It's strange, Bloodborne emphasises vertical exploration in level design and alien cosmology in vision but it also makes sure we're always confined to the matter of the violent instant. We have the ability to rotate the camera in a direction other to the one the player character faces — the player character moves, and the camera moves elsewhere — but the dislocation of camera from body rejects a sense of player-mastery over space (seeing more than the player character can see) and avatar-mastery (seeing all that the player character detects from their embodied position) alike. There is no negative space the player character can traverse. Instead Bloodborne's environment is a horrible amalgam of viscera, place, and action, that pulsate from the same sticky flesh. Everything in it glistens with the stickiness of connection. Pitch darkness draws things closer instead of pushing them away; the glow of lamps reveals the thickness of the atmosphere already present; the night sky reminds us that the earth is in the orbit of something else.
This claustrophobic, sticky presence is achieved through the synthesis of a heavy engine with agitated, jerky movement, and a design of disgusting tactility. There's an exhaustive precision to the hitboxes not found in a newer title like Elden Ring and this sets the player character as its own fragile body within the space, emphasising the dignity of the ongoing collision between equal adversaries. But then instead of slow and measured, Bloodborne encourages the balancing act of graceful movement and calculated barbarism. The roll mechanic is switched out for the dash, and so we sweep left and then and right, connect, and sweep again. It's both slippery and grounded, and success is entirely contingent on commitment to the flow of this weird ice dancing. To approach an enemy wanting to just inflict blunt violence is to fail, and so too is standing back to consider future action. If it's not felt, it won't work. The absence of shields for guns in parry is interesting, because there's no in-game penalty for getting the timing wrong, but the way it breaks the flow of combat spoils the feeling of its violent harmony. Backstabs too are arduous because they require multiple steps, the first charged. It's a quick victory but nothing next to the fluid carnage of the duel the game insists on and feels so good to perform.
Extending a weapon to its long-form is hardly ever practical, but emphasises the weird junk-mechanical nature of the instruments available. Assessing which weapons are required for which enemies is never a matter of looking at in-game spreadsheets but instead thinking about what the weapon's texture looks and feels like, and the quality of the enemies' flesh. We know when the jagged machinery of the saw will work, and when a clean cut would be better. In a world of crackpot physicians we're the worst, because instead of experimenting with different tools to deliver different ends, our vast and heavily modified toolset is entirely given to the act of bloodletting. There's a perverse intimacy to it that only grows more perverse and more intimate through the repetition of bloody violence. Every FromSoftware game is about a certain type of madness, but instead of the other games' desire to usurp one's tormentor (not as revenge, but to confirm the pain suffered was real and not a dream), Bloodborne unambiguously dramatises the madness of catharsis and will to eruption. The fight with Gehrman is most plain about this. We rush through white lilies, swaying at our feet, romantic music accompanying the game's climactic pas de deux.
Bloodborne lovingly invokes the vampire in order to place the brokenness of modernity alongside the endurance of the flesh. At a distance the romanticism of bodily fluids ("Will you drink my blood?") is contrasted with a Lovecraftian view on the insignificance of human life in the face of the cosmic, but for Miyazaki the vampire and the alien are consistent in the way they relate to the human body. Stacey Abbott points out that Méliès' film Le manoir du diable appeared before Bram Stoker's masterpiece, and that it conflates the vampire with the scientist, transfiguring human and nonhuman forms, conjuring visions, and deforming temporal order. The emphasis in that period was the more we understood about reality through novel scientific methods and instruments, the less 'real' and hospitable the world around us came to seem. Bloodborne follows in this tradition, using blood as the living string between cosmic, body horrific, and epistemological distortion, nodding to the dual concerns of horror fiction and scientific discovery. Its science-fiction is first and foremost of the body: what's seen in the cosmos implicates itself in the flesh.
Bram Stoker's vampire actually appears in the margins of records encountered within the volume, giving him the kind of formless-yet-omnipresent quality we might now associate with Miyazaki's reading of Lovecraft. The forces that most concern us are the ones only glimpsed in objects, conflicting manuscripts, and strange patterns of animal behaviour, and otherwise evade our comprehension. Alison Sperling has criticised Lovecraft scholars for placing too much of an emphasis on the limits of human knowledge — what Thacker characterises as "life according to the logic of an inaccessible real" leads to a lot of thinking about thinking, and that's all. A better picture of this horror, Sperling argues, is life completely saturated in the real. Miyazaki takes this reading too: the point is never the presence of an ancient or extraterrestrial force in itself, but the way awareness of these forces disturbs embodied reality. The revelation of the God that structures reality is that we are its dolls; the revelation of the alien that birthed us is that we are some mutant synthesis of the human and nonhuman, which is to say the human as we know it never was.
