A Measured Analysis of Bloodborne’s Thematic Difficulty
To say From Software has a reputation for creating difficult video games would be a drastic understatement. In fact, their approach to game design, dating back to 2009’s Demon’s Souls, has almost singlehandedly reinvigorated the medium’s love for and awareness of challenge. Obviously, these games didn’t invent the concept of difficulty, nor was there any lack of difficulty in the medium to begin with, but it was these games that made difficulty the new hit thing. It’s gotten to a point where all difficult games will undoubtedly see a comparison to Dark Souls, not necessarily because they are like in structure, but because the difficulty in From Software’s games has resonated with players on such a deep level that they ultimately see the challenge as a perfect comparison.
Yet despite all of this, I’ve yet to see an in-depth explanation for why these games have such a fun level of difficulty. Claiming it to be, “tough but fair” is merely a surface level argument which can be applied to basically any game, so long as the designers intend for you to be challenged. Even encounters reliant on RNG become fair once the player experiences the battle enough to understand how it works. And From Software is hardly excused from creating sections and boss fights which are just flat out unfair to the player. This simplistic view of mechanical difficulty just doesn’t explain what makes the games so unique.
In attempting to describe a fairly simple concept in broad terms, I took to coining the difficulty within From Software’s games as, “thematic difficulty”. What this means is that the difficulty found within the game is meant for a grander purpose than simply being an obstacle to overcome. The difficulty in games which use thematic difficulty is a necessity in creating a certain atmosphere or to tell a story.
A good example of standard difficulty would be from almost any retro game. Take Contra, for example. A classic in it’s own right, but the difficulty found within exists merely as a way of keeping the player busy. There isn’t really a good reason to limit the player to one-hit kills and three lives beyond creating a barrier to completion. And there is also no real purpose to the mechanic of limited continues, aside from inflating the length of the game so a player can feel perceived worth of their purchase. Contra was designed to be a difficult game, but that’s really the extent to why it is difficult. This isn’t to say games which utilize such a philosophy are bad, but it does remain separate from games which use thematic difficulty. A good example of which would be Bloodborne, the topic of this article.
Bloodborne is a pretty dark game. This isn’t just from the perspective of artistic design, but also in the atmosphere it aims to create. This isn’t merely expressed through tone either, as it immediately makes an effort to misguide the player. At the very beginning, the player will be given nothing but the clothes on their back. You are almost immediately greeted by an enemy which you will not be able to defeat through normal means. Most players will die in this encounter, sending them to an area where they will receive the necessary weapons for survival. This is a common trope used to give the player a sense of helplessness and a rush of power once they are able to defend themselves. But it serves to show the player how dangerous this world can be without a weapon.
The player will pass this obstacle and eventually run into an NPC by the name of Gilbert, who serves as a refreshingly friendly voice in a city that has been otherwise corrupted. He gives you advice on which route to take out of the city, and it just so happens this will lead you to a great bridge connecting to the area of Cathedral Ward. Even if the player neglects to consult Gilbert, the level is designed in a way to make this the most sensible route. There are only two paths to take which stray from this path to the bridge, one subtly hidden behind a pile of breakable objects, and the other one not appearing until you’ve already reached the eastern half of the massive bridge. Your eyes will immediately direct you to the large door in the distance, but once you cross a certain point, you are attacked by the Cleric Beast.
The Cleric Beast is certainly a greater challenge than the player will have typically faced up to this point, but it’s likely they will continue to brave this fight, simply because everything within the game has told them this is where they must go. But the thing is, this fight is completely optional. Whether or not you defeat the Cleric Beast has no bearing on one’s ability to reach the game’s end credits. This is because the moment the player bests the Cleric Beast, they come to the realization that this giant door is not operational. To rub salt into the wounds, there is a door to the side which is locked and can never be opened over the entire course of the game. All the player receives is a lantern to serve as a checkpoint, though the location is almost completely pointless in comparison to other lanterns which have or will later be accessed. This fight was utterly meaningless.
As the player moves forward, they will reach the squalid sewers of Central Yharnam, filled with rotting, living corpses and malformed beasts. While exploring, it is likely the player will run into another NPC, this one a young girl who is afraid of the monsters and worried about her mother and father being out in the streets. If the player offers to help look for them, the girl describes her mother as wearing a big red-jeweled brooch. She also asks the player to give her mother a music box which is used to help her father calm down when he ‘forgets them’. Upon examination of the music box in your inventory, the description reads:
When the player progresses through Yharnam and enters the Tomb of Oedon, they are confronted with a second boss, and the first necessary fight of the game. The name of this boss is Father Gascoigne. The same name scrawled on the paper inside the box. Gascoigne is typically where a lot of players will hit their first wall, as he fights more aggressively than anything else you’ve seen up to this point. His attacks almost always have forward momentum, so when the player’s natural reaction is to dodge backwards, they will quickly see the futility of their choice. In the third phase of the fight, we are shown what happens to Gascoigne when he forgets, as he transforms into a hulking werewolf-like creature, ditching his combat arms and using the brute strength of his beasthood to attack the player. But if the player hardens their will and defeats Gascoigne, they are greeted to a corpse at the top of a staircase. When the player loots the corpse, they retrieve a red-jeweled brooch. From the observant player, we can come to the conclusion of having murdered this girls’s father soon after he had murdered his wife.
