We love BLOODBORNE because it’s insane
Did we mention there’s blood?
You missed almost every interactable character when you played Bloodborne back in 2015. You’re not probably someone who missed them, you are someone who missed them, and that’s because you are a Sane Human Being who plays games the way they are designed to be played. Getting the full story of any FromSoftware game requires reading every item description and backtracking to talk to every NPC once every forty minutes when you obtain an item called “Morgoth’s Eye of Fucking Idiots” or something. But no, instead of doing that, you played the game the way a Sane Human Being does, and when you saw the ending, you said “this is one of the greatest experiences of my life and I have no idea what just happened.” Welcome to the FromSoftware experience. It should be bad. It should be excruciating. But it’s liberating.
What I’ve described, a game that does not cater to Sane Human Beings, is not a one-time experiment for the megahit studio. It’s instead the model for every single pre-Sekiro game they produced before someone finally said “what if we actually showed the story to the player?” Such a sentence would normally indicate a studio in peril of bankruptcy and/or creating an NFT, but instead it was made by one of the most beloved darlings in the industry. These games are titans among weirdos like me. My daughter’s name is Bloodborne Dark Souls and neither she nor I have any friends. FromSoft creations are gripping in such a unique way that they are constantly being reverse-engineered by MBAs desperate to make a videogame without the burden of originality. And while the gameplay is absolutely central to this studio’s unique voice, a strong part of that identity is the fact that the unhinged narrative structure itself is a part of the package.
I’m towards the end of my playthrough commemorating the ten year anniversary of Bloodborne (Micolash in NG+1 is a piece of shit), and hindsight is making things crystal clear regarding what made this an all-timer among a portfolio of all-timers. There is the obvious, beaten-to-death fact that you are encouraged to be more aggressive than in all other Terrifying Combat games (a genre name I will use instead of the virginity-inducing ‘Soulslike’), to the point where the only shield present in the game has a description stating that “a shield is nice, but not if it engenders passivity” (absolutely savage description). And there’s also the Lovecraftian story that would never be known to anyone who only played through the first couple bosses before quitting. But what makes this game really stand out is that it made those changes while retaining FromSoftware’s completely unhinged storytelling and structure.
Other games have the audacity to tell you where to go next, but not Bloodborne. No sir, you have three paths you can go down and one of those will end the entire game and you will get no indication that this is the case other than a set of credits rolling down the screen. Other games will show you what happens in the story, but for Bloodborne (and Dark Souls), you’re showing up after the story’s already ended. Will people tell you what happened? No, you Goddamn simpleton, now get out and never come to my office again. I just watched Vaati’s explainer video of Bloodborne’s story (I needed to know more about the blood in the game. You know, Sane Human Being stuff) and found out I missed an entire region of the game on my second playthrough. Who designs games that way?
These choices sound completely unhinged, and they are, but they also serve each game’s ethos of making you afraid. You don’t get to experience the story in a linear fashion, and you don’t get to understand the “best” place to go next. You have to dive in and discover it for yourself. This makes the games outrageously anxiety-ridden initially – when I look up a tool or a strategy, I have to force myself not to look up everything else and spoil the whole thing to put my emotions out of their misery.
But when you make your way through the whole thing, going through whichever path you’ve had the misfortune to choose, or figuring out pieces of the story by reading descriptions of items you’ve found, or finding ways to defeat horrifically powered-up nightmarish enemies who can crush you in a moment, that anxiety resolves into true catharsis, giving me the courage to say “maybe I’m not a Sane Human Being, but you know what? That’s ok. Also, I think I’m into blood now.”
Oh, Good
Blue Prince - A puzzle game that’s released tomorrow, it features a house you build each day to try and figure out how to access its one secret room. You have to become accustomed to each of the house’s normal forty five rooms to figure out how everything fits together just right, and you can only build the house by walking through the rooms yourself. No idea if there’s a real narrative here, and I don’t care. It looks incredible and is getting stellar reviews. My queue can get fucked.