Bloodborne review – elegant, precise and irresistible

Game designer Hidetaka Miyazaki returns with another obtuse but enthralling masterpiece that both mirrors and subverts his previous classics

Bloodborne's horror, at a glance, approaches clichi(C). Yharnam, the city in which Hidetaka Miyazaki's latest game is centered, is beleaguered with plague, its streets all grime and squalor. Bodies pile in sodden sacks, flies buzz around horse carcasses, while a pram, that beloved prop of the Hollywood set designer, lays on its side at the doors to a forsaken church. There are few places of sanctuary any more for the remaining healthy locals, who tremble and pace inside their homes, under an everlasting curfew, away from the terrors that roam outside their doors.

We've seen many of those freaks and mutants before too. There are the rabid Doberman and hoe-wielding peasants of Resident Evil. There are the fat crows of Hitchcock's The Birds. Even the soul-sucking Death Eaters of Harry Potter are hinted at. Jack the Ripper would certainly be at home here in the nooks and crannies of Yharnam's Gothic sprawl; its cobblestones are ever slicked with Saw-like gushes of blood.

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