Scary movies are my jam. Second only to science fiction, horror is a genre that I love to watch because it’s just so darn exciting! Free from the constraints of reality, horror explores the darkest corners of your mind and exploits your deepest fears. It’s pure, unadulterated creativity.
One of the things I loved most about Dark Souls when I played it was how it wasn’t your standard sword-and-sorcery take on fantasy. Yes, there were dragons and knights and kings, but also horrible demons and misshapen abominations. It was, as the name suggested, dark.
However, I’ve mentioned before that my overall experience with the game was less than stellar. Sub-par world design and an overhyped fan base led me to walk away feeling a bit let down. It was a good foundation, though, and I was interested to see where From Software took it in their subsequent games. When I purchased a PS4 just last year, I was able to take a crack at one such effort. Luckily for me, the next game in the queue was much darker than Dark Souls.
This was Bloodborne.
Who: Me, a traveler from a foreign land. Where: Yharnam, a city built on the ruins left by an ancient race. When: the night of The Hunt.
Bloodborne’s lore is as dense as that of any game from director Hidetaka Miyazaki, but try I’ll give you the quick version as best anyone can. Decades ago, scholars at the prestigious Byrgenwerth College discovered the ruins of a race of people had made contact the Great Ones; beings who exist in our world but are invisible to us because they exist on a higher plane of existence than our minds can comprehend. These Great Ones, however, are not immortal, and die like any other being. The scholars of Byrgenwerth studied the blood of the Great Ones, found in ancient tombs, and used it for Blood Ministration, believing it to both cure ailments and elevate oneself to the a position to make contact with Great Ones. Vicar Laurence would go on to found the Healing Church, an organization that brought this process of ministration to the people of Yharnam. Byrgenwerth’s founder, Willem, did not feel that blood ministration was a wise practice (hence his catch phrase “Fear the Old Blood”), and believed that turning one’s eyes inward was the way forward. The Healing Church grew in popularity, right up until the blood began to have a different effect on the citizens of Yharnam. Horrible mutations began to occur: everyday citizens turned into wretched goblins, heavy users of blood into giant mindless beasts, and even the churches founders, Laurence and Ludwig, were eventually transformed into nightmarish creatures. To stop the spread of this blood borne disease, Gehrman started The Hunt. The beasts needed to be destroyed. The source of this nightmare needed to be slain.
There’s also a bunch of weird stuff about miscarriages, giant spiders, and if you eat three umbilical cords to get to fight the moon. It’s a strange game.
As dense as the lore is, none of it critical to enjoying Bloodborne. The giant salad of words above comes from me piecing together elements of the game I’d found over the two months I’d played it. Even now, I’m sure there is a ton of stuff I’m missing. No, the story is just an excuse to justify the aesthetics, which, in turn, informs the gameplay. Every bit of lore was written as way to craft the most horrifying and pitiful visuals I’ve ever seen in a work of art. Ever. From Lovecraftian monsters to sequences of grotesque body horror, Bloodborne relishes in the nightmarish. But it does so tastefully, never going for shocking or explicit visuals just because it can. There is genuine emotion that goes into every inch of artwork on display.
Here’s an example! Kos is a Great One. Well, was a Great One. Kos was slaughered by the dumb Yharnamites who were trying to study and make contact with her. In their foolishness, they killed her and left her corpse on the beach to rot. Kos, unbeknownst to them, was pregnant. So when terrible mutations began to affect those living in the nearby fishing hamlet, who could be surprised? Eventually, as you press on, your character winds up on the beach where Kos’s body is decaying. Out from her body crawls her offspring; her orphan. This creature is gnarly. He’s all skin and bones from the lack of nourishment, he’s still got his mother’s placenta attached to him, and he can’t speak. He just stares and the moon and cries. When you approach, he lashes out and the absolute hardest boss battle I’ve ever faced in any video game ensues. It’s a temper tantrum…he’s screaming and crying because he’s alone and confused. He has powers he can’t comprehend and he throws a fit because he just doesn’t understand. The Orphan of Kos is absolutely pathetic to observe and is ultimately heartbreaking to put down when it comes time to end his misery.
I talk about the lore and art of this game not just because I like it (to be clear, I absolutely love it), but because it gives the player purpose. This is not mindless monster hunting. It is not senseless violence in pursuit of racking up a high score. All of this serves to reinforce a theme: This is a world of dangerous beasts. They need to be hunted, and you are a hunter.
