Grave Considerations: Bloodborne

I spent a lot of time this summer playing video games. While this is not an unusual pursuit for me, I feel like I played A LOT of video games this summer. I worked my way through all three games in the Dark Souls series, and the new God of War, which I really, really enjoyed while playing and then promptly forgot about once it was finished. I started Monster Hunter World and Breath of the Wild, the latter of which I’ve really been enjoying, and I also was about halfway through my fourth playthrough of one of the best games I’ve ever played: the Dark Souls-adjacent gothic cosmic horror fest Bloodborne.

Bloodborne and I had a real rocky start a few years back. The opening stage of the game was proving to be overly frustrating to me, as I wasn’t used to the gameplay and the general oeuvre of the game, at that point in time being unfamiliar with the Souls game as a genre. I spent almost an entire Saturday, home alone, swearing at the television to the point of utter madness, making some degree of forward progress in the games’ opening stage – literally going straight down a street – before being killed and losing all of the Blood Echoes I’d acquired and having to start over again. Something happened at some point, and I made a breakthrough, and then I never looked back. Thanks to Bloodborne, I would attempt the Souls series again, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

The story of Bloodborne is, at first, pretty simple: a plague has swept through the town of Yharnam, and you are a Hunter, tasked with cleaning house. Oh, yeah, if you happen to search for a cure or cause for this beast plague, cool. The path of debeasting Yharnam will ultimately lead you to discovering the shadowy history of the Healing Church and ultimately the Great Ones, a race of Lovecraftian extranormal god-like beings. The primary motivation of the game is slaughter, and this causes some interesting character developments as the game progresses.

One thing that is hard to ignore in Bloodborne is the idea that, contrary to what the other Souls  games would have taught you, aggression is encouraged. While the Dark Souls games generally punish aggression and wild behavior, Bloodborne wants you to rush down an alley, swinging your saw, without trying to assess things. Leap before you look would seem to be the mantra here. Make no mistake: doing so still results in your death far more often than not, though. Rather than using the now-familiar healing system of the Souls games, Bloodborne employs a mechanic that allows the player to regain lost HP by attacking and damaging an enemy. This most definitely rewards aggressive behavior, actually incentivizing it. Also, gone is any type of blocking or defensive play, and parrying is now done via firearms and stunning opponents, not through blocking or shield-based moves. Takes some getting used to, and ends up being very aggravating, even after multiple trips through the game.

But this is indicative of a true strength of the game: the game makes you play it by becoming a Hunter, and embracing the Hunt. Your character is supposed to go out into the Yharnam night and revel in killing, believing that you’re doing something good. The town is overrun with beast people after all, and residents are holed up inside their homes or churches or places of sanctuary to protect themselves from the beasts. You’re doing something good by killing them, right?

Well. . . .

The real story of Bloodborne is that the Healing Church has been involved in blood ministration for a long time, because they are trying to contact and commune with the Great Ones, a race of ancient cosmic deities that quite frankly don’t seem to care about the machinations of humanity, but are given this god-like reverence by the Church and the scholars of Byrgenwyrth. NPCs and hints nudge you in the direction of thinking something more is happening in Yharnam than previously announced, and following those things bring you into contact with an array of these Great Ones: Rom, the Vaccuous Spider; Ebrietas, the Daughter of the Cosmos; Amygdala, and a whole host of lesser Amygdala; the Brain of Mensis; the laughable Celestial Emissary, the horrible wet nurse of the newly born Mergo; the Moon Presence; and then, if one engages in The Old Hunters DLC, the Orphan of Kos. Not all of those are mandatory confrontations, but if one wants the entire story, then they are necessary.  In that great Lovecraftian sense, the more the player learns about the world of Bloodborne, the more they are drawn into the prevailing sense of madness that has enveloped Yharnam. Deeper investigation yields slivers of information, but mainly more and more difficult questions. Nothing is ever clear, and most conclusions are reached via a small amount of detail and a lot of piecing it together, and some good old interpretation.

