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As a gamer, I generally don’t like to be challenged. I never go back through games on harder difficulties, I detest challenge modes or trophies that require me to seek out super bosses or optional areas. When coming up to a difficult boss or high difficulty spike in a game rather than rise to the challenge or feel rewards through trial and error, I get frustrated relatively early and will look up guides to cheese it or just give up. I dread the end of Kingdom Hearts games because I know I’ll have to fight a gauntlet of difficult boss fights when I just want to get to the next cut-scene. I play games for their stories and characters, some of my favorites games are narrative games with little to no gameplay, not one of the games in my all time favorite list could be considered challenging ……. well, until now. With all this in mind about how much I truly detest challenge and difficulty in my video games, I truly can’t describe how much Bloodborne took over my life a couple months ago, and singlehandedly changed how I appreciate challenging games. Its an experience so singular, so engrossing and captivating in its world and themes that it engulfed every waking moment of my free time, I couldn’t stop from the moment I started till I saw the end credits.
I missed video deadlines, failed to write scripts and do uni work as I became completely addicted to the eldritch nightmare of Yharnam’s world. Now that sounds like a negative and especially in regards to the Nier video I’ve been promising for a while now it is. But it’s important to realize that not since playing my first Final Fantasy game have I been so singularly engrossed in a game world. Where the melding of mechanics, level design, audio and visual come together to sell a world so believable that the oh so rare sense of wonder that games can deliver engulfed the entire experience. All of this from a game that three years ago I completely wrote off without much of a second thought because I deemed it too hard. From software’s soul series has garnered a reputation since 2008 with the release of Demon Souls, for being a series of brilliantly designed and inventive RPGs with brutal difficulty and unforgiving nature. This reputation has made the series what it is today, one of the most respected and beloved game series of the last and current generation of gaming. However, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, its this level of difficulty that causes many to write it off before even trying to understand it or like me starting it and abruptly ending halfway through the first chapter when you realize that you only understood 2% of the what you just read. Luckily, unlike Ulysses, you don’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin in 1904. What you do need to know is that Bloodborne is hard but only because other games have watered you down. Take it from me as someone who is the constant liability on any game of Fortnite. This isn’t a game that gets easier as you go, its one that you get better at.
It isn’t this mountainous climb that only a particular type of gamer can accomplish and that’s likely the big mistake many who write the soul games off suffer. As I said earlier, for the most part, I suck at games, more importantly, character action games, my reflexes are too slow, my patience for trial and error is non-existent. Yet, by the end of Bloodborne, I was sliding around werewolf abominations like a lightning bolt. Despite the fact that Bloodborne is firmly an RPG, you will never be able to over level, sure when you run through on new game plus you’ll be one shotting the starter zone enemies that stole your lunch money at the start but they’ll still have no trouble taking your bag of Doritos chilli heat wave if you haven’t got those reflexes down. But by now you’ve probably watched, read and listening to hundreds of people tell you about the difficulty and rewarding gameplay of the souls series, it’s a mute point. But difficulty isn’t the reason I love Bloodborne so much. Like I said at the beginning being challenged isn’t how I get my kicks in gaming, its Bloodborne’s world, art direction, lore and atmosphere that made learning and mastering this beautiful terrifying nightmare of a game worth it.
If there’s one advantage the gaming industry has over all other mediums, its world building. Where a book can describe an incredible fantasy world and a film can show it. In a video game, you can inhabit it. Its the one advantage that games series like Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft understand and its why they stand out, its why you remember them years later. This feeling of wonder at a game world is something I remember fondly when thinking back on my first Pokemon game or the first time I played through Fallout 3. But its a feeling I haven’t felt for a while in the current gen of gaming. For a while, I just assumed that I had become jaded and that these feelings were more about nostalgia than anything else. That was until I took my first steps into the decaying city of Yarnham. The Victorian era, gothic horror inspired aesthetic is palpably dripping with character from the meticulously crafted architecture, aligned with eerie shadows, lighting and endless layers of detail scattered around it. From the first frame, Bloodborne is a game dripping with style and more importantly a thick layer of atmosphere.
Bloodborne isn’t a survival horror game yet its one of the scariest and most unsettling games I’ve played in years, because its world is so all-encompassing. Its horror is a specific brand of psychological, it isn’t filled with jump scares …. well maybe a few. But instead filled with terrifying hp Lovecraft inspired cosmic horror, Bloodborne is one of the best uses of Lovecraft’s brand of unknown and incomprehensible horror, you start out Bloodborne feeling like you are trapped in an unforgiving and hostile world and its one that only gets more unforgiving and incomprehensible as you go on. Rather than follow the veritable rule of any story wherein the answers become more clear and you get a resolution to your questions, Bloodborne just continues to add more and make things more confusing as you go. Things become more terrifying, more unknown and more engrossing. With all that being said it’d be surprising to know that taken on surface level Bloodborne’s story is paper thin. The four or five cut scenes that actually play through the game can feel like little more than artsy imagery and the few npc’s you meet seem to spout incomprehensible gibberish about castles you don’t know about and vilebloods you know as much about as palebloods. You can complete Bloodborne having learnt absolutely nothing about how its world works, who you’re fighting or why you’re fighting at all. However, dig a little deeper, begin to read weapon description, take in environmental clues and using your own intuition and you begin to piece together a deep, complex, cosmic horror narrative. Complete with extraterrestrial gods, sacrifice, insanity, the insignificance of human beings in a world with conflicts and reasons we couldn’t even begin to understand.
