Video game “demakes,” in which creators take a modern title and reimagine it as a much older, retro-style, game, is an interesting genre, one which strips the assets of modernity and faithfully recreates any number of entries as though they were from a different gaming era. One recent example of this is the fan who is creating a demake of Resident Evil 7, which gives it a classic PSX look. One other that many have been keeping an eye on is a retro, yet faithful, recreation of FromSoftware’s 2015 gothic action RPG Bloodborne, and the developer has now decided to add something of a relic of the past.
In a recent post on Twitter, user b0tster, who’s real name is Lilith Walther, has provided a few teaser clips of some new assets being added into their visual downgrade of Bloodborne. Essentially, what the dev is doing is adding cheat codes into their mid-1990s PlayStation recreation. However, to help fascilitate the ease with which these codes can be entered, they’ve also gone ahead and added in a digital keyboard to the game, which the first tweet shows off with the classic programming “HELLO WORLD” being entered in the menu.
In terms of the cheats themselves, additional tweets show a couple of them off, such as turning the protagonist’s hands into Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots-style fists, a time dilation one which changes the speed of the game, and a mode that makes the enemy dogs stop attacking. There’s also a “big head” mode which is perhaps a call-back to the era of Goldeneye 64 cheats.
While there are some modern games that do incorporate cheats, such as GTA 5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops, it’s a practice that has fallen off the wayside over the years. Walther’s demake is evidently a way to reintroduce this almost-forgotten idea. Walther also seemed to agree with one commenter in the thread who pined for the days when video games had cheat codes.
With the Bloodborne PS1 demake being released on January 31, there is still some time for the developer to perhaps add a few more bits into the game, or extra cheats. While they have said in the past that this won’t be a recreation of the entire game, it’s an impressive project all the same that will likely win older gamers over, especially those who remember the likes of Nightmare Creatures on the original PlayStation console.
Bloodborne is available on PS4.
