The Taint of Lucid Nightmares: Bloodborne And The Monsters Who Enjoy It

As With All Dreams Good and Bad...

The Souls franchise (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, etc.) is primarily known for a handful of design elements that run contrary to modern AAA game design philosophy. They are single-player focused, overtly cryptic, and more strictly punishing than any other popular Action-RPG within the mainstream consciousness. These elements however, are not mere gimmicks, but quintessential components of the narrative of each game in the series. The single-player focus inspires feelings of loneliness and self-reliance. The punishing gameplay and harsh death penalty (losing all of the money and experience points in your possession) force one to both respect their environment and fear the beings dwelling within it. And the overtly cryptic story works in tandem with the prior components to encourage slow & methodical progress stemming from a circumspective attention to detail. The last feature I mentioned is the least discussed aspect of these games outside of the dedicated fanbase, however, it is also the primary compositional element of each games’ story.

Every Souls game's story can be broadly summed up as follows, with minor variations: “A man or woman enters a kingdom/domain that they know almost nothing about, and by acquiring power through dangerous exploration comes to understand it in order to make a decision that decides its fate.” In Demon’s Souls one goes to Boletaria and becomes trapped in the Nexus. They then learn from the NPCs around them that in order to escape they must defeat five demons and slay the Great One. After doing so, they can either lift the fog or consume the Great One’s soul to become the most powerful being in the world. In Dark Souls, the player character is freed from the Undead Asylum and carried to Anor Londo where they eventually learn that in order to restore the world, they must acquire the four pieces of the Lord soul and re-ignite the First Flame. At which point, they can choose whether or not to do so. And so on and so forth. Though the setting and how one enters it varies from game to game, the process of exploring and significance of doing so is always the same (with one exception in Dark Souls 2 which I’ll touch on in a separate post).

To better facilitate the player’s interest in exploring, each game thus ensures that the player and their in-game character(s) have a unity of knowledge. Aside from players who flatly are not paying attention to the in-game dialogue or item text, both the player and their character should know the same things about the world they are both interacting with. As such, the player can step into their character’s shoes and gain some kind of investment in realizing their role in the story. In this way each, Souls game is a true-blue Action Role-Playing Game instead of an Action game with RPG elements.

With all of that said, in Bloodborne there is a clear dissonance between the player’s knowledge and that of their character. This is immediately made apparent by the opening cinematic:

The very first words, “Oh, yes…,” carry the unspoken implication that your character said something that would spark the mysterious man’s memory. We never learn what the player character said, however, we get a very good hint from the third word in that clause, “paleblood.” Based on the phrasing, one can infer that the player character did not necessarily know what paleblood was specifically, but rather mentioned what the blood was capable of doing. The following sentence, “well, you’ve come to the right place,” then clarifies that the player character was actively seeking paleblood, and thus agrees to accept a hunter’s contract, receive a blood transfusion in order to enter the Yharnam of old, and either find paleblood or at least learn more about it.

For those who haven’t played this game, becoming a hunter means agreeing to fight large supernatural beasts – typically some form of lycanthrope – for sport and/or to acquire blood echoes: this game’s power and currency. Plainly, your character is signing their life away in order to learn about paleblood.

As a player however, you have absolutely no idea what your character is doing or why they are doing it – after all, nothing in the game bothers to clue you in. On top of this, the game not only avoids closing the knowledge gap, like previous entries in the franchise, but actively extends it by obfuscating the player character’s investment in uncovering the secrets of paleblood for the first 2/3s of the game.

Every NPC during the early and middle portions of the game – excluding the two transient beings in the Hunter’s Dream – wishes you luck on the hunt, is concerned with their own safety, or has some personal goal that they are working towards. While these three functions don’t directly interfere with someone recognizing the player-character dissonance, their conversations hold different meanings for the player and their character, widening the emotional distance between the two.

For example, when the player finds Alfred and discusses Byrgenwerth with him he divulges that Byrgenwerth is the home of Blood Ministration and what led to Yharnam becoming what it is. For the player who has been reading the notes in the Hunter’s Dream, they know that they need to find paleblood in order to escape Yharnam and will consequently seek out Byrgenwerth. But for the player character, they want to know more about paleblood and will thus seek the same location, but for entirely different reasons. As a result of the unity of action, but dissonance of motives, the player cannot fully understand what they are actually doing on the first playthrough without consulting the Internet – one is incapable of identifying with their character or making an informed decision at the end of the game…until the final 1/3.

*SPOILERS: If you have any interest in playing Bloodborne or seeing its story first hand, stop reading right now and pick the game up as I am about to spoil the most interesting part of it.*

During the final third of the game, the paleblood moon rises and the game reveals that it is not

This is also the game's moment of fridge horror
where you realize that these abominations
have been skulking around for the entire game.

inspired by simple gothic horror, but eldritch horror. From here until the end of the game, the enemies that the player encounters are all twisted abominations or incomprehensibly strange cosmic deities, and the NPCs almost all begin succumbing to physical or mental illnesses. Whether the player and their character fully unravel the mystery of paleblood is not a fixed part of the game’s story. But what is certain is that once the final third starts, they both know that seeking paleblood leads to the
rise of Lovecraftian monsters and others’ despair.

