I was late to the party on Bloodborne, only getting around to playing it last year, around 5 years after its release. While I largely enjoyed the experience, it didn’t necessarily make a huge impression on me the first time through – and, still, it’s probably one of my less favorite games in the overall lineage of From Software games which includes Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. There are several reasons for this: In terms of pure mechanics, I find the design of the game frequently clunky and unpleasant, somehow simultaneously overcooked and half-baked, while I find the narrative to be so overly obtuse even by the standards of From Software as to be nearly impossible to interpret and enjoy without the use of supplementary materials. I think Bloodborne is a good game, and not undeserving of the high esteem it is held in, but that makes its failures and idiosyncrasies all the more fascinating.
Part 1: Mechanics
First, I think it will be interesting and edifying to discuss the failures of design present in Bloodborne in-depth, particularly as these are the very aspects which often seem to be idealized by fans of the game. Bloodborne’s most infamously hostile design decision is that of blood vials, the primary source of healing in the game. Unlike in Dark Souls, which provides you with effectively infinite, albeit limited and slow-to-use, healing, Bloodborne forces the player to scavenge for extra healing as they go along. This is a huge step backwards, a throwback to older and clunkier and more distracting methods from Demon’s Souls and other predecessors, and at first may seem an arbitrary choice – why invent the perfect healing system, then get rid of it? The reason for this is provided by the rally system, which lets you recover health if you press the attack soon after taking damage. This system exists to push the player to act more aggressively, to be willing to take a hit in order to deal damage or to quickly counter with aggression after a mistake, but in order to actually make it worthwhile to press instead of retreat and heal they had to make healing precious – so they made it scarce. Each individual step in this process makes sense: It’s designed to create the type of gameplay the designer envisions in the moment. However, in a broader scope, if we look outside merely the moments of aggression it creates in combat, the end result is that a) the player has to occasionally take a break from the actually interesting parts of the game to go back and harvest a bunch of healing and b) the player constantly has this concern in the back of their mind, quietly and subtly making each setback that much more obnoxious. The game constantly, quietly, insidiously threatens you with tedium, loosening the loop of attempt/learn/retry that defines other games in the lineage, quietly making every part of the experience less enjoyable.
Blood vials are frequently described as the main flaw of the game, but if anything I find the “parry” system even more galling – if, perhaps, significantly easier to ignore. In the Souls games, parrying is performed by performing a special block action at the moment an attack would hit you: If it’s successful and the attack is parryable you gain a significant advantage, if it’s successful and the attack isn’t parryable you don’t gain an advantage but you reduce incoming damage as though you’d blocked the attack, and if you mess it up you get hit hard. In the first place, I don’t actually think the Dark Souls parry system is good: It takes combat, with its intricacies of range, positioning, and observation, and largely boils it down to mere good timing, making the whole thing feel flatter and less nuanced. It is at least serviceable, though, and can be fun in practice. Bloodborne takes every part of this and makes it worse, and I think it’s worth talking about how that happened, because I think it’s possible to reverse-engineer this logical process. First: We have this 19th-century-esque setting, we have to have some sort of firearms to accent it and distinguish it from the dark fantasy setting – but this isn’t intended to be a shooter, so how do you make them work within a Souls-style combat system? Well, we can’t really let the player take careful aim, but we also can’t really let them spam down opponents with constant gunfire, so let’s make ammo slightly scarce and make it so rather than precise aim you have to have precise timing. Alright, so precise timing maps pretty closely to the parry system used in Dark Souls, so we just merge the two together and voila! Guns! The issue with this only becomes clear if you take one step away from the process: You now have a parry system where, because you’re not directly deflecting an attack, it’s impossible to tell when it’s supposed to happen – where it’s impossible to know which attacks even are parryable, and where the price of guessing wrong is taking a huge amount of damage because there’s no shield reducing incoming damage even against unparryable attacks, and where you also have limited ammo which further punishes you for guessing wrong. It’s another intricately and carefully thought out system that’s a significantly less interesting and enjoyable version of its predecessor.
