I also play Splatoon 3 and unfortunately the silly squid game has 'Borne beat by a medium-small, not-insignificant margin on integration between the gameplay/environment/player character and the universe's equivalent to blood. I already discussed it with @nex3 and TLOZ: The Wind Waker is 3rd at best (and if I'm being honest, it probably doesn't actually even make the top 5, but really thinking about what the Wettest Games are is a chost for another toast) because while the world is far wetter, Link only rarely gets even half as drenched as my woomy little squid constantly bathing in squid-blood, or the player character from Splatoon. That's a very funny joke. You're cackling right now. You're downright mirthful from that one.
(This is long, and I will spoil the end of the game)
themes.
Genuinely, though, I was astonished so many times from the first time I played the game all the way til like, <2 hours before beating it by just How Much Fucking Blood This Bitch Can Have On Them. It's staggering. Just look at all that blood. And aside from looking cool as hell and kinda gross, it feels really good? Like, games don't usually have such a visceral (badumtss²) visual representation of all the bullshit you just had to get through. Bloodborne gives you that in spades– although, to be fair, it would be a little bizarre if they didn't on account of the second piece of how wet the game is: how wet the game is.
Not all of Bloodborne's environments or enemies are especially wet, but the overwhelming majority are noticeably so. If my character is rolling through puddles to slash a horrible snake-man, it would be weird for them to not be glistening a little bit afterwards. Thus, if they roll through a trench of blood to stab a gigantic, well-fed tick... you get the idea.
The coolest thing about this for me is that it all serves a narrative purpose. Fromsoft really aced the design here. I want to be clever and flowery, but I barely know what I'm talking about and I want to do the game some level of justice, so I'll keep things simple for my own sake. You have two core themes: Childbirth, and cosmic horror (gothic horror is very much present, but I really think of it more as in service of the former). The game doesn't try to hide its Lovecraft inspiration, and while I haven't read enough of his work to know if childbirth was a particular theme of his (I've read The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Pickman's Model), they interlock pretty perfectly either way.
Childbirth is a WET affair. The baby alone is gonna be, medically speaking, slimy af. I... won't go into detail on the birthing parent's side of things, but if you don't happen to know how gross and harrowing and painful it is, make sure you learn before ever deciding to produce a child, and especially before ever telling anyone else they should.
Yharnam intentionally resembles Victorian England. This creates the fantastic opportunity for the gothic horror elements that make so much of this game look and feel incredibly cool, but I believe what it serves is the absolute horror of childbirth. Victorian England is, on the scale of all of human civilization throughout all of history, very well-documented. We have so much more information about what life was like for the people in England in that time than we do for so many civilizations and time periods. But critically, while they were advanced and powerful enough to have then-incredible records and to have those records survive, they were not yet advanced enough to have done all that much about childbirth.
That shit is still terrifyingly lethal, especially anywhere without widespread access to the very best of modern medicine (i.e. most places). Back then, infant mortality and birthing parent mortality were so high I think of it as a miracle that our species has survived, and Victorian England is, while far from the only one, a great window we have into the hell that it was to make a kid (and again, it's not even that much better now in most places). Factoring in how bad England is and always has been at everything but genocide and bigotry, you have yourself an environment where not only was childbirth inherently bloody and tragic, but so many women were forced to do it as much as possible, they were largely uncared for throughout it, infection was more common than oxygen, and things like "clean drinking water" and "food" that are "really important all the time but especially during pregnancy oh my god" were not exactly freely accessible to all. So what you end up with is a lot of dead babies and dead mothers, and a fucking ton of blood.
This all lends itself to all the other fun things about Victorian England, like the architecture, the technology, the church the myths of vampires and werewolves, the language, the church the geography, and oh dear lord THE CHURCH the fashion. Augh! Fashion Souls is dead, long live Fashionborne. Capes! Vests! Hats! Boots! Gloves! Love it. Beautiful. Oh, and-- wait, uh. Huh, there's something I can't talk about. Or question. Or think about. Or notice. What was it? What was I just thinking of? It's all kind of just melded into the background. Oh well.
The climate of England, especially, I think just makes it one extra layer of perfect. On top of all the other things mentioned, England is fucking wet. I've never been, but I assume it's just permanently drizzling considering how many fucking bogs or marshes or whichever that place has.
Cosmic horror/Lovecraft, meanwhile, focuses on the great, the vast, the unknowable, the distant-yet-all-too-close, that which contains so Much that it is Full but is so Big that it is Empty; that which is at all times a creator, a destroyer, an expanse, an organism, shifting and changing and staying the same all on innumerable scales that reach heights so grand you'd go crazy trying to conceive of it all at once. I'm of course talking about the ocean. Sorry. I'm talking about the brain. Sorry. I mean I'm talking about the church. Sorry. I'm of course talking about space! And the ocean. From what I personally know of cosmic horror, which is not that much, they're basically the same thing. Hence the enormous slimy beings from somewhere dark we've never seen that have tentacles and webbing and bioluminescence. And I hope it goes without saying, but I'm going to anyway: The ocean... is wet.
