• Home
  • Releases
  • Blog
  • Design
  • Posters
  • Submission Guidelines
  • About
  • Privacy Policy

Loser City

Multimedia Collective

  • Home
  • Releases
  • Features
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Interviews
  • Art
  • Submissions
You are here: Home / Features / Bloodborne Logs: Being Hunted With Religious Fervor

Bloodborne Logs: Being Hunted With Religious Fervor

March 27, 2015 By Jake Muncy Leave a Comment

As my bronzed blade sinks into his shoulder ligaments, soaking us both in blood, the rabid villager swears at me.

“Vile beast!”

Then he slumps over, dead, and some ethereal power in his blood—blood echoes, I’m told—is added to my own. Meanwhile, his physical blood, along with the blood of several men like him, is becoming caked into my coat. I shudder as I retract my blade.

I’ve just gotten to the city, and I’ve been told that I’m something called a hunter. So far as I can put together, the role of hunters is to protect Yharnam—a sprawling, Dickensian city of iron and squalor—from beasts that wish to prey upon it. They’ve failed. Werewolves, giant rats, and other horrors more terrifying and difficult to describe wander the streets. And with them, homicidal men and women like the ones I’ve been fighting. I’m not sure what’s gotten into them, but there are rumors—the title of the game being one of them—that some blood-based sickness or curse has taken them, turning them feral. Or just turning them dead. Coffins are everywhere, stacked up in every spare corner of the streets.

bloodborne villager

**

My understanding of Bloodborne so far has been scattered, fragmentary, coming in bits and pieces. I’ve spent about five hours with it so far, and I’ve spent nearly all of that time wandering the first few areas, a burned-out area of Central Yharnam. The only people I encounter who aren’t trying to kill me are hiding indoors, speaking to me only through closed doors and windows. Even then, they mostly just tell me to go away. They don’t need no trouble.

Other than that, all my time has been spent in combat. Fighting is fast and cruel. It feels hungry, like the enemies are aching to get at me, to cut and bite the life out of me. It’s almost personal, hateful.

Recently, I came to a bridge. On the other side of it, a group of eight or so villagers stood there, carrying torches, pitchforks, and blunderbusses. They’re looking right at me, waiting to see what I do.  I creep up slowly, extending my transforming blade from a short saw into a scythe. They charge. Behind them, a hulking beast sets a boulder on fire and throws it in my direction. This was a trap. For me. I barely made it out alive.

bloodborne-gates

**

Yharnam is immense. I’m used to the structure of games like this—Bloodborne was made by the same team that made the first Dark Souls, and I’ve gone on about those games enough in the past. These games place you in environments that are meant to feel real and complex, interlocking and intricate, with shortcuts and secrets and loose ends. You can, in any of these games, easily wander away into an area you’re not technically “supposed” to go to yet, with no warning from the game design itself. You’re free to explore and fight your way through whatever you think you can handle.

Yharnam, however, is big and complicated even by those standards, and it exists on the edge of what I can reliably keep track of. There are no maps, as I understand it, forcing me to hold a mental picture of the place in my mind. I find myself struggling with that, and I always feel dangerously close to getting lost on some cobbled stone street. It makes the ambiance, all fire and shadow already, even more oppressive.

I feel like a bug that Yharnam is trying to shake off its back.

**

There are empty wheelchairs everywhere. I don’t have any insights connected to this. It’s just creeping me the fuck out.

**

Cleric_beast

The first boss I face is called the Cleric Beast. It climbs over the barricades at the end of a bridge, and creeps toward me menacingly. It’s all tendrils, its entire lanky body like vines of gnarled muscle and flesh. One of its arms is larger than the other, stretching into twisted claws. It’s fast. I feel constantly as if I’m on the defensive, finding places where I can strike, looking for opportunities to heal. One of the wrinkles of Bloodborne’s fighting: You can recover from injuries by counterattacking, regaining stolen life from the enemy who took it. This means the best way to deal with the Cleric Beast is by getting into the thick of it, its kudzu flesh practically wrapped around you. Barely alive, I am a whirlwind of blade and flesh. I have no choice but to be.

The other interesting thing about the Cleric Beast is his name. After I finally fell the terrible thing, the game assuring me that my PREY has been SLAUGHTERED, I pick up a pendant from it. The items you pick up always have interesting descriptions, little bits of detail about the world scattered around. Tiny glimpses of some sort of narrator, a curatorial presence keeping the player just on the outer limits of informed. Sure enough, the pendant tells me that it used to belong to a cleric. And that clerics were the first hunters, and also the first to turn into beasts.

