When I first succumbed to the hype and decided to give Elden Ring a try, having never played a Souls game before, I bounced off the game pretty hard. There were just lots of things I didn’t like about the experience: the weird, annoying messages from other players; the general air of inscrutability, including the lack of clarity as to what I was supposed to be doing, let alone why; the sense that it was clearly a console game ported to PC; and the fact that the big dude on the horse kept handing me my arse on a platter polished gold to match his armor. But a few months later, while my wife was away for a couple of weeks, I decided on a whim to try again—and by the time she got back, I’d logged something like 200 hours in the game, died innumerable times, and managed to grind all the way to the final battle. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve played pretty much all of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games: Dark Souls I–III, Sekiro, and Nightreign. I haven’t finished any of them, to be clear. I’m still bad at them. But for some strange, possibly masochistic reason, I keep coming back to them. All of them but one: Bloodborne. Why? Well, I’ve never been a console person, and Miyazaki’s Gothic masterpiece remains, famously, a PlayStation exclusive. For over a decade, PC players have been hoping against hope that the game might one day come to Steam, but there’s no sign that this will ever happen—and if anything, the fact that Sony appears to be moving away from PC releases in general seems to have put the final nail in the game’s splintering wooden coffin.