There's no way this isn't all said and expanded on in ways I could never hope to in some video essay or essay essay or something that somebody who knows more than me has already made, so I'll wrap it up soon. Before my final Complete Thought, there's a couple remaining bits still floating around in my brain:
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Visceral attacks are performed against human(oid)s by punching into their belly and ripping out their. Organs? Viscera. This connects at least visually to the whole childbirth thing, and the violence of it all. They are performed on beasts and kin (aliens) primarily by doing the same thing to their head, where their brain is. To me this feels like the brutal dissection of the unknown in
the churchhumanity's constant thirst forpowerknowledge, as well as the destruction of the Other, ripping away all of their thoughts, experiences, knowledge, emotions — everything — out of fear of the unknown. -
In my humble opinion,
the church in Bloodborne is interested in doing Science instead of denying and rejecting it because the existence of the Old Ones allows them to do colonialism and otherwise accrue and maintain power / inflict violence, and this is not just an intentional indictment of the Church of England, but also simply realistic storytelling stemming from a solid what-ifgod is good, god save the queen! Wait, what? Sorry, I blacked out for a second. The fashion in this game is.... I said that already. Sorry. I'm talking about space. -
Lovecraft was a horrible, horrible racist, and nothing praising or even discussing his work, cool and foundational as it may be, should ever do any less than explicitly stating the fact that Lovecraft was a horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible racist. He was so extremely fucking racist. You cannot read his work knowing how racist he was without seeing it in every facet of his stories. He was so racist that other racists were like "Dude you're weirdly racist." Read about his racism and then read your favorite story of his again. You can enjoy them anyway, it's fine, but holy fucking shit dude. Anyway.
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For people who have played the game or know enough about these bosses, after everything else I've said in this section, I'm going to leave it to you to put together what I mean about each of them and just say the names:
4a. Amygdala
4b. Orphan of Kos
Almost every story I have ever enjoyed (and I mean, probably almost every story in general) is about breaking cycles of generational violence and trauma. Fromsoft leans into this very, very hard. Beyond childbirth, or cosmic horror, this is another story about breaking cycles.
In Bloodborne, you kill the remaining members of the church, you kill the remaining hunters that have to fight the horrors the church left on society, you kill the remaining people nonconsensually warped into beasts and kin, you kill the animals warped by the horrible world that was created around them by humans, you kill the Old Ones that the church did so many different kinds of horrible things to, and you take their pain into yourself in the form of Blood Echoes and become stronger for it in the form of Channelling them through the Doll, the one character in the game who seemingly can't hurt.
A few bits in the game discuss "sins of the father," and at least one questions why so many people have to bear the weight of the sins committed by the church. You, a very Lovecraftian "I Just Showed Up, I Don't Know Anything About Any Of This, And My Only Motivation Is Inquisitiveness" character, take it all. You do all the sinning you have to do, literally soak yourself in everyone else's blood, to take it all away from them. A few bits in the game discuss "waking up" and "ending the nightmare." At the end, Gehrman outright says he will kill you, and you will wake up, and it will be over. (You can do that, I guess, but assuming you want to fight the final boss) You kill Gehrman too. You don't wake up, you let everyone else. You remain, and become a wiggly little thing (at least, in the ending I got. I don't know how different it gets in the others. I beat Moon Presence and got this ending) left in the care of the Doll. And then, I think, you create something new. Become an Old One or something else. Birth a world or a dream or what have you where none of this happened. At the very least, Yharnam dies with you.
gameplay.
I loved Dark Souls. It pales in comparison. Bloodborne is the sickest shit I have ever played. Fuck. Augh. Aaaaa.
The weapons are so cool and tactile. The stance changes from "light" to "heavy" mode and back are the video game equivalent of biting into a perfectly ripe fruit and feeling the skin split on your teeth. The combat that flows around that mechanic is the metaphorical juice and flesh filling your mouth and running down your chin. It takes what made the combat in Dark Souls & co. so cool, adds one core mechanic and the subsequent combat and design elements that come naturally from it, and then makes a nightcore remix of it. (Note: Nightcore is a genre of music remix where you speed up a song so it sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, and then put an anime girl on it)
I did most of my run with Ludwig's Holy Blade, which is probably the coolest melee weapon I've used in a game ever. Light mode is a normal European longsword, it's got decent reach and damage that gets carried by great speed and the option to use your gun, or whatever else you've elected to put in your offhand now that you're far enough in the game that you have options. Heavy mode takes away your use of the gun as you sheath your sword in the hauntingly large scabbard, take that off of your back, and trade in all that speed for huge range and huger damage as you beat enemies to a pulp with it.
