THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: BLOODBORNE WTF?

​Frankly, this entire series could consist of moments from Bloodborne. Where do we even begin? The opening animatic, in which a demonic, partially-flayed werewolf rises from a pool of blood at the player character's hospital bedside? Or how about when they encounter the titanic monstrosity of The Cleric Beast atop the central Yharnam bridge after hearing it shriek and roar throughout their journey thus far? Or maybe when we first find The Blood Starved Beast, waiting in the burned and desolate chapel in Old Yharnam?
 
Bloodborne is a game of escalating what-the-fuckery, of the most hideous body horror that eventually transcends even those parameters to become a thing of Lovecraftian cosmic lunacy. Every encounter, every new area opened, provides more instances and varieties of horror than can be contained within a series such as this.
 
Just as in its sibling franchise, Dark Souls, Bloodborne paints a picture of humanity at its very worst, in its most wretched and abominable condition, after aspiring to the stars, grasping for some transcendence, having toppled so very far, failed so utterly in that ambition as to make less than monsters of itself.
 
Here, humanity and its institutions have committed acts and communed with entities beyond belief or description in order to court some measure of spiritual evolution: the city of Yharnam, the Healing Church that dominates it, the related but long since divorced college of Byrgenwerth...all powers that sought to usher in some new condition of humanity, in their own particular ways, to elevate the status of the species through various occult arts and rites, but which have all failed in the most lurid and spectacular ways:
 
The Healing Church's “blood ministration” has led to insanity and abomination, the college of Byrgenwerth's occult practises have revealed secrets that have tainted its scholars and driven them insane. Worse, both powers have drawn the attentions of entities that it would probably have been better to let be, that echo the Great Ones of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos not only in form and nature, but the metaphysical nihilism they imply by their very existence. 
 
This is the situation the player is hurled into: a city on the brink of collapse, infested with the mad, the mutated and the lycanthropic, every step revealing some new depth of atrocity, some new human evil that has become decidedly much more and much less than that. Eventually, the player even encounters those vast and unseen powers that might have orchestrated the entire affair or merely been drawn by it from states of being beyond waking perception.
 
Perhaps one of the strangest, certainly one of the most distressing and bizarre, occurs towards the latter portions of the game, when the player finally makes their way to the long sealed and derelict college of Byrgenwerth, in search of the secrets that the Healing Church would rather they didn't discover.
 
Having fought their way through the college, finding its scholars mad and mutated, the college itself infested with the extra-dimensional vermin their studies have summoned, they find themselves out on a stone balcony overlooking a great lake. There, the twisted, bloated master of the college, Master Willem, gestures feebly to the edge of the balcony. Following his direction, the player finds themselves staring down into what seems to be a suicidal drop into the water, in which the moon is perfectly reflected.
 
Having no other choice, they take the plunge, descending into the depths...only to find themselves standing in some bizarre “mirror dimension” reflection of the lake, which now extends to the horizon, to the very limits of perception, the player able to walk on the surface of the water as though it were solid land.
 
In the distance, a heap or hillock of something rises from the lake, the only disernible feature, and therefore one that the player makes for.
 
Upon closing the distance, they find themselves face to face with an immense creature, a bizarre fusion of spider and pill-bug whose back erupts with luminous fungus, whose head resembles a distorted stone mask festooned with mismatched eyes. From the sky descends a swarm of lesser-spiders that defend the entity with homicidal fervour, the creature itself assaulting the player not with its body but blasts of arcane energy, rains of magical matter.
 
This is Rom, the Vacuous Spider, which was presaged earlier in the game by a random missive found in the Yharnam library, which talks of the “Byrgenwerth Spider” and the secrets it conceals.
 
Like all of the monstrosities in Bloodborne, Rom is framed in such a manner that we are to infer her background from framing, symbolism and the subtle cues that the game provides rather than having reams of text to wade through:
 
The implication is that Rom is somehow one of the students or scholars of Byrgenwerth who achieved their ultimate aim: transcending to the condition of a genuine Great One by magically and surgically grafting the eyes of various other-worldly entities to herself.
 
As a result, she now stands as a supreme wielder of arcane magics, using them to halt or suspend the rituals underway within Yharnam itself, which seek to bring down -maybe even create- other Great Ones that will mean only an escalation of madness within the city. 

​By eventually defeating Rom, we usher in the next phase of the night, the next cycle of the game: all she held back -or maybe concealed- is now revealed when we “wake” from her peculiar dreaming realm. This is perhaps the most sincere horror of Rom and of Bloodborne itself: in defeating her, the player unlocks the most hideous revelations, the darkest secrets: now, we see what the various cults in operation within the city were attempting, the creatures that they have either called down or that have descended like extra-dimensional locusts to observe their insanity.
 
Traversing Yharnam in the wake of Rom's death, we find it infested by a swarm of Great Ones collectively called The Amygdala, creatures -or maybe one creature spread across various points in space, time and probability- attracted to insanity and metaphysical decay, that seem to facilitate and exacerbate those very phenomena for their own amusement (or perhaps even nourishment).
 
That these entities were present the whole time and that the player simply wasn't aware of them or able to perceive them up until this point is a moment of profound disturbance, especially given that, by our actions, the world is brought one step closer to a species of dissolution no religious text or scientific projection could possibly presage.