Waiting For It To End: Bloodborne and the Pandemic
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
“These hunts have everyone all locked up inside. Waiting for it to end… It always does, always has, y’know. Since forever. But it won’t end very nicely, not this time. Even some folks hiding inside are goin’ bad.” – Bloodborne’s Odeon Chapel Dweller
In 2020, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s From Software games became my world of solvable problems in a year of absolute chaos. It was a terrible thing to need. Without those sets of punishingly achievable objectives, though, I honestly would have been lost. I feel pretty weird saying that now. It was that kind of year.
So, in celebration of Scary Season, I’m finally sinking my claws into Bloodborne. It’s the version of Dark Souls where they make it all Gothic and give you a blunderbuss with a matching tophat. You take on the role of a hunter in a world overrun by horrifying beasts because of (what I’ll call for the sake of avoiding spoilers) a mysterious, blood-related pathogen. It might be the most aesthetically perfect game I’ve ever played. And then, after finally moving past Father Gascoigne, the game’s Big First Roadblock Boss, I encountered an NPC who told me something that I haven’t been able to shake.
The only name I know of for him is the Odeon Chapel Dweller. He’s about as wholesome as From Software NPCs get—he genuinely has everybody’s best interests in mind, so of course, in this world, he has to have a terribly grotesque appearance. He just wants everybody to know that his chapel is a safe place in a world spiralling out of control; he’s got this special incense burning, you see, that keeps the beasts and monsters away. And then he said it. Everybody’s locked up inside, he said. Waiting for an ending that makes sense:
“But it won’t end very nicely, not this time. Even some folks hiding inside are goin’ bad.”
In the world of the game, that’s just a statement of fact. You experience this yourself, because there are a number of NPCs you can interact with who are simply hiding behind locked doors, sheltered in place, refusing to let anybody in. Some of them even express sympathy for you: “Oh,” they’ll say, “what a terrible night to be out of doors” (looking at you, Castlevania 2). But you know none of those doors are going to open up for you. Sometimes you can even hear the screams of people finally losing it, echoing from inside their safe, safe houses. I often imagine they are working from home with children who are doing online elementary school. In such circumstances, I will admit, it sometimes got hard to worry about the welfare of strangers. At the end of the day, mere survival felt like a victory, occasionally supplemented by a virtual victory over Dark Souls’ Havel the Rock or (fucking finally) Ornstein and Smough.
The fact that Bloodborne takes place in a pandemic-ravaged world has, obviously, not gone unremarked in the past year; NPR’s Jason Perkins Mastromarino wrote an overview of the topic all the way back in April 2020. The thing that sticks in my craw now is the idea that this disfigured, well-meaning Chapel Dweller sprung on me, right in the middle of my ongoing pandemic escapism time. He mentioned “waiting for it to end.” Is that what we’re doing now, in this world where my kid is back in school but I still wear a mask to the grocery store? Are we waiting for it to end, or did the end creep up on us unawares? Does the end just…look like this (which is to say, not an end at all)?
It always ends, he says. But the end, this time, is not going to be good. He can tell. And folks, I know I don’t have to remind you that narrative structures like beginnings and endings don’t ever cleanly apply to real-world scenarios. I have sometimes even fallen into the habit of talking about COVID-19, or, more loosely, “the pandemic,” in the past tense, while it’s clear on a quantitatively demonstrable level that such talk is wishful anachronism at best. Ask anybody who works in health care.
And that’s the thing that gets me. Even in Bloodborne, a world crafted to be as bleak and unforgiving as death (or, more accurately, many, many deaths), there’s this idea that we know what the end of a pandemic looks like. Out here, though, I have completely lost the plot in regard to what that means. Will I ever see the bottom half of my students’ faces in the classroom again? Will we live through another winter of isolation as it becomes too cold for friends and colleagues to gather outside? Will COVID-19, like the flu, just become part of our annual wellness and vaccination routines? Or are we just going to watch people having loud physical altercations about basic public health common sense as the virus develops more and more deadly mutations…forever? They’re taking horse pills out there, folks.
As Bloodborne prophetically reminded me, the fact that something comes to an end—that we agree to demarcate a point, usually after the fact, as an “end”—is absolutely no guarantee that the ending will be good. Even some folks hiding inside are goin’ bad. Maybe I’m going bad, because I’m losing hope. Maybe the hard-but-achievable objectives just aren’t doing it for me anymore.
I can’t leave things there, but I also don’t want to simply rehash the valid but often-repeated thesis about “Soulsborne” games as metaphors for depression. Instead, I’ll say this, again: Bloodborne is an atmospherically perfect game. It’s a game about extraordinary dark-Dickensian views and exploration as much as it is a game about bloodthirsty slaughter. And, you know what? It doesn’t actually end. Like all its Dark Souls cousins, Bloodborne starts you right back at the beginning of the game, in NG+, after the final boss. (For the unSouled, this means “New Game+,” a version of the game that starts over from the beginning but lets you keep most of your stuff.) The bosses are a little harder, but the rewards for defeating them are also greater—the stakes are higher all around, but so is your health and your strength.
That’s the point, I think. For all his good intentions, the Odeon Chapel Dweller is shortsighted. “When is this ever going to end?”; that’s the wrong question. I can’t tell myself that I’m waiting for the end of the pandemic anymore, because I have lost track of what that means. I simply know that I start each new day equipped with all the tools and abilities that I’ve cultivated over the past eighteen months of survival. Could I, to be as cornball as possible in the midst of what I’m starting to think of as despair, wake up in the morning and call it New Day+? It’s enough for me, for now, that there’s still all this breathtaking world to uncover, explore, and be alive in—however dangerous it remains.
For more articles on gaming in the pandemic, read Patrick Jagoda and Kristen Schilt on Breath of the Wild, Brian Rejack on Death Stranding, or Anastasia Salter on Jackbox Games.
