Buying the Playstation 4 when I did was pure luck. I played games infrequently, only when I had enough hours in a day to burn three or four of them on “Call of Duty” or something. My friend Chris, who had devoted an entire room of his home to his game collection, pointed out a deal that packaged the PS4 with three of its best games; I said, sure, put the money down, and goofed around with some games before getting lost in the presidential primary.
You know what happened after the primary. Stuck at home, I finally replaced my cruddy modem with one fast enough to make gaming worth it. A few nights a week, I’d play games with or alongside friends from Delaware. Not much was good about last year, but here was an exception; I reconnected with people I’d known my whole life but missed out on when I was on my usual beat.
As the quarantines continued, I mentioned to my friend Dean that I wanted to try “Bloodborne,” a game I’d been intrigued by when I’d stumbled across it online. Put “Lovecraftian horror” in something, especially something schlocky, and I want to to see it. Advertising for the game, which for some reason had stuck with me, left a distinct memory: A figure in a long coat “racking” a saw-shaped weapon and fighting a giant beast.
“You will not like that game,” Dean said. “It’s all about patterns and timing and repetition. You die again and again.”
Dean’s known me for nearly 30 years. He was right: This was the sort of stuff I usually hated. During a sale, I downloaded Bloodborne, played it, and hit a wall. I picked it up a few weeks later, and kept making “a-ha” discoveries that rendered the game playable. Hitting the right trigger locked on (or off) a single enemy in a melee. Items could be dropped in a quick-use box. Dying, again and again, had benefits: You learned your enemies’ patterns, and if you were struggling, you could run in a loop and pick up - there will be terms like this throughout - “blood echoes” that paid for items and level-ups.
In short order I was hooked. In the first video games I’d played, like Super Mario Bros., getting hit by an enemy meant death, and starting a level over. In more forgiving games, you had hit bars, and ways to recover lost health before dying. Save points, by the time I was out of college, were typically passe; most games would save your progress every few minutes, or after the cinematic cutscenes that became universal with the original Playstation.
This game was a throwback. You had a hit-bar, and could expand it, but every enemy had the ability to kill you quickly. It added another bar: Any action more energetic than walking, like running, rolling, or swinging a weapon, drank from a fast-refreshing “stamina” bar. You carried a gun in your left hand, if you chose to, and if you shot an enemy at the right point in its attack, you could make a “visceral attack" - literally, plunging your hand into its guts, and ripping it back out, wreaking more damage than a usual attack, but less than you’d think after watching it.
Most modern RPGs gave the player a map, either as a part of the usual toolkit or as an item to earn. This one didn’t. You really could explore, and exploration was terrifying: One naive turn around a corner could mean an ambush murder, one leap after a hard-to-get item could mean falling to your death.
But in what a world. The first named setting in the game was “Central Yarnham,” a city you access after butchering a werewolf and emerging from a grisly hospital. It looked like a scaled-up Victorian city, but all wrong: Emptied of people, coffins wrapped in chains and stacked in front of homes, abandoned carriages that concealed psychotic townspeople. I discovered a lantern that saved my position, and when I died, I realized that I flashed back to it for another try. Cutting through my enemies, I found a lever, pulled it, and realized I’d made a shortcut back to the lantern, letting me breath easier and, if I chose, teleport to a safe area. When I defeated the first boss, another lantern appeared, with the same properties as the first.
Over the summer I grew obsessed with the game. The design, the cryptic story, the combat, all of it. To generalize a bit, other games I’d played tended to make things difficult by giving enemies more hit points and requiring you to survive longer and longer battles. This game had long battles, but the difficulty was navigated by paying attention and recognizing the AI’s moves. Some enemies were slow, some were stupid, some were both, and some were so relentless and fast it was like they had already learned to hate you.
Each battle was memorable. Of course it was: Repetition is how you remember anything. What always drove me away from games was the knowledge that I could be using the time playing them to do or learn anything else, but in a pandemic, there was so much less to do that the guilt subsided.
I was dimly aware at the start of this that Bloodborne was developed by From Software, a Japanese company known not just for hard games, but hard games that shared all the qualities of “Bloodborne.” Save points, shortcuts, brutal combat, enemies that seemed impossible until the 26th try when you remembered to dodge, not run, under the projectile from their mouth full of eyeballs, and jumped in for the killing blow.
I would play the game right after work, then pause it to walk with the sunset. On many days I realized that my most vivid memory came from the game, not from anything I’d lived through. By the end of summer I was completely comfortable thinking I’d spend much of my life moving a little avatar around, experiencing things through him, instead of doing anything dangerous myself.
A lot of my downtime since then has been spent watching videos of people playing the game; digging up “lore” from the game’s world; watching videos of people playing through self-imposed obstructions, like only using a gun (built to be much weaker than any melee weapon) or only using visceral attacks. I played the first two “Dark Souls” games, too, the first big hits by From, and ambled further into the lore and fandom. It’s a fascinating addiction and I’m still thinking about what to do with it.