Does Lovecraftian horror interest you? Do you think you could muster fighting unfathomable monstrosities with blade weapons while carefully dodging and parrying their attacks? Do you not mind grinding areas and bosses until you conquer them?

If the answer is yes, you might have what it takes to enjoy Bloodborne!

It was my first Souls game and like for many others, just getting through its first level was a combination of fear, frustration and small victories. But by the time you manage to defeat the first boss just barely, there is nothing quite like the feeling of conquering what on all your previous tries seemed nearly impossible. That just got me hooked on the series so hard that I have played every From Software Souls game at this point and still consider Bloodborne to be the best.

To me it’s the combination of its setting, visuals, art style, game mechanics and level design that make it such a great game.

If you own a PS4 or 5, it’s available on PS Plus so if you have that, you can try it out!

Splatoon 3

It’s a 4v4 third-person shooter, bright and colorful, and has a heavy emphasis on movement and stealth. Your character is a humanoid, shape shifting squid called an ‘Inkling’ (or an octopus called an ‘octoling’) with weapons that shoot and spread ink. Once your ink has been spread on the ground (or walls) you can turn into squid-form to submerge for stealth and swim through your ink. Your ink will cover up enemy ink as well as damage and kill your opponents, and vis a versa. Touching enemy ink greatly inhibits your movement, and it cannot be swam through.

Your load-out (kit) consists of three parts, a Main weapon, a Sub weapon, and a Special weapon. Your Main and Sub weapons draw ink from a tank on your characters back, and ink is replenished by swimming through ink you have already spread. Special weapons have to be charged up by painting a certain amount before they can be used.

The main weapons consist of guns called ‘shooters’, sniper rifles called ‘chargers’, gatling guns called ‘splatlings’, dual wields called ‘dualies’, and inventive classes like umbrella-shield shot guns, buckets, brushes, swords, and (paint) rollers. Sub weapons consist of various grenades and bombs, as well as enemy marking tools, and beacons that you drop on the map which you and your teammates can jump to at any point during the match from anywhere on the map. Special weapons consist of outrageous missile strikes, vacuums that suck up enemy ink, drinks that buff you and your teammates movement stats and respawn time temporarily. . . And a tank. . . And Goku’s Spirit Bomb.

The quick-play mode is called ‘Turf War’. It’s a 3 minute bout where the objective is to paint the floor of the arena majority of your color before the round ends. Kills are irrelevant, but dead squids can’t paint.

Then there are the four objective-based competitive modes. Splat Zones, a king-of-the-hill style mode where you need to maintain majority control of a set, highlighted area on the arena to count down a timer; Rainmaker, which is like capture the flag except the flag is a powerful but movement inhibiting grenade launcher and has to be pushed into the enemy base instead of returned to your base; Tower Control, there is a mobile tower that starts in the center and moves slowly along a set path into enemy territory while a player rides on top of it vulnerable and exposed; and lastly Clam Blitz–an absolutely one-of-a-kind mode that’s very unique to Splatoon–Clams spawn in groups of 3 around the map, collect 8 clams to build a ‘Power Clam’ which is capable of temporarily opening the enemy basket, once the basket is open you can throw in individual clams (or more Power Clams) to score points.

There’s also a PvE horde mode called Salmon Run where you need to kill ‘Boss Salmonids’ which drop ‘Golden Eggs’ which you have to shuttle to a collection point.

Lastly there’s Gear. You dress your character with a head-piece, shirt, and shoes. The Gear you choose to wear has ability modifiers like buffing running or swimming speed, improving the rate you recover ink, saving on ink consumption for you Main and Sub weapons, or improve your respawn time. The more you wear of a certain ability the more effect there is, but there are diminishing returns.

It’s a phenomenal game (franchise) which I’ve sunk thousands of hours into and I can’t recommend it enough.

I noticed that this post triggered Calckey to duplicate it several times. Did you edit the main post like four or five times? I’m curious what causes it.