From these two boss examples, Bloodborne sets the stage for what victory means to the player. In one instance, we risked our life for the sake of a red herring, and in the other, we contributed to the loss of the parents for a lonely, innocent little girl. To really hammer in the point, they made this second fight a necessity for plot advancement, and there’s no way for the player to avoid this without abusing some form of bug. Where most games hold their boss fights upon a pedestal, happily rewarding the player for besting the challenges that come with them, Bloodborne manages to keep the epic feel of downing a significantly more powerful being while lacing the finality of the strife with a tinge of dread. These victories are personal achievements, but they do not change the past. We had no control over the great bridge’s door being locked, nor did we have control over Gascoigne murdering his wife. We merely control how we proceed through the world in our own moment.
The underlying theme spread throughout Bloodborne is one of futility. That no matter how strong we become, we cannot obstruct the fate of our world. For nearly every boss, there is a negative consequence arriving with their defeat. The next boss seen is typically going to be Vicar Amelia, who we initially see as a young woman in prayer, but witness transforming into a massive wolf-like beast.
Defeating her progresses the plot, but in addition to this, we see the evening turn to night, with the town’s residents further losing sanity, the presence of stronger creatures, and the unlocking of far more sinister areas. This is yet another clever use of thematic difficulty, as defeating Vicar Amelia directly resulted in the game becoming harder. As we continue to slay beasts and learn of the atrocities the world of Bloodborne holds, we see ourselves losing the advantages we had over enemies.
While traversing the next mainline area, the Forbidden Woods, the player will witness the humanoid enemies transforming to don a cluster of snakes in place of their head. This turns a once typical enemy into one with new strength and required skill to manage. It also shows the player how quickly people are beginning to lose whatever shred of humanity they once held. The game’s story of beasthood and theme of uncontrollable fate are, yet again, expressed through difficulty. The boss of this area is actually a group of three human-like figures, but as the fight progresses, we see them shift into more snake-like beings, eventually showing the capacity to conjure massive snakes from the earth.
But after their defeat and yet again progressing our own adventure, we are greeted to the small area of Byrgenwerth, a once prestigious college now succumbed to beasthood, with former students taking on the shape of insects which attack the player on sight. Progressing through this area leads to the boss fight against Rom, the Vacuous Spider. It is through Rom’s defeat where we see the night transition again, this time into a blood moon which reddens the sky, making visible a group of colossal creatures known as Amygdalas. In addition, the enemies become stronger yet again, once friendly NPCs are now either dead or have transformed into beasts, the sane NPCs are beginning to lose said sanity even as they hide in safe zones, and most importantly, we unlock the area of Yahar’gul.
Once the player enters this area, known mechanics of the game are changed. This is primarily seen through the addition of an enemy known as the Bell-ringing Woman, who is able to resurrect once defeated enemies and buff their strength. Whenever a player has slaughtered an enemy, it has since been dead until the player rests at a checkpoint, where it proceeds to respawn. Here, however, the player defeats the enemy, gains the experience which comes from it’s defeat, but are then witness to the corpse’s reanimation and successive re-engagement of combat. This shows the type of supernatural capabilities brought to the visible world from the blood moon seen after Rom’s defeat. Initially we were dealing with the event of men transforming into beasts, but as we’ve progressed through the game, we begin to start witnessing concepts beyond true comprehension. Are these enemies simply reanimated corpses or have their souls returned? Were they truly alive to begin with? This isn’t really something the game attempts to answer, as leaving the air of mystery fits with the game’s overwhelming thematic presentation of the player having little to no comprehension of the creatures they are fighting. It is at this moment where Bloodborne turns it’s cover of a blighted world of beasts into an existential horror of arcane and cosmic proportions.
Before further analyzing the main path of Bloodborne, I wanted to take a step back and discuss insight, a commonly ignored mechanic the player has the moment they begin the game. At it’s basis, it is a currency used to purchase items from a specific shop in the hub while also allowing the use of players to play cooperatively. But aside from being an expenditure, it serves as a stat directly linked to the game’s mechanics. It isn’t the use of insight as currency which makes it so crucial to understanding the thematic difficulty of the game, rather it is the means to which we acquire insight and the results of accruing enough over time.