Okay I know I said I liked the game and I’ve done nothing but shit on it so far. That’s because I really feel that Bloodborne is a game that largely fails in terms of its systems and largely succeeds in terms of its design – though there’s exceptions to both of these, as I’ll get into. Before that, though, I have to talk about one other system that is less catastrophically misguided but is still incredibly weird: Upgrades. In Dark Souls, the greatest part of player effectiveness (aside, perhaps, from their personal skill) is derived from how much they’ve upgraded their weapon. There are other factors: Stats can provide a significant boost to damage and defense, and certain other abilities and items can also contribute, but the biggest gate on how effective your character is in battle is dependent on what upgrade items you find. This is still sort of true in Bloodborne, but the bonuses to damage, health, and defense gained from increasing stats by leveling are far more significant relative to upgrades, so unlike in the Souls games simply grinding and leveling is a fairly effective tactic for getting past difficult battles. There’s another wrinkle, as well: Blood gems. Blood gems are a secondary upgrade system, allowing you to place a few gems on each weapon to get additional bonuses. While you can find a few of these in consistent locations, the biggest source of blood gems in the game is generally just killing enemies and getting lucky. On a normal run through the game, these can provide bonuses of up to 20% damage – which means that the difference between a very lucky run and a very unlucky run might be somewhere around a 50% damage difference. This is a wild divergence, and means that the game can very quietly brutally punish you for not killing enough enemies (or just getting unlucky). This makes the true difficulty of areas and bosses quite difficult to actually evaluate: One player might find a particular challenge far more difficult simply because they haven’t found good blood gems – or have forgotten to equip them, an oversight which is made quite likely by the first few gems you’re likely to encounter offering measly 0.5% damage bonuses that seem hardly worth bothering with. It’s hard for me to say this upgrade system is clearly worse than its predecessor systems, but it is much weirder, and for no very good reason I can see. I suspect at one point blood gems were the only available upgrades, but that this changed somewhere in development.
Before I move on from systems stuff to talk about narrative, a few things I do like: Bloodborne’s backstab system is a significant improvement on that used in the Dark Souls games. In Dark Souls, if you move behind an opponent and attack you can snap into a special backstab animation that does a ton of damage – this is easy to do by accident, and also easy to get caught in by happenstance. However, in Bloodborne the player has to very intentionally backstab by fully charging a powerful attack from behind, which sets up the opponent for a devastating followup. This is a much more intentional and delineated choice, and is much easier to visually parse. It also makes it possible to integrate the mechanic into boss fights in a way that was simply unfeasible in Dark Souls, where enabling backstabs would have allowed the player to instantly obliterate nearly any boss. The main issue with backstabs in Bloodborne, in fact, is simply that I do not believe the mechanic is explained anywhere in-game. I also feel that integrating arcane(magic) attacks directly into the item system, and have the player use them the same way they would, for instance, throw a molotov, is much more elegant than having to equip items and magic separately and carry separate weapons and catalysts to attack or cast spells. The concept of trick weapons which hide a special function or form that can be selectively deployed by the player is quite interesting, as well – this emerges from the ability to hold weapons with one or two hands in Dark Souls, but iterates on the idea in some creative ways, each weapons transformation carrying unique traits beyond merely range and damage. The biggest drawback of this is simply that the most fascinating of these trick weapons are impossible to acquire for most of the game and can only be enjoyed on a replay.
Part 2: Narrative
As I mentioned before, I had a really tough time engaging with the narrative of Bloodborne. There were a number of things I could perceive that were really interesting and exciting: The repeating motifs of blood, birth, eyes, the moon, water, dreams, and the unknown were fascinating but it was difficult to pick out any actual themes or messages or, indeed, to form any idea of exactly what the fuck was meant to be happening. While I understand the appeal of obscurity, in the end I wish that the game had given me more to work with in understanding it. For a game so much about dream, it doesn’t actually feel very dreamlike: The world is largely constant and predictable, harshly and specifically defined at every moment, with vivid consequences for success and failure. Dreams are intimate, and stem from the dreamer – which makes it difficult to really capture the sensation of dream when we’re playing as a blank slate, a construct with no perspective or personal stake. Of course, it’s not meant to be the player’s dream at all – the player is the interloper on the troubled dreams of others, of Gehrman, Mensis, Mergo’s Wet Nurse, the Moon Presence, and/or the Orphan of Kos. Even so, everything feels so concrete, it hardly feels like a dream, but merely entering a warped world – which is fine I suppose, but I like dreams and works about dream enough that I found it a bit disappointing, and this is probably one reason I found the game less captivating than I’d hoped. The story deals with these all of these intimate topics, with dreams and blood and birth and death, but gives us no perspective on them, merely a doll to play with, and feels inert because of it.
