For Those Who Can’t Find a PS5
Bloodborne is widely considered one of the must-play titles of the PS4. Although it offers a slightly different combat loop to the Souls series of games, FromSoftware fans and newbies to the genre alike praise the game. With the PS5 remaster, proposed sequel and PC port on the horizon, it will be brought to a massive group of uninitiated gamers. Especially considering GeForce Now is available on Xbox theoretically allowing the game to be playable, Bloodborne is about to get a whole lot more popular.
Bloodborne is coming to most systems but is unavailable to one demographic in particular; retro gamers. Developer Lilith Walther looks to change this, however.
Bloodborne PSX is a demake of the 2015 title, complete with PlayStation 1 dithering and all. The game even features the iconic PlayStation startup sequence and sound effects. It’s incredible to see the opening of Bloodborne, as well as the character creator in essentially what looks like a low-poly mode. The animations are charmingly stuttery, yet cohesive.
The demake was made in Unreal engine, which is not as true to life as we’d want but it’s surprisingly close to what a render of the game would look like on official hardware. It might theoretically be possible to make a port that would run on official hardware, but the content would have to be cut even with the reduced textures and models, as the PlayStation 1 used CD-ROM which could only contain 650MB of data. The 2MB of RAM also means that the disk would have to read constantly, and even more data would have to be severely compressed or cut.
Despite essentially being a modern game in retro styling, Bloodborne PSX is still absolutely incredible and might be nostalgia-inducing for those who were fans of the system back in the day while allowing for an all-new Soulsborne experience.