It’s vital to understand there is no ability for the player to gain strength without at least one insight. In fact, most players will die to the Cleric Beast before they are able to level up, as the only way to do so is through the powers of a doll within the hubworld, the Hunter’s Dream. It is through the player’s encounter with this horrid creature which they are given the insight allowing them to do things which they were previously unable to do. Bearing witness afforded knowledge, and this knowledge now lets us move forward. Throughout the course of the game, the player’s bank of insight will grow as they make contact with the several abominations faced or with forbidden knowledge known to have driven others mad. As the player gathers insight, new things begin to appear, peeling a layer of artificiality which we once saw in the world. Some enemies begin to wield weapons of arcane power, new enemy types begin appearing from a void in the world, and the player will begin to distinctly hear the cries of a deceased child whose curse began the nightmare in the world of Bloodborne. Insight on the true face of this world is causing us to come to terms with new challenges which we must deal with. And the humanity we hold slowly fades as we gain more knowledge, inching ever closer to godhood.
So now that I’ve explained why insight works the way it does, and how it plays into the overarching plot of Bloodborne, lets take a look at the boss we find at the end of Yahar’gul, The One Reborn:
The concept of cosmic horror is difficult to portray in a visual medium, as much of it relies on the unknown. Many of Lovecraft’s creations aren’t able to be described simply because the horror is in how inhuman and disturbing they look. So grotesque that our human brains cannot process the words to describe it. This is lost in such mediums as video games due to this vision. How do you apply the concept of non-discernability to something you can truly see? When we see something, we can generally figure out some way to describe it, so the horror comes from our inability to do something so basic. Now, I’m not saying the amalgamation of flesh and bone known as The One Reborn is incapable of descriptors, but it’s the closest to true cosmic horror I’ve witnessed visually. Keep in mind, video games are not still images such as what is pictured above, and when you enter the arena to find this thing sitting there, immediately attacking you the moment you step in, it is far easier to present something truly incomprehensible. As lame of a fight this is, it does a fantastic job at setting a new theme for the game: Dreams and reality.
Once you defeat The One Reborn, the player’s journey takes them away from the physical world and into the cognitive one. You must now enter nightmares to face off against the godlike beings destroying the waking world. Suddenly, reality itself becomes murky. The insight you’ve gained has given you the power to enter dreams, but everything within these dreams carries the same consequences as reality. When you are hit, you take damage. When you die, you are sent back to the last checkpoint. Many enemies follow similar attack patterns as their true counterparts. So many things remain unchanged, and this is compounded with how strongly actions made in these nightmares can affect reality. The line between dreams and reality is blurred so heavily that the player can now enter and exit at will.
Of course, it wouldn’t be thematically appropriate if these nightmares weren’t significantly harder than reality. The nightmares host some of the most grotesque abominations yet, with men who have fully transfigured into beasts, gargantuan spiders, bloated crows the the heads of dogs, and the horrific Winter Lantern, a bipedal creature with a swollen, fleshy mass for a head and caked in crusted blood. These creatures are so grotesque they inflict a specific status effect known as frenzy, simply due to how distressing their form is.
On top of these new monstrosities is an abrupt change to the invasion system. Previously, invasions would only occur if the player chose to receive help from another player. This would trigger an enemy which rings a bell to alert invaders, allowing one of them to jump into your game. But in the nightmares, this enemy spawns regardless, meaning you are at risk of invasion unless you kill it. To someone who has spent the entire game online while avoiding invasion, this can be quite fearful. The game has, mechanically, broken up the world we know, much like how our dreams will radically change the possibilities we have within reach. Entering a nightmare has exposed us to a more terrifying world than the real one, as not only are we still dealing with creatures which aim to slaughter us at every step, but now we have no idea how our world works. These levels truly are nightmares, and, as H.P. Lovecraft, a major source of inspiration for Bloodborne, stated, “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
As the player progresses through the nightmare, they will take on creatures far removed from the animal-like beasts fought in the game’s opening hours. The shift into the alien is a soft and gradual one, and it is done to the extent that everything happening feels natural. We become consumed by the story’s progression and don’t recognize how wildly out of hand things have truly gotten without thinking about it. Now, obviously, the game started off with some pretty dire happenings, but the level of danger posed at the beginning is trivial compared to the endgame. It isn’t until we charge into the Nightmare of Mensis to lay the child and source of the nightmare, Mergo, to rest, that we begin to see some finality to the tale. We return to the Hunter’s Dream, our one place of refuge in the game, blanketed by fire. Mergo’s rest is causing the dream to lose balance, and we are suddenly given the unfortunate realization that there is no safe place in either dreams or reality.
