Posted in: Games, Movies | Tagged: Bloodborne, entertainment, games

Why Am I Doing This?!!: My Bloodborne Diary – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Bloodborne is the game dominating all the internets right now. Its story is minimal, it's entirely based on fights and killing. Difficult fights, kill or be killed. It is not a relaxing game. It is a deeply stress-inducing game.

Why am I playing this game?

I usually only play games for the story unless it's Tetris. I was never a fan of Demon Souls or Dark Souls because the fantasy setting was never my thing, particularly not a grimdark fantasy setting where you're an undead fighter wandering about in a world that's already ended. The gameplay was also too slow and defensive for my taste: use the shield, parry, strike, fall back, rinse, repeat. Somehow, the decaying pseudo-Victorian setting of Bloodborne felt more my speed – a world afflicted and rotted by Lovecraftian, Eldritch forces right before the cusp of Modernity. Here, the Industry Industrial is stillborn in the shadow of Armageddon.

I don't usually like the idea of a game where you do nothing but fight. Yet here I am. Maybe I'm bored or need a distraction from the day-job. You begin with a character with the toughness of tissue paper and you get killed a lot. Every enemy will kill you with one or two hits if you don't dodge in time.

You click "View Spectre" to see how other players died. Ghostly red phantoms that run ahead of you, flail their weapons and fall over. No doubt your own death will be recorded for the edification of other players after you.

Long load times when you die and respawn. Why do people complain about the long load times? That's a bathroom break. Or for you to contemplate the meaninglessness of Existence and the meaninglessness of playing this game. And sob.

There is a memory leak bug where players who leave their Playstations on for 12 hours with the game running will cause the bosses to slow down and not attack you rigourously, turning the game into Easy Mode. I'm not doing that, because the Playstation 4 sucks power as it is, and I don't want to be slapped with a $600 electricity bill. I can, however, appreciate the desire to exploit the flaws in a game's system to beat it.

I'm not so obsessive as to play more than an hour at time at most, usually just 30 minutes while waiting for dinner to cook in the oven. So I got killed again and again on the first level, the decaying streets of Central Yharnam. It was the werewolves on the bridge that especially stumped me. Eventually I used the bell and called in a player to help me. Someone responded, someone higher level. He was a bit ahead of me on the map when he entered and by the time I caught up with him, he'd killed the werewolves already cleared a whole path for me before we whaled on the first boss together. Nice bloke.

Why is it called The Cleric Beast? There is nothing clerical about him. He didn't even offer tea and biscuits before trying to pummel us, and he pummelled with fists, not religion. Bad show. Did the Japanese designers completely misunderstand what clerics are about?

Wish I had a sniper rifle. But if I did, I would go through the whole game sniping all the enemies. After a couple of evenings of this, I found I knew that map and the enemy patterns by heart. I started killing the same enemies over and over again, almost muscle-memory. And for the hell of it, I ended up with so much currency I decided to go back to the Hunter's Dream and level up. I ended up at level 20 and decided that Central Yharnam. I was killing the same pitchfork and meat cleaver-wielding idiots again and again. I started thinking of them as UKIP supporters.

I get it now. No longer having the constitution of tissue paper has turned the game from Hell to Purgatory where you are less easy to kill. I've opened up the gates to access most of the main areas of Central Yharnam and can work my way through the respawning enemies through those maps. I've even killed the second boss, Father Gascoigne. I've noticed all the bosses have religious or clerical rank to their names. Vicar Amelia. Celestial Emissary. They have been corrupted, mutilated, transformed. This suggests the failure of faith and religion, authority figures tainted and entropied. A theme emerges. It suggests religious faith is for nought. The stars and the cosmos don't care. When they come to claim the world, crosses and faith will not cure disease, despair, madness or undeath. Even the unsullied who lock themselves indoors will eventually succumb. This is Lovecraft through and through.

This game finds beauty in decay. It searches for transcendence through bleakness. That blood-orange sky has the beauty of a JW Turner painting, and you are killing abominations under it. It's like a nightmare dreamtime version of England, stripped of culture and sophistry, reduced to decaying castles and cathedrals, full of murderous undead doomed to repeat their actions over and over again. A shadow England as imagined by Japanese games designers who use it as a backdrop as they refine and boil down the essential core of sadistic Japanese video game design to endless repetition to improve tactical skills and pattern recognition to defeat monstrous bosses in a masochistic reflection of work ethic: repeat until you become better. And underneath that metaphor of England hides the real metaphor of Japan, a society that's all about towing the line, of doing things again and again in the hopes of getting better.

So this might be the endless, cursed game that drives players mad in the way that the texts Lovecraft depicted in his stories drove men mad. Bloodborne has a dark literary heart beating behind every time you kill and every time you are killed, and you can choose to repeat that cycle again and again in a cycle of obsession. And after all, what is obsession but a kind of madness?

Hail, Lovecraft, patron saint of sadomasochistic gaming!

The blood is the life!!! at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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