I’m rarely the sort of audience who needs things to be spelled out for them, but even by the Lynchian standards I’m used to Bloodborne provided very little for me to go on. I’d thought after my first time through that I must have just been distracted or inattentive, as I was streaming that playthrough, but even on a replay I was really only able to pick up tiny fragments of narrative. Eventually, as I started getting near the end of my replay, I realized that there wasn’t going to be a moment where this just clicked into place, and I looked for answers elsewhere. The elsewhere I discovered, in this case, was The Palebood Hunt, a novel-length exploration of what could be read and could be inferred about the world, characters, and goings-on of Bloodborne. I don’t agree with all of its inferences, but most of them are well-reasoned and I would definitely recommend it if you, like me, were left wondering what exactly the fuck you just played. Most importantly, it gave me the grounding to actually start to analyze, not just what happened in Bloodborne, but what Bloodborne was about.
Before I get into themes, though, perhaps I should pull back for a second and describe the broad strokes of the narrative – as I understand it, anyway. You may feel some bits are missing or incorrect here: in some cases here I disagree with the more common interpretations, and in some I’m probably just forgetting or overlooking important information because there’s honestly a lot. So: Humanity, by way of the Byrgenwerth Scholars, encounters mighty alien creatures which they call Great Ones: Kos in the ocean, Ebrietas in the labyrinth, Oeden as a voice from nowhere, and Amygdala seemingly everywhere. The scholars who find these creatures are seized by envy of their otherworldly wisdom and power, and seek to elevate themselves to the same level – creating a schism between the Byrgenwerth Scholars, who study the methods of thought of the Great Ones for insight, and the Healing Church, who inject themselves and others with the blood of the Great Ones, the “Old Blood,” to gain longevity and power and cure disease. All of this is, actually, completely fine with the Great Ones: While they don’t normally have any way to produce living offspring, by slipping through the bounds of reality, during the “Paleblood Moon”, they can impregnate some human women – those already treated with the Old Blood. The resulting child never lives long, though – of course not, because the Great Ones are by their very nature creatures of unreality, and trying to tether that existence to a frame of bone and flesh is untenable. Even after death, though, the child’s cries reverberate and create nightmares. Meanwhile the people who have been treated with the blood of the Great Ones and its derivatives shift into werewolf-like beasts, particularly as the Paleblood Moon sets in, and hunters set out to slay them. Only defeating the child, or whatever forces keep it tethered to existence, ends the nightmare and, granting closure, completes the game.
Let’s jump back to the motifs I noted before: Blood, birth, eyes, the moon, water, dreams, and the unknown. These are all loosely related by themes in fascinating and shifting ways. Blood relates to birth and the moon by way of menstrual blood, referred to by the Nightmare of Mensis. The eye and the moon are reflecting orbs, the moon influences the tides of the water which also reflects, the eye reflecting upon water reflecting the moon’s light even as the moon’s light itself is reflected sunlight – a connection to something vast and a protective barrier from it, two states of being. Two states of being also relates back to birth (before and after coming into existence), death (before and after leaving existence), the moon (dark and light sides), dreaming and waking, known and unknown, and the ever-shifting boundary between these. Even the player’s weapon represents this idea of boundaries and thresholds, flicking between two states on command just as the player navigates the boundaries of dreams. It might be possible to graph out the symbolism present in Bloodborne, but the dense web of symbolic connections is difficult to capture in words.
