Bloodletter (PC) Early Access Preview

My subject today is the current Early Access release of Bloodletter, developed and published by Aldamami Games. Bloodletter is a horror-themed Rogue-like deckbuilder in which you call upon your knowledge about healing both the human body and soul to protect a medieval village and its several bizarre inhabitants from various ancient evil entities. The blight wreaked by those malevolent forces affects the bodies and spirits of the villagers in your care. Both the body and the spirit must be treated simultaneously to cure victims. You, as a barber-surgeon, are the only person around who knows how to treat these blights on both fronts.

Thus, it’s your duty to keep the villagers alive and healthy while also driving off the evil gods that plague them. That brings me to Bloodletter’s core gameplay loop. In each run of Bloodletter (called “matches”), you start by choosing which evil god you want to face and your preferred difficulty setting out of those you’ve unlocked. You’ll only have a couple of choices until after you’ve won a few runs. Winning runs gets you “meta Bloodstones,” which you can then spend to unlock new evil gods and higher difficulty levels. As is tradition among Rogue-likes, you’re intended to fail frequently and grow progressively stronger.

You start out with a small deck of cards that you can play when treating villagers. Your cards depict (usually horrifying) methods you can use to treat the bodies and spirits of any villagers who come to see you at your bathhouse. Each villager has four stats you’ll have to keep an eye on: Health, purity, sickness, and trust (or distrust) toward you. If any villager reaches zero health or purity, they’ll die. Even in runs you ultimately win, villager deaths will count against you. If three villagers die, you lose the current run and have to try again.

Each in-game day in Bloodletter is divided into three parts: Daytime, evening, and nightfall. During the day, you’ll be able to treat anywhere from three to five villagers and improve those four important stats I mentioned. The catch is, except in one specific circumstance I’ll explain later, which villagers come to see you on any given day is random. That means you might not be able to help a villager whose death is imminent just because randomness wasn’t in their favor when they needed you most. That’s compounded by the possibility that relatively healthy villagers might see you instead of those more desperate.

While treating patients during an in-game day, you can play cards from your deck to raise their health and/or purity (ideally both whenever possible), remove stacks of sickness they may have, and change whether they trust or distrust you. Making sure as many patients as possible trust you is particularly important: As long as a patient trusts you, you’ll be able to play up to three cards to treat them. If they don’t trust you, you’ll only be able to play up to two cards. The trust mechanic also affects gameplay in other potentially significant ways I’ll get to shortly.

Depending on the size of your deck and luck of the draw, you may not be able to help every patient every day. When you’ve done all you can (if anything) for a patient, you ring the bell on your desk to dismiss them and bring in whoever is next in line. Each time you ring the bell, the cards you played most recently are added to your deck’s “discard pile,” and you draw cards from your “draw pile” until you reach your maximum hand size. Many cards have negative aspects that may require you to make sacrifices.

For example, you might be stuck playing cards that increase a patient’s purity meter at the cost of some of their health, or increase either of those while adding stacks of sickness you’ll eventually have to treat. Getting each patient’s purity meter as high as possible is your main priority behind trying to make sure no villagers die. A meter on the left side of your HUD will tell you the combined purity of all villagers. When that meter reaches certain thresholds, you extract a “Bloodstone” from the malevolent god you’re trying to purge. You win the run by extracting every available Bloodstone.

When you’ve treated every patient on any given day, evening falls. You’ll choose one villager to visit each evening out of all living villagers who trust you. Each villager has a unique perk that can benefit you for the rest of the run. These include things like upgrading or duplicating cards. The Midwife’s unique ability allows you to select which villagers will come to see you the following day. Once you’ve done that, nighttime begins. That’s when the evil god will wreak havoc by draining health and purity from villagers, making them sick, and/or making them distrust you.

These effects grow more severe with each in-game day that passes during a run. That’s the main reason you’ll want to focus on extracting all available Bloodstones as quickly as you can. I like the way Bloodletter makes the player feel like doctors often do in desperate times. You want to fully cure all your patients right away, but circumstances you can’t totally control prevent you from doing so. Bloodletter’s setting and core gameplay loop are a notable example of having to make the best of a terrible situation.

On that same token, Bloodletter’s Rogue-like elements help the player incrementally make their situation less dire in enjoyable ways. However, there are a fair few things I dislike about Bloodletter, many of which will hopefully be addressed during its tenure in Early Access. The only voice acting I’ve encountered in Bloodletter is in its opening cinematic, and the voice acting is rather weird. It sounds to me like the person doing the voiceover was trying to fake a British accent, but kept rapidly switching between gaining and losing that accent. That’s jarring, especially considering how many changes there are even within one sentence.

I suspect I may have encountered a potentially major bug in one part of Bloodletter’s core gameplay loop. When you use a certain villager’s ability to increase the number of cards you can choose from as rewards, any additional cards other than the three you’d usually be offered are positioned behind the others so that you can’t click on them or select them. In fairness, I’m not sure if this actually is a bug or if there’s something I’m doing wrong to make this situation appear to be a mistake. Regardless, hopefully Aldamami Games can sort that out.

There are several cards you can add to your deck that allow you to discard cards from your hand. My issue is that the wording of these cards’ effects makes it seem like playing these cards then means you’re required to discard cards from your hand, even though you’re usually not. These cards’ effects should be changed to say something like “you may discard X amount of cards.” There needs to be clear communication as to when the player is and is not required to do something, whether it be discarding cards from their hand or anything else.

Bloodletter’s Steam Store page mentions “dubious healing methods” and “bizarre villagers.” Those descriptions are so accurate that it’s possible the more horror-themed aspects of Bloodletter will be disturbing for some players. I know that isn’t a universal sentiment, especially among players who aren’t as averse to horror games as I typically am, but I thought it was worth mentioning regardless. I also have to “be that guy” once again: I’ve noticed a few minor errors in spelling and grammar within Bloodletter. As usual, these errors don’t affect gameplay at all, but I feel compelled to point them out since I noticed them.

A few examples of those errors are the in-game statistic that lists your number of “successfull” purges of each evil god and the book you can look through that “containts” information about each villager and all the cards you’ve encountered. My complaints are all reasons I’m glad Bloodletter is launching into Steam Early Access for a while. Hopefully, that will give Aldamami Games enough time to address this sort of feedback from players. Bloodletter has certainly impressed me enough to make me want to keep a close eye on how its development progresses leading up to its full 1.0 release.

A PC review copy of Bloodletter was provided by Aldamami Games for the purposes of this preview.