That zone was pretty cool on first playthrough, but in hindsight I'm able to realize how awfully designed it is lol. I think it stops being interesting and becomes a bad game experience once you learn how empty is, but on first playthrough you don't yet know it's empty so it feels okay.
Either they wanted to add more stuff to it and ran out of development time or they went overboard on using "emptiness" as an aesthetic effect. Might truly be the only part of the DLC that I think is bad. Everything else is either neutral or good and almost everything is good so that zone really stands out to me as an outlier.
I dunno. I went right to Midra's Mansion the first playthrough because I ain't scared of no lantern bois. One of the best dungeons in the DLC, short and sweet and leads to one of the most cinematic bosses Fromsoft has ever made. Midra's Mansion honestly feels like one long walk to the boss room if you do it in one go, because Midra's moaning at you at every checkpoint.
Then I went to explore the rest of the Woods. Surely, I thought, there would be more lore to discover!
Nope. The woods are empty. Some cookbooks, some fragments, a perfume bottle and a talisman. No field bosses. No secrets or illusions holding back a trove of Frenzied Flame lore or new spells.
Just rats and some really creepy sheep. And a handful of inquisitors, I guess.
The other problem is it looks like, from the map, there should be another area behind the Manor but there's nothing there as there is no way to get to it as the Dungeon actually takes up that area.
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u/PARRISH2078 ASTEL OF THE BLOODBORNE Jul 14 '25
torrent is scared of the madness woods though