Using LHB, your attack options at any given time are as follows: Light attack 1-3, charged or uncharged heavy attack, sprinting attack, jumping attack, backstep attack, rolling/dodging attack, form-change attack (where the input to change your weapon's form does a very cool animation with a seamless attack in the form you're changing to), shoot/parry/otherwise use your offhand item (light mode) or a fast overhead chop (heavy mode), and Visceral if you trigger the opportunity for one. These options aren't all universal, but any given weapon does most of the same stuff. Each one serves a different function, hits at a different range in a different shape at a different speed, moves your character in a different way, deals a different amount of damage. Don't forget that most options are available in both modes and behave differently in each. This all blends with rolling, dodging, running, jumping, back-stepping, strafing, and the overall speed-increase of Bloodborne from previous titles to create the most fluid, intuitive combat I've ever encountered in a single-player game.
I didn't play much with the weirder weapons, but there's a lot of really cool ones I'd like to try in future.
I don't have much to say about the bosses. Most of them are really good. They're what you'd expect and hope for from this game. Some of them are hard. I struggle with humanoid ones and flatten everything else for some reason. The hardest ones are by and large the best, with the notable exception of Victorian Femme Lesbian Sephiroth, Maria, who is not that hard but is the coolest person in video games and is allowed to kill me in real life if she wants. The bosses in general are the most fun part of playing the game, and barely factor in to why I love playing it. They just serve as (mostly) really well-designed vehicles for everything else, mechanically and narratively.
As always for me in 3D games, navigation was the hardest part and the least rewarding. The environments are gorgeous, that can't be stressed enough. However, I have ADHD, and I'm autistic, and one of my main coping skills for sensory- and information-overload is blocking out visual details, so I miss every tree for the forest, and I miss every doorway and ladder for the wall. That makes this sort of game very difficult, although Bloodborne was a bit easier on this front than DS1. Thankfully, the way I play these games (with a friend who knows them) makes this almost a non-issue. Almost. And goddamn, those gorgeous environments made it a lot more compelling this time around. Dark Souls is pretty, but not Bloodborne pretty.
All told, this is some of the most fun I've ever had with a game.
real life.
Not much has changed since my Dark Souls chost. It hasn't been very long since then, lol. I'm still in the position I'm in, and that sucks. I'm disabled, I'm mostly alone, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with my life, and I hate it. But I started playing DS1 with Nat and Liz and others, realized I could be good at something I found intimidating and thought would be too hard, had a lot of fun with it, tried over and over and over at things until I could do them properly and was rewarded for it by the game and praised for it by friends, and just got to spend a chunk of time every so often where I could share in something a friend of mine cares about, have fun, and hang out with people.
These are fundamental human experiences that I've mostly been denied, and I got to finally have some of them with people who never abused me, and whose presence in my life isn't interlocked with my ability to continue living. That is to say, I got to have these experiences in a healthy way, for... not literally the first time, but it might as well be. And I did that through the vehicle of playing Dark Souls. It was really cool. And while not much has changed, some has. I mentioned in that post that all of these experiences helped me start taking better care of myself, my environment, and my cats. That's still true. So, I'm healthier and happier for it, if only somewhat.
Dark Souls 1 is the only Fromsoft game I currently have the equipment to play, because it's on Switch. This meant that to continue playing through the rest of these (or rather, specifically Bloodborne, as the case may be), I had to start going to Nat and Liz's house, which did a few things. It introduced significant travel time, which hurts my body and combines with Being Somewhere Else to take me away from my cats for a long time. It reduced the frequency at which I could play and thereby continue to do this thing that I have found so valuable and nourishing. It meant I started getting home really late whenever I did it, which cuts into sleep and makes scheduling anything more complicated. It brought me out of the house and into a different place where I'm not being constantly bogged down by my own monotonous bullshit. It put me in a real physical space with my friends that I like a lot and who are nice to me, meaning I got to like them a lot and have them be nice to me in 3-D with facial expressions and hand gestures. It meant I was in frequent direct proximity to one of the best cooks I have ever met, who despite my repeated threats of legal action dogmatically continued to give me really, REALLY good food every time I was there, occasionally even sending me home with some. It also placed me in such proximity with someone who has spent years getting really good at making cocktails as a hobby, like really good, you have yet to miss, how do you keep making the yucky chemical taste good, what the fuck. And it got me to notice that the care I've taken of myself since starting DS1, limited as it is, has gotten me back to a place where I can do things like travel longer distances and stay up late without ruining my body.
I mentioned to Nat that this has become my favorite thing that I do. It's been that since I was still on Dark Souls. Switching to hanging out in person for Bloodborne just made it moreso. I'll be sad to switch back once I gain the ability to run these games at my own place (and we won't even talk in this enormous mess about what's enabling me to do that, jesus christ lmao). But like, I hung out IRL with these people before, I will hopefully continue to after, and I enjoyed Dark Souls plenty "on my own," i.e. with the only other people being in my computer so... it's not like I'm really losing anything but a ritual. Which is a lot better than a lot of other things I've lost, and leaves much happier feelings in its absence as I continue to do the same things that are special to me with the same people that make them so special.
