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May 28, 2024

My First Level In Remnant 2 Was Basically Bloodborne, For Better And Worse

Remnant 2 feels great to play, but its reverence for FromSoft has its pitfalls. ‘Hmmm, beasts all over the shop,’ I think to myself, as I step out of the rutilant red crystal that transported me into

Remnant 2 feels great to play, but its reverence for FromSoft has its pitfalls.

‘Hmmm, beasts all over the shop,’ I think to myself, as I step out of the rutilant red crystal that transported me into the first proper level of Remnant 2. The damp cobbled streets disperse the light emanating from austere probably-paraffin street lights, discarded carts and carriages line the streets, and a thick gloom hangs over the town that just screams ‘Victorian London.’

Suddenly, a woman shouts in an archetypal Dickensian accent, “You’re not welcome ‘ere” before she and a gang of pasty gangly ne’er-do-wells charge down the street towards me with rusty blades and unwieldy rifles. As we start shooting and swinging at each other, a werewolf-like beast enters the fray, and a three-way scuffle ensues.

What bastards. It’s hard enough trying to get over FromSoft’s fantastic Bloodborne with it trending every other day on Twitter. Now I’m playing a level that’s clearly evoking that spirit, right down to the name (Morrow Parish). Seeing as Remnant 2 is ostensibly set some 40 years in the future from now, I don’t even know why my grizzled post-apocalyptic protagonist has suddenly been transported to Yharnam circa 1890, but here I am.

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What’s more, chatting with my fellow ‘shockers, Review King Rob Webb and Guides Master Jason Moth, it turns out that due to the miracle of procedural generation, our first levels are very different from each other, not just in terms of layout but actual setting. Jason’s found himself in an ‘Abyssal Rift,’ with flying alien thingies attacking him, while Rob Webb was transported to some Beatific Palace, which you can see below has serious Leyndell Royal Capital (Elden Ring) vibes; there’s even a king locked away inside!

And there’s nothing wrong with a bit of mimicry, especially as mechanically Remnant 2 has shades of Soulsy combat (dodge-based, stamina-restricted, crunchy-slashy, and punishing of mistakes) while ultimately doing its own thing. You have moddable guns with proper ammo supplies, cooldown-based super-abilities, and generally more of an action-game feel despite the RPG numbers underpinning everything. Moment by moment, Remnant 2 feels really good, and I can’t wait to jump in with our reviewer Rob Webb and Guides Master Jason Moth for some co-op action.

But the game is also guilty of doing what pretty much every Souls-like does, which is showing a little too much reverence to the FromSoft games that clearly inspired it. The problem in Remnant 2’s case is that the environments I’ve seen so far are so reminiscent of Bloodborne and Elden Ring, that it kinda puts into perspective how inferior these environments ultimately are to FromSoft’s.

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Take Central Yharnham Morrow Parish, for example. At a glance, my thoughts are ‘coooool Bloodborne!’ but after a little bit of traversal (and yes, multiple agonising deaths and restarts from the first checkpoint), the level’s artifice starts to become clear. Remember just how cluttered everything in Bloodborne was? Terrified, mad people gathering around bonfires, tons of coffins sealed with padlocks, sacks piled into barricades, smashable crates, barrels, the works. By comparison, Morrow Parish feels weirdly empty, and weirdly orderly. Yes, it’s all apocalyptic and grim, but where Bloodborne’s clutter would seem to almost be claustrophobically folding in around you, everything in Morrow Parish is kinda upright and neat. It’s like an incomplete studio set for a low-budget Bloodborne movie.

Then there’s the level design itself. Where Yharnam felt like a winding, weaving, layered city—ruined but clearly once lived-in—Morrow Parish is kinda flat, with only the occasional ladder giving you a bit of verticality. Depth-wise, Bloodborne was filled with buildings you could go into, doors to open, where you’d often uncover bits of world-building and more intimate details about the world. As of now, I’ve yet to find a single building to go into in Morrow Parish. I’m just a tourist skimming along the surface, not an anthropologist exploring and uncovering this weird place.

In short, Morrow Parish feels more like a game level than a ‘place’. That’s not the end of the world—Dark Souls 2 was built like that and despite many people criticising it for that very reason, it’s still very much worth playing—and from what I’ve played of Remnant 2 it’s got a lot of quality in other areas. The procedurally generated aspects trades off the sense of ‘lived in spaces’ for variation and greater scope for surprises, and I’m interested to see just how much my playthrough varies from that of other players, and how much mileage that offers. In a way, it feels like an analogy for AI as a whole: impressive in its efficiency, but lacking that crucial human touch.

But when you build levels that evoke the streets of Yharnam, or Elden Ring’s royal capital, players will compare them, consciously or not, and to this day no FromSoft-inspired game has come close to matching the splendour of FromSoft level design.

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Robert is Lead Features Editor at DualShockers, arriving at the DS court after six years of freelancing for sites like PC Gamer, VG247, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more. Enjoys immersive sims and emergent stories, and has crowbarred more mods into games than Gordon Freeman has crowbarred headcrabs.