Bloodborne begone: a hardcore gamer lets go

Critic, author and father Rich Stanton has beaten Bloodborne a dozen times, but having faced the game's toughest boss, is it time to retire?

Recently, my partner and I had our second child and, over the subsequent weeks, as is often the case, we barely slept. What I didn't expect was that, in the zombie hours at the edge of night, the harrowing cries of our newborn baby would keep pulling me back to something dark, distant and seemingly unrelated. Bloodborne.

From Software's 2015 masterpiece, a dark action adventure set in a plague-ridden gothic metropolis, is a towering achievement of interactive media, but it is also a grim and intimidating challenge requiring at least 50 hours to appreciate. During that time, players discover that a core theme of the game is progeny, covering the whole gamut, from birth to infanticide. Not for the first time, I realised the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, thinks of everything.