We’ll come back to theming in a bit. But for now, let’s dive into mechanics. This is a game, after all, and games have mechanics. So let’s ask ourselves a big, overarching question: What is the core mechanic of every game?
“That’s impossible to answer,” you say. And, at first glance, you’d be right to say that. The core mechanic of Super Mario Bros. is jumping. The core mechanic of Doom is shooting. The core mechanic of Metroid is exploring. There are too many genres of games to boil them all down to one core mechanic, right? To that, I say “Fie!” For there is one core mechanic that unites all games under one umbrella.
The core mechanic of every game is that they are played.
Now doesn’t that sound fucking stupid? Preposterous, even. That’s like saying “the goal of every movie is for them to be watched!” Well…show me the lie! What’s false about that? So what’s false about a game being crafted around the idea that it must be played in order to be completed?
I’ll cut to the chase. There is a trend in video games right now, primarily shooters, that I absolutely hate. This is the trend of regenerating health. Games like Gears of War and Halo don’t provide you with a health bar for you to monitor. Instead, as you take damage, your screen gets redder and redder until your character dies. When you get injured, it’s incumbent upon you to duck behind some boxes while you auto-heal. Once you’ve hidden long enough, you can lean back out and fire off a few more shots. I hate this trend for a very simple reason: when I’m hiding behind cover, I’m not playing the game.
Regenerating health, essentially, rewards you for removing yourself from the action. It encourages you to put yourself in time-out. It supports your passive instincts. And I hate it.
So the flip side, then, is a health bar; a quantifiable measure of your ability to control your avatar. When you get injured, your health goes down and you, the player, have to fix it. Do you stay the course? Do you retreat? It depends on the situation, of course, and decision lies with you. You’re playing the game.
Bloodborne takes this even further. Bloodborne not only encourages you to get in the thick of battle, it punishes you for your cowardice. Let’s break down that first half: encouraging you to fight. Your health bar actually has two visual markers on it, though you may not notice it at first. Your health bar is big and red, but there is a white notch as well. Almost all of the time, the white marker is at the right edge of the red bar, signifying your maximum vitality. When you take damage, however, the white notch teleports into the middle of the red bar, though the red hasn’t shrunk yet. The game is telling you something: this is how low your health will drop, unless you do something about. For about five or six seconds after taking damage, you have the ability to earn some of that health back and move that white notch back to the right. After those precious few seconds expire, the red bar retracts back to where the notch is located. This is the game encouraging you to play it. If you take damage, don’t just write that health off as gone, get back in the fight and earn it back! Fight for your life, literally!
Let’s look at the second half of my original sentence: punishing you for cowardice. Bloodborne’s combat looks very similar to Dark Souls on the surface. You have a health bar and a stamina bar. You can only dodge and attack so long as you have stamina left in the tank; once it depletes, you’ve overextended yourself and are opened up for an attack. It forces players to think about their actions and not just mash buttons as fast as they can. Dark Souls is very deliberate in nature. You have a shield that can protect you from most attacks that come your way. It drains your stamina to deflect a swipe of a sword, but you’re protected all the same. Because of this, you play slowly. You hide behind your shield and get your hits in where you can. Bloodborne does away with the shield. There is no hiding from monsters. Furthermore, Bloodborne’s creatures almost all have attacks that are powerful at a distance. The Cleric Beast can jump from across the arena and slam down with deadly force, Micolash can summon a deadly wave of magic that covers the entire floor, and Rom can summon meteors from miles away. If you keep your distance, they will come for you. When you get up close, beasts will swing their fists or stomp their feet or gnash their teeth. They’ll still attack, but these are attacks you can predict and dodge. A swing from Lady Maria’s sword can be avoided by a sidestep; a rain of fire from above cannot. Put them on the defensive!
Bloodborne’s removal of the Dark Souls shield wasn’t absolute, however. Players were given something to compensate: a gun. Though it doesn’t do much damage, the gun plays an important role in combat. When an enemy attacks, a shot from your gun will stagger them. Once staggered, they fall to their knees, which allows the player to come in with a brutal visceral attack, dealing more damage in one slice than a dozen of your best standard attacks combined. This parry system offers an excellent reward for you: massive damage in exchange for mastering timing. Don’t run when they attack, fight back!