There’s religious imagery everywhere in Yharnam, and much of it is on fire. In the first major street I come upon, which is crawling with murderous villagers—a veritable angry mob—I see crucifixes in the Catholic style, a figure who looks very much like Jesus (is Yharnam supposed to be somewhere in our world?) suspended from the crossbeams, crown of thorns and all. They’re almost all smoldering in the twilight. It occurs to me that I’m not sure if the light on the horizon is the sun, covered by clouds, or the glow of distant infernos.

There’s a bonfire around the corner with a stake in the middle, of the burned-at-the variety. Faith—and the connection between people of faith and the beast hunt—seems to have played a huge role in whatever happened here.

Bloodborne-square

I make note of it, but, to be honest, as I move on from my fight with the Cleric Beast, it’s not what I’m most worried about. I’m most concerned about the possibility that I could turn into a beast while fighting them. Or that I’m already the beast, that I’m the prey and everyone else are the hunters. After all, the few sane in this town tell me I’m the outsider. It would certainly explain the outbursts, the embittered viciousness every enemy approaches me with.

The only friendly person I’ve so far encountered, a dying man who will only speak to me through a closed window, tells me to go to the Cathedral Ward. There are clergy there, and they might have answers. Or they might try to kill me. But it’s where I’m heading regardless. If I am a hunter, this is my calling. And if I’m a beast, then at least I’ll give the hunters a challenge.

 


Jake Muncy is a freelance writer, editor, and poet living in Austin, TX. In addition to functioning as Loser City’s Games Editor, his writing appears on The AV Club, Ovrld, and anywhere else he can convince people to post it. You can contact him by email or twitter, where he tweets regularly about video games, the Mountain Goats, and sandwiches. He has very strong feelings about Kanye West.

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: blood, bloodborne, bloodborne logs, borne, clergy, cleric beast, dark souls, From Software, hidetaka miyazaki, jake muncy, souls, video games, yharnam

About Jake Muncy

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

SOCIAL

FacebookInstagramTumblrTwitter

Buy Loser City Apparel

loser city T-shirt

Be a Loser

Sign up for Loser City's mailing list to receive weekly updates about the latest articles, shows, and releases.

TRENDZ

Anatomy of a Page art Austin CBS comedy comics Dark Horse DC DC Comics documentary Fantagraphics Film Fossil Records Games HBO hip-hop horror humor IDW Image Comics Indie indie comics jake muncy manga Marvel Marvel Comics Melissa Benoist Music penny dreadful Pete Toms punk Questionable Comics Review Ryan K Lindsay sci-fi Seattle Showtime Supergirl SXSW Television the CW TV video games Video of the Week ymmv

Top Posts & Pages

  • Codeine Crazy
  • Below Her Mouth is Yet Another Disappointing Film About Lesbian Experiences
  • Fossil Records: Peter Ivers' Terminal Love
  • Out from the Past: The Thief of Bagdad
  • The Transfiguration of Fiddleford McGucket
  • Pop Rehabilitation: Megan is Missing
  • Fluid Exchange: I Roved Out by Rupert Everton
  • Fossil Records: Lowdown da Sinista's Coming for Your Soul
  • Fluid Exchange: Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It
  • All You See: The Fall of Family Guy

Follow Loser City

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
Unable to communicate with Instagram.

Follow loser_city on the Gram

Loser City is…

Comics, shows, a secret critical network -- we aim to fail big.

Danny Djeljosevic: Co-Founder

Morgan Davis: Co-Founder

Nick Hanover: Glorious Godfrey of LC

David Fairbanks: Creative Writing Editor

Kayleigh Hughes: Film Editor

Julie Muncy: Games Editor

David He: Assisting Consultant*

Contributors: Nate Abernethy, John Bender, AJ Bernardo, CJ Camba, Liam Conlon, Daniel Elkin, David A. French, Rafael Gaitan, Dylan Garsee, Stefanie Gray, Johnson Hagood, Shea Hennum, Zak Kinsella, Austin Lanari, Marissa Louise, Francesca Lyn, Chase Magnett, Justin Martin, Diana Naneva, Claire Napier, Joshua Palmer, James Pound, Mike Prezzato, Lars Russell, David Sackllah, Keith Silva, Nicholas Slayton, Carly Smith, Ray Sonne, Tom Speelman, Mark O. Stack, Dylan Tano, Mason Walker

Art

Why So Angry: Refusing to Forget Stories of Abuse

Poetry: My God, My World

Comic Cinema Club: Sorcerer by Rafael Gaitan and Mike Prezzato

Nonfiction: Progeny in Crisis by Kayleigh Hughes

The Persistence of Synergy: Scenes from the Stock Business Photo Prison Hellscape

More Art

Interviews

Dhani Harrison Plots His Own Path With Solo Debut In///Parallel

Boston Terriers and Desert Vibes: A Conversation with Jay and Sanders Fabares of “The Pale”

Questionable Comics: Becky & Frank and Rachael Stott

More Interviews

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in