Most big-budget video games work hard to appeal to a broad player base. Boot up The Last of Us: Part II and Red Dead Redemption 2 and you will be treated to cinematic introductions that neatly outline mechanics and plot, spelling out details with lengthy tutorials and exposition-laden dialogue.
Bloodborne, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, took a drastically different approach: It dropped gamers into the deep end and ignored their cries for help.
Fans of other challenging games by FromSoftware loved it. Others despised it. Dan Stapleton, convinced by enthralled co-workers at IGN to give Bloodborne a shot, called the experience “tediously repetitive and very rarely fun,” and “more chore than challenge.”
He was not alone. Based on public PlayStation data, less than half of those who begin Bloodborne defeat its first boss, a hulking antlered monster that players encounter in the game’s labyrinthine starting area. Only one in four players ever defeat Mergo’s Wet Nurse, the many-limbed eldritch horror who must be vanquished to reach the game’s most basic ending.
A century ago, influential artists like Picasso, Munch and Duchamp also confused and outraged audiences with difficult work that pushed the boundaries of the medium. The critic Julian Street, reviewing Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase,” wrote that it was like “an explosion in a shingle factory.” Critics and audiences were similarly skeptical of modernist literature that demanded more from people than many were prepared to give.
Bloodborne, a mass-market game featuring beast hunters hacking up werewolves and aliens with giant saws in the fictional city of Yharnam, may appear to have little in common with these famous works. But Nathan Wainstein, an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, sees the modernist stamp all over Bloodborne.
In his book “Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne,” he compares Duchamp’s “Nude” not to a shingle factory explosion but to a video game glitch. Mustering thinkers like Theodor W. Adorno, Roland Barthes and Michael Fried to support his arguments, Wainstein describes Bloodborne as a continuation of the modernist impulse to push art forward by challenging the expectations, and sometimes the patience, of its audience.
Bloodborne is as comparable to a mass-market action game, he argues, as Joyce’s “Ulysses” is to a Dan Brown novel.
Conversations about difficulty, the game’s most obvious feature, can overshadow Bloodborne’s artistic achievements. But for Wainstein and other scholars, it’s a central element of the game’s ambition.
“People often think of play as easy,” said Patrick Jagoda, a game designer and an English professor at the University of Chicago who helped develop the university’s game studies curriculum. “But difficulty can also open up reflections, frustration or anxiety, interruption, disruption or subversion, right? Difficulty can challenge us to be uncomfortable and see where those precarious feelings will take us.”
Bloodborne embraces discomfort from its opening moments, when beginners are greeted by a werewolf devouring a corpse in the middle of a hospital clinic. This enemy will almost immediately kill most players, who have no weapon or any real idea of how to approach combat, resulting in a frustrating reset barely a minute into gameplay.
That kind of disorientation is a hallmark of the FromSoftware experience.
“It’s not Breath of the Wild, where everything’s explained to you,” said Paul Galloway, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art who has been central to the New York institution’s efforts to include video games in its permanent collection.
“And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Breath of the Wild,” he continued, referring to the highly praised Legend of Zelda game from 2017. “But I think that kind of ambiguity and lack of definition allows for a richer experience, because like a modernist novel, you are allowed to interpret and bring your own kind of perspective.”
“You just wish you could hit pause,” he admitted.
FromSoftware games offer no such reprieve. Even within game menus, enemies can and will attack. For Galloway, the experience is like a return to the frustrations and joys of the coin-operated arcade cabinet.
Beyond gameplay difficulty, Jagoda notes that games like Bloodborne also offer challenges through their opaque storytelling, encouraging “a kind of close reading” that rewards players for mining the game’s environment and items much in the same way that scholars in the humanities scour primary sources.
These games also ask players to grapple with their emotions, which Jagoda calls affective difficulty: the frustration of losing to the same enemy 10 times in a row, the anxiety of getting lost or running low on healing items.
“When people call a game artistic, they usually judge it by criteria used by other art forms,” Jagoda said. “They might mean that a game is visually stunning or that it’s well written. But a game can also be artful because of its mechanics or its rules or its objectives.”
While the basic elements of the Soulsborne genre that FromSoftware pioneered have remained intact since Demon’s Souls (2009), Wainstein said in an interview that he believed that Bloodborne was “the most undiluted version of the formula.”
The game, he said, has a uniquely modernist bent: fragmented, ambiguous and absorptive. “It draws you in by basically ignoring you, but ignoring you in a respectful way.”
Dark Souls (2011) and Elden Ring (2022) are rooted in a hodgepodge of fantasy tropes and feature a wide variety of environments and hundreds of weapons. That is part of their broader appeal.
In Bloodborne, on the other hand, Wainstein sees a spare “Aristotelian unity.” It takes place over one night in one city and has a rich, coherent aesthetic that extends from its level design to its limited but highly inventive arsenal of weapons.
If Bloodborne is a pure expression of those ideas, the open-world Elden Ring, which has sold more than 30 million copies, can be viewed as a concession to more popular tastes. When the franchise’s first multiplayer game, Nightreign, comes out this week, it promises to further push that distinctive formula toward systems familiar to even more players, with preset characters and a fast-paced gameplay loop.
Now more than ever, Bloodborne seems to have done something extraordinary for a mass-market entertainment product, hiding the best parts of itself behind challenges that most people cannot or will not overcome.
After that inevitable first death, players awaken again to find a mischievous mentor figure to all the hunters in Yharnam.
“You’re sure to be in a fine haze about now,” he says, slyly acknowledging the disorientation of those early hours. “But don’t think too hard about all this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It’s for your own good.”
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