It is here that, for the first time since the game’s beginning, both the player and their character’s knowledge bases align so that they can finally hold a unity of motive. Witnessing the effects of the supernatural moon will either spur the player and their character to end the nightmare (the player’s original motive), or pique their interest to understand the eldritch beings (the player character’s original motive). Which motive the player actually settles on, varies and determines which ending the player ultimately chooses.

As with the preceding Miyazaki directed Souls games, Bloodborne ends with a decision: Gehrman, the first Hunter and the player’s guide throughout the game offers the player the option to end the night and return to the real world via a beheading. If you accept Gehrman’s mercy, then you are executed and awake in an empty Yharnam street, free to see the sun once again  amidst a cloudy blue sky.

"Paleblood" moons are understandably more horrifying, yet notably
less "pale" than normal blood moons. Go figure.

If you refuse him, then you must fight him to the death in single combat. When you defeat him, one of two things occur based on whether you fully unraveled the mystery of paleblood and the elder gods. If you did not unravel the mystery and simply refused Gehrman out of petulance, then after defeating him one last cosmic deity appears (The Moon Presence), picks you up, and shines a bright red light on you that causes you to black out and awake in the same wheelchair that Gehrman once sat in – ostensibly filling the same role he once did. Finally, if you refused Gehrman’s offer, defeated him in combat, and learned the secret of paleblood, then when the Moon Presence descends and shines its light, it will recoil and also engage you in combat. Upon defeating it, the screen blacks out and re-enters with you becoming a cosmic deity infant.

In the context of everything one experiences in this game, the first decision where the player doesn’t fight at all is the morally “good” decision – you have determined that understanding paleblood only leads to insanity & suffering and thus is not worth pursuing. It is the only ending where no one else dies and the only ending that leaves the player and their character with any feeling of liberation.

The second ending in which the player refuses Gehrman’s offer, but doesn’t understand what is happening in Yharnam is the “worst” ending because it denies the player the freedom of the first ending as well as the power of the third ending, and curses them to a hollow existence of watching and guiding others through the same tasks that they just accomplished. It’s essentially a punishment for being contrarian.

The third ending where the player slays the Moon Presence and becomes an eldritch god is the morally “bad” decision, in that one has to succumb to the same madness that plagued the past scholars of Yharnam in order to achieve a power that, as the success of your tribulations demonstrate, is wholly vacuous.

Pictured: The rare spider-jackass

Narratively, the game is actually fairly unbiased in leading players towards any specific ending. Unlike in the past Souls games, in Bloodborne there are no overtly likeable NPCs that live for all that long. And since the enemies and people populating the world appear desecrated and beyond salvation, nothing about Yharnam seems to be worth holding on to. At the same time, the narrative gestalt shift during the game’s final act is genuinely interesting and could very easily convince players to dig into the story. However, the only reason that both perspectives are equally plausible in the first place is due to the initial player-avatar dissonance.

It would have been very easy for From Software to make the opening cutscene or an NPC (likely Alfred) explain that the Paleblood moon gives rise to unspeakable horrors, but is the only way to end the night. And yet, they deliberately refrain from giving any clear answers about it throughout the entirety of the game, instead allowing the narrative shift to elicit its own response.

If the devs had simply explained the effects of the moon, most players would willingly choose to end the night. While the gore and werewolves are striking the first time one sees them, the lack of context coupled with the disproportionately long amount of time spent dealing with them ensures that they eventually become mundane. And in achieving that mundanity, any interest that a player may have held towards learning more about them and their place in the world becomes largely nullified. Thus the player-character dissonance creates an impartiality that lasts until the unity is finally attained during the game’s final act.

And fortunately, I don’t have to speculate (much) about that either as the player reaction to this transparent approach versus the one that Bloodborne actually takes can be discerned by juxtaposing the trophy acquisition rates of Bloodborne’s endings with those of Demon’s Souls.

Boy, I wonder which choice the game wants me to make?

Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne have almost identical overarching stories (among other commonalities): the player characters both enter a strange land in pursuit of power, both become trapped in a horrific space, and both are tasked with either escaping it or becoming its ruler. So, the final decision of both games’ are pretty much identical and worthy of comparison (it's worth noting that Demon's Souls  is WAY more on the nose than Bloodborne with the good choice-evil choice dynamic).

