Bloodborne developer FromSoftware is popular for a bunch of reasons, but the most significant of those reasons is that they do not shove their stories in a player’s face. They would leave the breadcrumbs of lore everywhere and let the gamers figure out what was going on in that world. This is the case with pretty much every game they have worked on over the years.
One of the games that shines in doing this is, no doubt, Bloodborne. A game set in a dark world where everyone is either looking for a cure for a bloody disease or they are looking for victims to quench their thirst for blood. This is why they call this game Bloodborne; it’s all about blood. There are even things about this game deliberately done by developers to allow players to figure them out themselves.
The Bloodborne director confirms they deliberately leave things unexplained
The story of Bloodborne is pretty straightforward at first glance. When an outsider enters a city, they are looking for something called pale blood. Then someone is shown giving them a blood transfusion, after which they wake up in a vacant clinic.
Stranded in a strange city full of monsters, players eventually come across a peculiar lamp. When they touch it, they are teleported into a place called the hunter’s dream. There they are allowed to level up, upgrade their weapons, and talk to the creator of that dream, Gehrman, the First Hunter.
He tells them that they are free to use the workshop in the dream, and then sends the player off back to the city of Yharnam as a hunter to hunt monsters. Hunt those who are addicted to the blood and make sure the chaos ends.
In this pursuit, players now meet a bunch of different enemies. They fight mutated humans; they fight werewolves and trolls; and sometimes they meet massive, powerful enemies that some call bosses. These bosses used to be significant figures in Yharnam’s past, but for some reason, they have now turned into monsters.
When they kill these monsters, they get the message, “Prey Slaughtered.” This message makes sense; for a hunter, most enemies act as prey. This is good and all, but it gets more confusing when players defeat certain enemies, such as Mergo’s Wet Nurse and Moon Presence, who give “Nightmare Slain.”
Fans have wondered why this is the case, as it basically increases the confusion among them. How do players go from a hunter’s dream to defeating a nightmare that they thought of as the real world? This is pretty confusing indeed, and someone even asked director Hidetaka Miyazaki about it. Unsurprisingly, his answer was pretty straightforward yet cryptic.
That’s something deliberate on our part. This might be going off-topic a bit, but I like reading about how gamers interpret or think about the story and world of my games. So, I don’t want to rob them of that space for open interpretation.
Yes, this means he never gave an answer to this question. He only revealed how much he loves it when players go crazy guessing the lore of his games. One can’t help but wonder if he would ever reveal this answer to his fans.
But one thing is clear: the lore of Bloodborne is as deep as that of Elden Ring; players would continue digging through it for years to come.
Only a sequel can make these things clear
While fans keep on trying to find answers in Bloodborne, it must be said that one cannot find answers that do not exist in a game. Maybe FromSoftware never included a clear explanation for this issue in their game.
Maybe they can include it in a sequel if it ever releases. It would serve two purposes at once: it would give fans their answer, and it would give them a sequel they have wanted for so long.