And, speaking of webs, there’s also one other motif that it took me some time to notice: Spiders. While my initial interpretation of their presence was that they were just included as standard horror game creepy-crawlies, they’re notably prominent and deployed in much more specific ways than the aggressive birds and dogs that pepper the world – and, in particular, noting the appearance of Mergo’s Wet Nurse as a giant spider-like creature, along with Rom the Vacuous Spider, seems particularly significant. The eight eyes of the spider are likely one reason they’re recurring (the more eyes the better, as far as the Byrgenwerth Scholars are concerned), but more than that spiders are weavers – of webs, of fate, of dreams. Rom weaves a web to keep the worlds of dream and reality from touching, while Mergo’s Wet Nurse weaves a web to maintain the dream that is all that remains of Mergo.
The Great Ones seem to fill the roles of being Gods of the Gaps. Kos (or some say Kosm) was the first of the great ones encountered by humanity – dead, washed ashore. The setting of Bloodborne, while not directly modeled on a real-world era, corresponds roughly with the age of sail, when the vast unknown of the ocean became familiar and well-traveled. Perhaps the other Great Ones represent similar gaps in our knowledge who might one day perish by our enterprising exploration: Amygdala the hidden secrets of the human mind, the Moon Presence and Mergo’s Wet Nurse the threshold of dreams, Ebriatas and the Cosmic Emissary the vastness of the cosmos – and shapeless Oeden, the unknowable unknown, who will never perish.
Alongside the theme of transformation and boundary I mentioned earlier, there is a theme of what it means to seek power. This is definitely a place where this game is thematically at its most similar to the Dark Souls games – a group of scholars, who seemingly already occupy a place of high status in society, are consumed with the idea of achieving more intelligence and more power. What do these things even mean? What does intelligence mean to a rotting brain, unable to move or speak? What does power mean in isolation, with no task to be applied towards? What does evolution mean, when it’s attempting to evolve towards a being incapable of reproduction, the most basic of evolutionary tasks? Yet this is what the Bloodborne characters largely strive for. The decision is made, explicitly, over and over again, to destroy everything a human might hold dear for the purposes of accumulating more, more, more. It’s distressingly familiar, how this idiotic avarice is cloaked in aspirational language of “elevating” humanity. The Paleblood Hunt says that none, or few, of the characters are truly villainous – and here I must disagree, because at every step they’ve chosen to sacrifice the future of humanity, humanity as it actually is and exists, for some nebulous idea of something unidentifiably better. Why should the Great Ones be aspirational figures? Because they’re big? Because they’re unknowable? As they rely solely on other creatures to reproduce, the Great Ones are surely best understood as glorious parasites. There’s nothing innately sinister in a parasite, but it’s hardly an existence to aspire to. The things we aspire towards are so often the tides that carry us back where we’re trying to escape from. They who try to ascend become beasts, hungry for violence, or mindless sponges, with their knowledge leaking out and, unused, decomposing into madness.
But what is Paleblood, and the Paleblood moon? I suspect that, because the series comes from a Japanese developer, the audience is weirdly unprepared to accept the possibility of intentional English wordplay in these games: I’ve seen more than a few people complain about the punctuation of the title “Demon’s Souls” without stopping to consider who, in a game where you collect souls, that demon may be – and Bloodborne, as well, is a title with several interpretations, yet few seem to look towards double-meanings in interpreting its narrative. Pale is the color of a corpse, pale is the dimness of the light, but pale is also a fence, a boundary, as in the phrase “beyond the pale”. The pale is the threshold, the moon, the water, which is penetrated through, allowing the hunter to traverse the dream. However, there is another threshold being quietly traversed, another Unknowable Creature interloping into the world of Bloodborne: The player.
What is a Paleblood, and why does seemingly only the blood minister during the intro scene seem to have ever heard of it? Well, who even says that the clinic where The Hunter wakes up is necessarily the same place where the blood minister appeared before us, the players,? We couldn’t see our body: Were we even The Hunter at that point, or just a player? Would this hunter, this “foreigner”, even exist in the world of Bloodborne if there weren’t a player transcending this barrier, from beyond the pale, to inhabit them like some sort of parasite, play with them like some sort of doll?
