The Bloodborne Demake Has Just Got A New Trailer
The nostalgia for the era of the PlayStation 1 is at an all-time high right now. Horror games with low-poly, low-resolution PS1 style graphics are big in the indie community, but something called 'demakes' have picked up steam in the past few years. With the most notable of them all being Bloodborne PSX.
What Is A Video Game Demake?
Click to enlargeFor those who don’t know, a demake (or sometimes, a demaster) is essentially the opposite of a remake. Instead of focusing on more graphical fidelity and bringing the game into the new generation, demakes instead opt to wind back the years on a title.
Lower-poly models with less detail, chunky pixels, compressed audio, rigid animations, old TV scan lines, and more are all par for the course here. It’s a challenge of trying to represent and capture the spirit of a game, refining it into the core of the experience, just through the lens of an older generation of gaming.
Some demakes also go about changing the gameplay and genre entirely. The 16-bit Halo demake is a good example of this, that emulates older side-scrolling action games like Contra, but with a Halo skin.
What Is Bloodborne PSX?
Bloodborne PSX is the demake of From Software’s 2015 Soulsborne title, designed by independent game developer Lilith Walther. She has previously stated that it won’t be a full remake of the entire game, instead replicating some areas and fights from the beginning of Bloodborne.
If you’re interested, you can check out updates for the project over on her Twitter, where she just released gameplay of the first ten minutes. The footage shows the game's beginning, as The Hunter (Bloodborne’s protagonist) is strapped to a table before having a scarily close encounter with one of the game's werewolves.
We saw some of the combat, which had to be slightly rebalanced by Lilith when designing the game, such as toning down one-hit kills and giving the player some self-healing options. The UI and HUD have also undergone some changes, to make them closer to the design of older PS1 titles, such as the spinning items in the inventory, reminiscent of older Resident Evil.
Right now, there still seems to be no word on the release date for Bloodborne PSX. Lilith is still working on another game with Heartstring Studios called Witch, described as an "indie JRPG", so it could be a while, considering it’s mostly a side project.