My laborious explanation of Bloodborne’s combat mechanics exists to illustrate a point. Yes, they are complex and rewarding and thoughtful. They are also super thematically on-brand. These aggressive monsters will fight you with everything they’ve got, so it’s your job to bring the fight to them. After all, this is a world of dangerous beasts. They need to be hunted, and you are a hunter.
Boiling things down to “themes are important” would be pretty reductive. Themes aren’t important, they are everything. Art can be beautiful and haunting and memorable, gameplay can be engaging and fun and challenging, and stories can be intriguing and complex and dramatic, but if each of these elements are disconnected from one another, things don't feel cohesive. Disparate elements, though strong on their own, need to be held together by thematic binding. It’s what makes things feel right.
This is why (brace for impact) Bloodborne is miles better than Dark Souls. The latter has you playing a person in a world with gorgeous art but poor level design, combat that is far more bland, and a story that is interesting to observe but never really felt. The former, however, revolves around a single idea: you are a hunter. The level design is tighter and rewards you for hunting, combat encourages you to be a proactive hunter, and the story gives your hunt purpose. Dark Souls is a game. Bloodborne is an idea.
The importance of the “idea” can’t be understated. The “idea” is the theme. It’s the structure. It’s the purpose. Our minds don’t like the random or the disparate, they like patterns and consistency. When the parts comes together, it feels like a completed idea. I get to take part in the idea. I get to participate in the theme.
I get to be the hunter.
Post Script
The level design and enemies of Bloodborne are top notch. It’s amazing how diverse the game can be while still feeling like everything belongs. That being said, it wouldn’t be a From Software game without the bosses. So, in no real particular order (except for the first one), here are my favorite bosses of Bloodborne. I've linked them to videos of other people fighting them!
Martyr Logarius – Perched atop the snow-covered roof of Cainhurst Castle sits my absolute favorite boss of the game. He starts off easy…a man with a magic sword who will swing if you get close, but spawn magic skulls that swoop towards you if you run away. Halfway through, his magic gets more intense. He’ll pull out a second sword, jam into the ground, and magic beams will fly through space to stab you. That’s nearly impossible to avoid. The first five or so attempts kicked my ass. Once that sword was plunged, I couldn’t catch my breath. I was running away from the beams and Logarius was running after me. I realized then, of course, that I was running away. I was playing like it was Dark Souls. I needed to play like Bloodborne. My next attempt saw me run in guns blazing, so to speak. I fought more aggressively, even recklessly, than I had all game. The result? Logarius never got a chance to plunge his sword into the ground. I never game him the chance. That was a victory.
Father Gascoigne – If you’ve never played a Miyazaki joint, you’d think the first boss is easy. You’re still learning, right? Nope! Father Gascoigne was a skill-check; a way to prove to the game you’d successfully learned the mechanics and were worthy of progressing. Gascoigne moves fast and hits hard. Thankfully, I had spent my time in Yharnam really focusing on learning how to use my pistol, so parrying his hunter’s axe proved effective and rewarding.
Mergo’s Wet Nurse – There is a demigod who watches over the empty bassinet of the Queen’s miscarried child. A grotesque, multi-armed fiend, Mergo’s Wet Nurse is a wonderful blend of magical mystery and good old-fashion swordplay. This boss attempts to pull the rug out from under you a few times, but if you stay on top of your game, she’ll be done in no time.
Ludwig the Accursed – Ludwig was an oft spoken of, but never seen, cleric from the Healing Church. Like everyone who participated in Blood Ministration, he eventually succumbed to the scourge, mutating (with his horse), into a two-headed, centaur-esque monstrosity. He fights like beast in his first form, bucking and kicking and trampling his way through combat. Halfway through the battle, however, he finds his Holy Moonlight Greatsword and suddenly he stands upright, fighting like the hunter he once was. It’s the most dynamic battle in the game, full of surprising twists and turns.
Orphan of Kos – While the second form of the orphan is an absolute controller-smashing nightmare, the first half is so good that this boss makes the list. This guy, as I mentioned above, is a childish demigod, and he hits like a freaking freight train. It’s incredibly hard to even find an opening in his attacks, let alone a reliable method to get in your hits. After a few dozen deaths, however, you’ll soon realize that the Orphan of Kos’s moveset is meant to mess with your head. You need to unlearn your techniques and recalibrate for his big, swinging placenta of doom. Once you learn to fight your instincts and act opposite your gut, this guy will finally be put to bed.
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