Bloodborne comes to the PC in the form of a fan demake

Bloodborne has finally made its way to the PC in the form of a fan-made PlayStation-style demake. The free to download game is a fuzzy, CRT vision of FromSoftware’s gothic horror action game, but with careful changes to make it as authentically retro as possible.

I played it on a gamepad with D-pad controls and rotating the camera on the triggers, which was a hassle—but in a good way. BloodbornePSX requires some patience before you start to see how far its developers went to make it not feel like a modern game. Characters and objects jiggle in place like my computer can’t quite handle the graphical fidelity and Bloodborne’s Central Yharnam is cut up into separate rooms, complete with an exit animation where you watch your character walk off before a loading screen fills your screen.

The opening of Bloodborne is notorious for its abundance of enemies, but BloodbornePSX keeps the number small, as if the game couldn’t handle that many effects at once. The combat remains largely the same: enemies swipe at you and you swipe back, hopefully regaining some of the health you lost. Although BloodbornePSX uses a lot of the same level layout as the original, it’s shifted around and downsized a bit to match the scope of games at the time of the original PlayStation.

Lilith Walther, one of the demake’s developers, said the project took over a year to make. Throughout its development, clips from the game were shared widely on social media. One of the videos features a comparison to the cutscene for the Father Gascoigne boss fight, which demonstrates how much care was put into it matching its inspiration. It’s impressive how much everything lines up, but with elements like a massive UI and a memory card save system on top to make it feel old.

The game is available for free on the developers’ itch.io page. It uses much of the same dialogue and sound effects as Sony’s game. Hopefully, the company doesn’t force them to take it down, and appreciates a surprisingly faithful ode to a particular era of games.