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Echo Chamber: 'Bloodborne's' Critical Praise Is Gaming Journalism's Failure

This article is more than 9 years old.

Read any review, discussion, forum thread or opinion on From Software's new PS4 exclusive Bloodborne, and you're bound to encounter the phrase: "it's not for everyone." Sometimes it's sort of an embarrassed acknowledgement: "I know, this thing is weird and painful, but here's what I like about it." More often, it's sort of a smirking humblebrag: "It's not for those people, just for we that can appreciate it." But in nearly very instance, it precedes a few hundred words of gushing, unrestrained praise, meaning that it all comes down to the same thing. Bloodborne may be off limits to all but a tiny fraction even of people that play a lot of video games, but we as gaming journalists just don't seem to care. It makes me wonder: since when have we stopped giving a damn about "everyone?"

Bloodborne is a meticulously crafted game. It is wildly successful in everything it attempts to do, no doubt. The atmospherics are incredible, the combat is brutal and satisfying, the bizarre, opaque story is slowly and strangely mystifying. The level design, from an aesthetic and a practical point of view, is staggeringly and intricately brilliant. This game has been hewn with care, skill, obsession and love, and this this shows through in every tiny moment it has to offer. That's not really what I'm talking about here. None of that praise affects one of the most fundamental truths about the game that we need to be communicating: most people will hate it. It is incredibly hard, and most people won't be able to make it past the first boss before rage quitting. This isn't a value judgment, it's just true.

Think about what we consider a general requirement for reviewing a given game: finishing it. Seems like it would make sense, right? In situations like this, however, I'd argue that that is an insanely restrictive requirement. This means that the official word on this game from any given publication is going to come from someone with the time, skill, and inclination to actually make it through this thing, and that is one rareified human being. Add into the fact that this person has probably finished both Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, and maybe even Demon's Souls, and you've got a near-assurance that their opinion will be meaningless to all but core franchise fans. When Bloodborne review copies arrived, most outlets trotted out their "Souls" expert to do the review, but in doing so they've locked out the less-informed opinions that could actually end up being more valuable to more people. (For my own perspective on the game itself, check out my daily diary).

The gaming world has already talked ad nauseaum about the fallacy of Metacritic and the woefully inadequate tool of a review score when it comes to something like a video game. I understand that. But with all of the talk about Bloodborne as masterpiece, Bloodborne as perfect, or Bloodborne as best game ever, I can't help but feel like the gaming media is failing at one of its most fundamental jobs: telling people about video games. Because while Dark Souls fans do deserve to know how this game compares to the thing they already love, regular people also deserve to know that they will, probably, hate this game. It is maddeningly, crushingly and unendingly difficult. To fans, this is part of the appeal. To most people, this is awful. This is a perspective that's mostly absent from the discussion, save this very important piece from IGN.

It isn't any one reviewers fault -- everyone should say what they think and be fine with it -- it's the universality of the praise that's so troubling. There should be some tempering voices in there, probably a lot of them. The failure to provide that perspective throughout the ecosystem of games writing is just a bit embarrassing.

This wasn't really a problem with a game like Demon's Souls: it was a newcomer, there were plenty of other current-gen titles out there to play, and (I assume, didn't play it) that it was a genuine surprise at the time. But Bloodborne has much broader exposure than any of the games before it, and it's being held up as a "system seller"for the PS4. I've had several casualish gamer friends ask me if I'd recommend it, and I've told all of them no. I don't say this because it's a bad game, or because I wouldn't have recommended it to myself, but just because I know these people, and I know they don't want to play this game. Come to think about it, I don't think I personally know a single person outside the games industry/press that would enjoy this game -- we're falling down on our duty to make sure they know that.

Bloodborne deserves all the praise it gets, and we as people that like video games should spend a lot of time thinking about what makes it so maddeningly successful. But we can't just shout to ourselves about the stuff we like. The echo chamber of praise for Bloodborne reminds us what an incredible lack of perspective we have within the world of games criticism, and that's not just a practical failure, it's boring to boot.