This is a great reality of the game world, as well. At the center of everything is the Healing Church, who had discovered the Old Ones and tried to commune with them, ultimately attempting to ascend and/or become like them. This resulted in a lot of wild and horrific experiments, both surgical and ultimately, I guess, chemical, as the process of blood ministration begins and then is held in opposition by a faction of the church that tries to gain insight or favor of the Old Ones. For their part, the Old Ones are largely docile and don’t really seem to care one way or the other whether the Church succeeds or fails; again, in the Lovecraftian tradition, these celestial beings are mostly unconcerned with the machinations of people. The twist here is that the Old Ones are not really concerned with anything, and they don’t seem to have much agency I the world. Only the wet nurse is around to fulfill a function: Ebrietas and the Brain are prisoners, and Rom is a transmogrified human who now shields humanity from the truth of the Old Ones. Amygdala and company are apparently worshipped as chaos deities, and the Moon Presence only appears when you have fulfilled the criteria to be transmogrified into an Old One yourself. Kos, who the DLC reveals is the progenitor of the Church’s hands-on dealings with this celestial host, has washed ashore dead or was killed by agents of the nascent Healing Church. By all accounts, none of the Old Ones were even trying to engage with the humans, but were instead forced to.

It’s a classic story of Man ruining Nature.

Or a classic story of Man, in his desire for knowledge, ruining Man.

So an interesting thing develops while one is playing Bloodborne. The player starts to understand, if they’re paying any real degree of attention and not just slashing their way through a city, that in a world filled with wild and at times unspeakable horrors and questions cosmic in nature, and populated by characters seeking to exploit both the cosmic and the human for personal gains in knowledge or power, it is the player who is the real monster. You’re not cleansing Yharnam of the beast plague, you’re killing people, as the rogue Hunter Djura tells you. They’re not beasts, they are people, and you, along with how many others since the Hunt began are running around slaughtering them, without even questioning what or why you’re doing it. When you happen upon any of the Old Ones, you rush in and slay them, often just because they look monstrous. Old Ones like Rom and Ebrietas just kinda sit there for a minute, allowing you to look at them the first time you encounter them, before becoming aggressive because you attacked them first. Others, like Amygdala and the Orphan of Kos, attack you first because you are an invader into their space, and the lesser Amygdala seem to mainly be hanging around Yharnam (lol. –mr) observing and maybe punishing those who unwittingly at first get too close to learning the truth. And others, like the hapless Brain of Mensis, attacks you from afar, but when you get it in a compromised position, just sits there and looks at you until you make contact with it, whereupon it rewards you. Then, you can kill it, for no reason other than it is there and is different. This passivity occasionally extends to lesser enemies in the game as well, as the feral inhabitants of Yharnam sometimes won’t be immediately aggressive towards encroachment into their space, until the player attacks them or gets too close. This doesn’t mean one could complete the game sans aggression, but given the tendency of the player to rush in and attack anything that moves, it is a detail that is generally overlooked.

This, I guess you could call it a twist, is what really sets Bloodborne apart from other games I’ve played in my life. While it isn’t anything totally new or unique from a storytelling perspective, you are the monster in Bloodborne, you are the aggressor, you are the terrible evil that waits at the end. There is probably no better or clearer illustration of this than the opening stage of The Old Hunters DLC, which, presented in reverse chronological order, depicts enormous roots pulling the city of Yharnam into place, busting forth from the ground and anchoring the various buildings and structures in an off-kilter fashion, with the only stable and established (read: flat against the ground) buildings being the Grand Cathedral of the Healing Church, and the Chapel of Oedon.The Hunter isn’t saving anything or anyone, or performing any necessary or valiant service; the Hunter is a marauder, manipulated or lied to or maybe just plain bloodthirsty enough to wage this extermination campaign against the unfortunate victims of the Church.  

I really grew to love Bloodborne for its incredibly cool and deep lore, something that I came to love the other Souls games for as well. The overall atmosphere and presentation of the game is absolutely stunning, and if there was a game that felt like an October night near Halloween, this would be it. There are those who would point to what are apparently flaws in the game, but frankly, I don't think anything the game doesn't do well in any way is enough to overshadow its towering successes. Every night before I fall asleep, I hope a tiny hope that there will be news of a sequel, as this one leaves enough lore and cosmology unexplored so as to have a lot left over for future installments. But until any official word comes from FROM to grant us eyes, we are left to struggle with our limited understanding.

Fear the old blood, reader. Fear it.