Review by Ian Keogh

Yharnam is a city stalked by merciless emissaries of darkness who slaughter the innocent and unwary. Fortunately it’s also home to Hunters, who as their name suggests, put paid to threats. In The Lady of the Lanterns Cullen Bunn and Piotr Kowalski showed how Abraham and Gretchen saved Lucien, but he’s reckless in wanting to prove himself and as The Bleak Dominion starts he’s been abducted elsewhere. They follow.

Bunn transfers the aims of the game on which Bloodborne is based to comics well. He has all the main cast wandering around a subterranean labyrinth encountering assorted imaginatively designed horrors, just as you would if playing. Lucien is a complicated character for someone so young. This being a mystical world, we don’t know for sure if he’s hearing his sister’s voice in his head, or actually haunted by her ghost. If the latter, she’s persuasive in isolating him.

You’d have to have experienced the game to know whether Piotr Kowalski is an astounding designer as well as an astounding artist, but the horrors he has populating the pages aren’t creatures you’d want to see anywhere. They’re distorted and perverted mimicries of humanity or twisted memories of something that was once human, and are designed to generate nightmares. Even if Kowalski didn’t design them himself, he’s responsible for the detailed and foreboding locations and the phenomenal action sequences, all drawn in a loose grainy style increasingly reminiscent of the work Guy Davis produces.

In addition to seeing Lucien’s recent past, Bunn shows Abraham’s earlier past, including his baptism of fire, the moment that proved him, and the guilt that haunts Gretchen. It’s all leading up to a finale where nothing is certain beforehand and by which point the three main characters have become well established. How many of them will be around for the next instalment?

Bloodborne has always been an interesting form of horror, and Bunn and Kowalski have raised it a notch.