In Demon’s Souls, which explains everything to the player about making both the “good” and “bad” ending decisions, according to current (July 7, 2015) Playstation trophy statistics, 22.8% of all online players defeated all of the bosses* and 19.2% of online players experienced the good ending (which is only possible if the prior condition is met). In other words, 84% of players who finished the game, saw the good ending. In Bloodborne, however, which has a clear counter for each ending, 11.7% of players chose the “good” ending, 17.1% of players chose the “worst” ending and 17.4% of players chose the “bad” ending. In this case 32% more players saw the “worst” ending than the good ending and 33% more saw the “bad” ending.

*The 22.8% number is from the number of players who defeated the False King. As was previously stated, in order to access the ending one must defeat 5 particular bosses, one of which is the False King. Since this boss is the hardest to reach, most difficult to fight, and the one that (according to the trophy stats) the fewest number of players have beaten, I assumed that if a player had beaten this boss they had also probably seen the ending. I’m sure this isn’t true in all circumstances, but it’s probably true for most.*

Granted many people, like myself, have simply seen all of the endings muddying these statistics. But, because the data also indicates that more people saw the bad ending than the worst ending, we know with certainty that more people were willing to put in an unnecessary amount of extra labor to uncover the mystery of paleblood, than those who only wanted to end the night. There are undoubtedly many possible meta-factors that promote the difference in choices. However, the biggest in-game contributor is actually the gameplay mechanics themselves.

Every Souls game is built around acquiring power (souls/blood echoes) to achieve one’s goals. Due to the series’ harsh death penalty, where you die and lose all of the souls you were carrying, this power is always precarious and consequently far more precious than is typical of RPGs. This power is also necessary as the enemies continually increase in difficulty throughout the game. And finally, acquiring power is (for non-extreme players) endless. The level cap is so extraordinarily high that almost no one will ever realistically reach it without cheating in some way. So, all players have an impetus to seek more power throughout the game and no reason other than restraint to ever stop.

Now, all of these mechanical components are also present in every game in the Souls franchise, so they alone do not explain the difference in player approaches. Rather, the fundamental difference between Bloodborne and every other Souls game is that it builds on top of these series-spanning systems in ways that contradict the game design philosophies of its predecessors.

The beasts of Bloodborne are faster, stronger, more aggressive, and more intelligent than any of the enemies in past souls games. Right from the outset a player will find that most enemies can take them down in two to three clean hits, compared to the five or six of past souls games. The enemies also have far more health than they used to and take longer to put down. And to further extend the difficulty, now if an enemy walks over the spot where the player died they will acquire their blood echoes, forcing the player to not only reach the same spot where they died, but also defeat an enemy to reclaim their lost power. Collectively, the death penalty of the Souls game has shifted from a knowledge test – “prove that you know how to reach this spot” – into a skill test – “prove that you’re good enough to get your power back.”

Additionally, the ceiling on how much power a player can acquire has risen dramatically. Each weapon in the Souls games can be strengthened from its base form up to +10 or +15. After that point, a player’s stats were the only further contributor to the weapon’s strength. However, although the level progression of souls games is borderline endless, each attribute that a player can invest in reaches its functional cap fairly early on at 50 (though most hybrid builds stop around 40), placing a hard cap on the strength of weapons. Most players, naturally, don’t bother striving towards the actual level cap of 712, but instead seek the more modest 120-140, as they won’t become appreciably more powerful from that point onwards.

But, Bloodborne extended players’ potential strength by introducing Bloodgems – special gems which can be socketed into weapons to further increase their power. A few Bloodgems are littered throughout the town of Yharnam with fixed stat boosts, however the best Bloodgems can only be acquired by exploring dangerous Chalice Dungeons, and all of them have random stat allocations. For comparison of just how much stronger player characters are in Bloodborne, in Dark Souls a player with 50 Dexterity and a fully reinforced Uchigatana (the ideal Dexterity weapon) has 425 AR. In Bloodborne, a character with 50 Bloodtinge, a Lost Chikage (the ideal Bloodtinge weapon), and three strong (butnot optimal) Bloodgems has an AR of over 750 – nearly twice as powerful as the past damage ceiling.  Because this extra power is not acquirable at fixed intervals and only through struggle and persistence, players have to be far more willing to seek it – actively prizing it – than they did in previous games where it was a basic necessity, but not the sole purpose for exploration.

Lastly, the application of this increased power is far more “liberal” in Bloodborne than its predecessors. As I stated at the very beginning of this post, the Souls games are built on the player advancing carefully in both combat and exploration. Bloodborne spits in the face of this idea by introducing the Rally System in the aforementioned hostile environment. Whenever the player takes damage, they are given a brief window of time in which they can attack other enemies to regain that lost health. This in tandem with the increased enemy damage and removal of shields means that players are now rewarded for their aggression and punished for their passivity.

Collectively, the list of changes ensures that players are mechanically incentivized to behave as myopic, amoral, power-hungry beasts. There are no narrative invectives compelling one to think of anything other their own self-preservation, and numerous mechanical pressures communicating that the only way to battle the monsters of Bloodborne is to become something far far worse.