I didn’t really like Dark Souls. Objectively speaking, it’s a great game. The gameplay is solid; the world is compelling; the characters are interesting. Maybe it’s because, Demon’s Souls fanatic that I was, I had hyped the game up in my mind to such impossibly high standards that there was no way it could compete with my expectations. But I always found that there was something missing in Dark Souls: the unknown.

The story of Dark Souls is certainly mysterious; the game avoided conventional storytelling and instead gave the player the burden of uncovering the truth on their own. One could pull back the curtain of Anor Londo and discover the machinations of Gwyndolin and Frampt, or bring the Lordvessel to Kaathe and learn of another layer to the story. Even so, the story of Dark Souls was all too grounded for me. It was the kind of story that could be re-arranged and presented as fact, with all of the mysteries solved like a novel where, at the end of the book, the brilliant detective goes over the evidence to the rest of the characters and makes all the connections for them.

Demon’s Souls had been different. In Demon’s Souls, the answers hadn’t been there. It’s no mystery that the concept of Souls Lorehunting didn’t really exist with Demon’s Souls other than a few notable exceptions like GuardianOwl. The only real topic of debate was whether or not the Old One was the God of the Church. But there was no answer to whether the Monumental was good or evil; there was no explanation for how Biorr’s armor could be found in Miralda’s well; the mysteries behind Lord Rydell and the Old Monk remained void of answers. They were unknown.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, the genius behind the Souls franchise, grew up in poverty in the city of Shizuoka. Unable to afford any means of entertaining himself, Miyazaki would spend most of his childhood reading books found in his local library. He was fascinated with western tales of fiction, but his English was not fluent enough to understand every single word. Many times he would read a story and find that he couldn’t understand half of it, and so he would connect the words he could find and fill in the blanks, forming a story of his own that used the pieces that had been laid out before him.

I’ve read many criticisms of Bloodborne’s story when compared with Dark Souls. Many people find that the characters are empty, that the story isn’t as entertaining, or that the plot doesn’t seem to be as rich when compared to the tale of Gwyn and the First Flame. And they’re right. Bloodborne, like Demon’s Souls before it, doesn’t have the answers to be solved within the game itself. There’s no dialogue or item description which can provide the player with that crucial piece of information that explains everything. There’s no brilliant detective who can explain it for someone in a condensed manner. Bloodborne is a book where half of the words can’t be understood, and the reader must fill in the blanks on their own.

When I first wrote The Paleblood Hunt, I wrote that there was a singular truth we could discover. Seven months later, having read so many different interpretations and discussion on the game’s story, having discussed the plot with so many different people, I can only now see how absurd that the idea of a singular story had been. There is no answer to Bloodborne’s story. Bloodborne is a game that asks you what YOU think. It asks you what YOUR story is. What do YOU make of the unknown? This is my story. This is my Eldritch Truth.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
–Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927