Bloodborne’s narrative and more importantly the way it tells it is one of the best uses of Lovecraftian horror and its use of the video game medium to do this is brilliant. Throughout Bloodborne, while collecting blood echo’s you’ll also be collecting insight a separate currency you obtain through fighting bosses and seeing specific events in-game. Though this currency is used for summoning allies in co-op and can buy gear it also affects the events and visuals of the game in some interesting ways. See insight represents your characters psyche and its influence on the cosmic horror of the game’s world. A big theme of Lovecraft’s stories is sanity and how characters minds are twisted and warped with their exposure to the events around them. Bloodborne’s world warps and changes as your insight increases, enemies begin to look more otherworldly, environments warp and lets just say you don’t want to start looking up on church walls later on in the game. Its an inventive and unique use of video games interactivity to portray a key element of Lovecraft’s horror that just couldn’t be portrayed in another medium. The idea that the game’s horror isn’t just hard to comprehend but that your mind is so repulsed, so baffled by it, that it actively shuts it out and the loosening grip on your own sanity is the only thing keeping the vale back. Even when that vale is pulled back Bloodborne might be one of the rare examples in which the terrifying, disgusting and sometimes even beautiful in the most fucked up way possible designs that the art directors and visual artists cook up are more disturbing than my own imagination. There are enemies in Bloodborne that literally used their grotesque design to actual beat me, when they caught me off guard (I’m looking at you The One Reborn) and yet at the same time, amongst the misery and agony of From Software’s masochists fantasy, there is a surreal beauty underpinning it all.
The cosmic entities have a twisted elegance to them, the hunter’s dream feels like this melancholic last breath of hope for the world. The way fires crackle as the moon hangs low in a bright purple sky. Yarnham feels like a place pushed past the point of human boundaries and over to something we could only appreciate on the most cerebral level. Its lack of answers (at least upon first-hand experience) is part of the wonder, part of the intrigue. Its why I’d almost verge recommending not reading weapon descriptions and dissecting the environment because the sense of wonder and grandeur that my first playthrough had is an experience I haven’t had in years. While you might hear a lot of people describe Bloodborne as how games used to be, I’d say instead that Bloodborne plays how you remember games playing, how detailed and full of wonder your nostalgic memories are of a game world, how large and vast it felt. And then you play through again (and trust me, once you’ve finished Bloodborne once you’ll want to finish it again) and you begin to understand its world, you read item descriptions, you start to understand the jargon said by npc’s (and you watch a couple VaatiVidya videos) and you begin to understand this really deep and more importantly very deliberate narrative, while some might find foul with having to piece together a story from item descriptions and vague hints (after all why can From Software get away with it but Bungie got crucified for it in Destiny) but its all about intent, while Bungie’s reasoning was born out of mismanagement and lazy story delivery, in Bloodborne its done in service of the narrative. You’re not supposed to dig deeper, the very themes imply that to know such knowledge is to lose further grip on your own sanity. By learning more you’re actively partaking in the game’s narrative in a meaningful way and its why I have nothing but respect for the way From Soft delivered the narrative in such cryptic and open to interpretation ways.
Bloodborne on the surface is everything I tend to avoid in video games, it’s brutally hard, requires patients and copious trial and error, its story is basically nonexistent on first glance and its difficulty spikes are frequent. On the surface, Bloodborne is everything I avoid in video games and as such, I avoided it for years simply believing it wasn’t for me. In hindsight, fear kept me away from one of my favorite games of the generation, and so, I made this video to appeal to players like me, to the ones who wrote the souls games off because of difficulty or didn’t attempt out of fear of frustration. Bloodborne is hard to learn but once you have it, it never feels unfair. When watching videos on souls games you always hear people talk about the fabled feeling of reward that these games provide. That while they are punishing the trade-off is this feeling of accomplishment that makes it worthwhile. I didn’t really get this when people described it to me but I think it’s about more than just beating a boss or reaching a checkpoint. Its about etching your way through a world that seems desperate to push you back, adamant to shut you out and be left alone, the feeling of accomplishment isn’t just about winning, its about earning your place in this world, seeing it grow from terrifying unknown to a place you not only know but have beaten. Few game worlds inspire so much awe and terrifying wonder as Yarnham, fewer still hold such a tight grip on you that feel compelled to push on after countless deaths (and missed deadlines) as this. I hate difficult games but I loved every painful, horrifying second of Bloodborne.
Games in Focus 
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