insight. Getting to 60 provides some interesting additional knowledge about how the game really ends, and all this weird stuff starts to come into your head as certain things happen to you, the player, no matter where you are in the game. It’s maddening, it’s believable, and it’s FromSoftware’s sadism at its best.
And I only played it in 2023. I’d tried to get into Bloodborne about five times before then – but it never got stuck. When I saw it had been added to the PS Plus collection (despite owning it a few months ago thanks to a PS Plus deal), I tried again – this time due to the fact that the PS5 pretty much eliminated load times . This time, I managed to get out of the cobbled streets of Yharnam. The game’s unique aggressiveness and momentum-based combat was on my mind as I took on the bloodthirsty beast. I dug into the depths of the Grail Dungeon (with the help of the now infamous “cum dungeon”).
From then on, it just felt very natural–and hooked me in a way that few games do these days. Staying up until 3am, killing everything I see, tentatively following every path I can find, learning all goblin lore and reading everything I can get my hands on, poring over the wiki, watching the excellent Every second of the video produced by VaatiVidya… Bloodborne has cast its spell and the Old Ones are in my head, grinning when I’m mad and mad when I bleed.
“Give us eyes, give us eyes,” intones a poor mutated NPC eager for knowledge of the Old Gods who infect the world. “Put eyes on our brains to purify us of bestial stupidity.” He’s mad with knowledge, you see—he knows enough about the true state of the world to want to ascend, but his knowledge Not enough to really understand the nature of the people he’s trying to communicate with. A limbo of hell, aware of one’s own ignorance. All around him, in the damned abode he chose to live in, you’d see human eyes swollen–their brains do have visual organs for trying and seeing the underworld. It kills them, it’s horrible. But you and me, we’re smarter than that, aren’t we? We have the insight to prove it.
Not that the stats really do anything. You really need to go out of your way to make it bloat to the point where you need to hear the end game reward, all it does is slightly change the state of the world – you can’t do anything with it other than summon other players (Elden Ring was later streamlined and simplified stuff). But I think that’s why it’s so impactful; all these little changes that change the world, if you get the agency to see it as a player, everything is implied, everything is in the gutter, nails in Yharnam in the soil beneath.
It took me nearly a decade to finally understand the appeal of Bloodborne, but once it got its claws on me it wouldn’t let go, and I immediately understood why everyone else kept talking about it . More importantly, it started my current FromSoft obsession – I’m committed to getting Platinum or 1000G in every game on modern platforms by the end of the year.
So that’s why I wanted to write this post today; a tribute to the beauty of the PlayStation Plus Collection and thanks for finally giving me the tools and motivation to play one of the best games I’ve ever had the pleasure of being abused . It gave me a new appreciation for the library of PlayStation 3/4/5 exclusives – something I used to be rather brutal and dismissive of. If you’re here in time to steal anything you can from this dying service, I recommend it: you never know what you’ll find.
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