There are three possible endings to Bloodborne, none of which feel truly happy or final. It serves to match the game’s overall atmosphere of hopelessness and destruction. There’s far more lore than what I briefly covered, but sharper minds have delved deeper and can explain the inner workings of Bloodborne far better than I could ever hope to. But the purpose of this was to analyze how Bloodborne uses it’s gameplay mechanics and a thirst for difficulty to hammer in the story themes in a brilliant manner. To wrap this thing up, I just want to take a look at each boss battle in the game and show the consequence, punishment, or utter lack of reason to risking your life against them.
Cleric Beast -> Gate you must get through is locked, making this a dead end.
Father Gascoigne -> After his defeat, you find the corpse of his wife, leaving the Yharnam child alone without parents.
Blood-starved Beast -> Optional, but defeating it leads to a dead end at the bottom of a ruined city. It does, however, open up the optional Chalice Dungeons, which contain the most difficult battles in the game.
Vicar Amelia -> Day turns to night and enemies grow stronger while NPCs become less mentally stable.
Witches of Hemwick -> Actually the only boss fight that doesn’t have any repercussions while having a decent reason to in the form of a workshop tool.
Shadows of Yharnam -> Opens up the fabled Byrgenwerth college, which has been destroyed and overrun with insect beasts.
Rom, the Vacuous Spider -> Triggers the Blood Moon, causing stronger enemies to appear and completely changes the world at a mechanical level.
Darkbeast Paarl -> Opens up a shortcut to a level you’ve likely already finished, serving little purpose.
The One Reborn -> Grants access to nightmares, drastically ramping up difficulty and muddying the world’s logic.
Martyr Logarius -> Leads to an NPC who will cause the death of on of the only friendly NPCs in the game.
Amygdala -> May be a stretch, but the fact that you kill only one of the many you see throughout the game feels underwhelming while showing you how easily these creatures could destroy humanity if they cared.
Celestial Emissary -> Basically not a real boss, merely guarding the area’s true boss.
Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos -> She is the only Great One interested in coexisting with humans, but you destroy her.
Micolash, Host of the Nightmare ->He’s more or less just in the way, as his consciousness only exists in the dream.
Mergo’s Wet Nurse -> Sets the Hunter’s Dream ablaze.
Ludwig -> Appears as a beast but shows clear signs of humanity before the second phase.
Laurence, the First Vicar -> A major player in the game’s story, yet we only see him as a beast without humanity.
Living Failures -> Much like the Celestial Emissary, this boss only serves to guard the true boss.
Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower -> Opens the Fishing Hamlet, the most blighted, hopeless, and dangerous place in the game.
Orphan of Kos -> Initially doesn’t even reward you with a victory text like every other boss. Also leads to a dead end and an anticlimactic end to the DLC.
Gehrman, the First Hunter -> Removes your freedom, forcing you into his spot as a guide to wayward hunters.
Moon Presence -> Completely removes your humanity, turning you into an infant Great One.
As can be seen, there is so much negative reinforcement with each boss. As you defeat more, you either see progress halted or become more difficult. Even in the instance of the Witches of Hemwick where everything seems positive, the fight is notorious for being laughably easy. Everything you actually have to put work into has repercussions.
That is unless you view these bosses without the veil of artistic design I’ve draped over them. Every boss will give you experience and a way to unlock new weapons. So clearly there is reason to go out of your way to defeat these vile creatures, right? Well, the thing is, when you start looking at the challenges in this way, you’re unintentionally engaging the game’s core, contradictory theme of humanity and the terror of losing it while still in pursuit of ascension.
What is it which drives us to finish a game like Bloodborne? Is it the knowledge we gain about the world we’re in, or is it the simple enjoyment of slaughter? Perhaps a mixture of both. But just as those characters in the game, our quest for knowledge will lead us to killing, and our killing will lead us to beasthood, and ultimately the destruction of humanity. But if we can only ascend through killing, and killing destroys us, we find ourselves in the deadly cycle which destroyed Yharnam. Even our player character is dropped into the game with one specific mission: Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt. How many players truly remember this mission by the end of the game? We knew we needed to transcend the hunt using Paleblood, but this led us to kill. Soon we began killing everything we came up against, even seeking out new enemies specifically to kill. We use the rationale of needing to gain strength in order to progress, but what is it we’re progressing to? Paleblood is vague all throughout the game, and the hunt stops feeling as if it’s a crucial part of the game about halfway through. We just find new concepts we wish to understand, and the only way to do so is through killing. But because this is a video game, our morality won’t kick in, and we ruthlessly slaughter anything in the way of our curiosity.
Of course, this is all just my interpretation of Bloodborne. The great thing about art is that it can hold different meaning to different people and still mean a lot. In the end, I just wanted to talk a bit about why I feel the game needed to be difficult, and how it utilized so many clever techniques in order to facilitate the obscured story. Bloodborne is truly a masterpiece.