And so what's so good here is that it's all so addicting. Miyazaki does not expect us to recoil from the alien flesh but to embrace it, to want to see ourselves turned inside out along with the rest of the world. Everything in Bloodborne is calibrated to draw us into its ultraviolent dance, so we can feel it in our nervous system. Then, coated in blood, and guts spilled across the room, we're not supposed to be able to tell whose is whose. There's a tragedy to this vulnerable body that seems to exist just to erupt, but in that is ecstasy.
This claustrophobic, sticky presence is achieved through the synthesis of a heavy engine with agitated, jerky movement, and a design of disgusting tactility. There's an exhaustive precision to the hitboxes not found in a newer title like Elden Ring and this sets the player character as its own fragile body within the space, emphasising the dignity of the ongoing collision between equal adversaries. But then instead of slow and measured, Bloodborne encourages the balancing act of graceful movement and calculated barbarism. The roll mechanic is switched out for the dash, and so we sweep left and then and right, connect, and sweep again. It's both slippery and grounded, and success is entirely contingent on commitment to the flow of this weird ice dancing. To approach an enemy wanting to just inflict blunt violence is to fail, and so too is standing back to consider future action. If it's not felt, it won't work. The absence of shields for guns in parry is interesting, because there's no in-game penalty for getting the timing wrong, but the way it breaks the flow of combat spoils the feeling of its violent harmony. Backstabs too are arduous because they require multiple steps, the first charged. It's a quick victory but nothing next to the fluid carnage of the duel the game insists on and feels so good to perform.
Extending a weapon to its long-form is hardly ever practical, but emphasises the weird junk-mechanical nature of the instruments available. Assessing which weapons are required for which enemies is never a matter of looking at in-game spreadsheets but instead thinking about what the weapon's texture looks and feels like, and the quality of the enemies' flesh. We know when the jagged machinery of the saw will work, and when a clean cut would be better. In a world of crackpot physicians we're the worst, because instead of experimenting with different tools to deliver different ends, our vast and heavily modified toolset is entirely given to the act of bloodletting. There's a perverse intimacy to it that only grows more perverse and more intimate through the repetition of bloody violence. Every FromSoftware game is about a certain type of madness, but instead of the other games' desire to usurp one's tormentor (not as revenge, but to confirm the pain suffered was real and not a dream), Bloodborne unambiguously dramatises the madness of catharsis and will to eruption. The fight with Gehrman is most plain about this. We rush through white lilies, swaying at our feet, romantic music accompanying the game's climactic pas de deux.
Bloodborne lovingly invokes the vampire in order to place the brokenness of modernity alongside the endurance of the flesh. At a distance the romanticism of bodily fluids ("Will you drink my blood?") is contrasted with a Lovecraftian view on the insignificance of human life in the face of the cosmic, but for Miyazaki the vampire and the alien are consistent in the way they relate to the human body. Stacey Abbott points out that Méliès' film Le manoir du diable appeared before Bram Stoker's masterpiece, and that it conflates the vampire with the scientist, transfiguring human and nonhuman forms, conjuring visions, and deforming temporal order. The emphasis in that period was the more we understood about reality through novel scientific methods and instruments, the less 'real' and hospitable the world around us came to seem. Bloodborne follows in this tradition, using blood as the living string between cosmic, body horrific, and epistemological distortion, nodding to the dual concerns of horror fiction and scientific discovery. Its science-fiction is first and foremost of the body: what's seen in the cosmos implicates itself in the flesh.
Bram Stoker's vampire actually appears in the margins of records encountered within the volume, giving him the kind of formless-yet-omnipresent quality we might now associate with Miyazaki's reading of Lovecraft. The forces that most concern us are the ones only glimpsed in objects, conflicting manuscripts, and strange patterns of animal behaviour, and otherwise evade our comprehension. Alison Sperling has criticised Lovecraft scholars for placing too much of an emphasis on the limits of human knowledge — what Thacker characterises as "life according to the logic of an inaccessible real" leads to a lot of thinking about thinking, and that's all. A better picture of this horror, Sperling argues, is life completely saturated in the real. Miyazaki takes this reading too: the point is never the presence of an ancient or extraterrestrial force in itself, but the way awareness of these forces disturbs embodied reality. The revelation of the God that structures reality is that we are its dolls; the revelation of the alien that birthed us is that we are some mutant synthesis of the human and nonhuman, which is to say the human as we know it never was.
And so what's so good here is that it's all so addicting. Miyazaki does not expect us to recoil from the alien flesh but to embrace it, to want to see ourselves turned inside out along with the rest of the world. Everything in Bloodborne is calibrated to draw us into its ultraviolent dance, so we can feel it in our nervous system. Then, coated in blood, and guts spilled across the room, we're not supposed to be able to tell whose is whose. There's a tragedy to this vulnerable body that seems to exist just to erupt, but in that is ecstasy.