Nightmare Fuel / Bloodborne

"An unsightly beast... a great terror looms...! Ludwig the Accursed is coming..."

Bloodborne, as a spiritual successor to Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, was bound to include plenty of nightmare-inducing elements. Indeed, this game features horrors that put even the aforementioned titles to shame.

Unmarked spoilers ahead.

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• The Plague infecting Yharnam. Its victims slowly turn into mindless monsters, and eventually the victims mutate into ravenous, flesh-hungry beasts.
  • Even the citizens you talk to behind locked doors aren't safe. During the initial Evening phase, most of them converse with you sanely and lucidly. By the time of the Night or even Blood Moon phase, they're either howling mad, laughing manically, or not even respondent whatsoever.
• You know that a game isn’t messing around when it hits you with nightmare fuel right out of the gate. Less than thirty seconds after you finish the character creation, you awaken to find a skinless, nasty looking werewolf creeping towards you, emerging from a massive pool of blood… all while you are immobilized and utterly helpless. The game never explains where all the gore came from, but as the beast slowly reaches towards your face in a leisurely fashion, you can tell that it intends to take its sweet time in dealing with you... and what might make it worse is that the gesture it makes with its claw isn't reaching out to grab you, it's beckoning you.
• All throughout Central Yharnam, you'll find dozens of coffins stacked in streets, cellars, and random corners. Many of them are hastily chained shut, as though people were afraid of something coming out...
  • That's because "something" can come out, at least in Yahar'Gul and certain Chalice Dungeons. Said something is a family's worth of Plague-infected corpses all mushed together from being stuffed into the same coffin and rotting together in the dark.
• The Cleric Beast. If his scream doesn't intimidate you, his ruthless attack pattern will. The fact that his design reminds Dark Souls players of Manus, Father of the Abyss, doesn't help either.
  • In addition, if it's your first time playing the game, then you're likely to be caught off guard when you're about halfway up your first ladder by what sounds like a hellish death metal scream, left wondering, "What the hell was that?". A question that is answered for you when you finally meet the Cleric Beast itself.
  • For people who have never played a game in this franchise, it's something else altogether. When you start playing, there's a sense of looming horror for everything you fight, but nothing that appears too abnormal. But then the Cleric Beast appears, and you realize that you are in way over your head.
  • What's worse is that the scream sounds vaguely like a person's. A very agonized person's.
• Even the subtle, benign details can be deeply unsettling. For example, you may wonder how the moon is able to shine so bright on such an overcast night, only to realize that the moon is somehow below the clouds...
• The Blood-starved Beast: That thing's skin has been flayed off its back, and what remains hangs off it in horrible fleshy flaps. And it's called 'Blood-starved' for more than one reason. It's hard to say what comes out of it when it's hit, but it sure the heck isn't blood, and it sure is toxic!
  • Not to mention that horrid, horrid face it has.
  • The comic, The Death Of Sleep, actually ups this by turning it into a Super-Persistent Predator. At least in the game, it stays put, but here it stalks the main character unceasingly, no matter where they go.
• Even before entering Old Yharnam, you are greeted by a foreboding sign warning Hunters to stay away. Of course, the protagonist, and player, ignore this and press onward, eager to hunt more beasts and discover more secrets. Upon entering the charred ruins, however, you are greeted by the distant and booming voice of an unseen Hunter named Djura who again warns the protagonist to leave "Or the Hunter will face the Hunt." Compared to other eldritch or environmental horrors in the game, it's not much, but the surprise and ferocity of his voice alone are enough to give first timers a good spook. And that's before he even whips out his Gatling gun.
• Amygdala, a gigantic Giant Spider featured in the background◊ of the city, grasping a tower with her massive legs tipped with human hands. A closer look◊ shows that she looks like an unholy cross between a spider and Cthulhu. That was just in the Alpha test! In the game proper, she's revealed to be a Great One who lives within the Nightmare Frontier, and is one of the game's harder optional bosses. Also, did we forget to mention that there are lesser versions seen clinging to buildings in Yharnam once either Rom is killed and the illusion broken or you have enough Insight? Some of them even in places you've frequented from low levels, like the Cathedral Ward entrance. Always nice to know there was a giant nightmare spider watching you the entire time.
  • Even before you can see them, the Lesser Amygdala can be a source of a couple of unexpected scares. For example: you are minding your own business traveling through the city when suddenly a laser beam fires at you out of nowhere, or worse, you suddenly get grabbed by a massive hand and are staring at an Eldritch Abomination which causes you to go into a frenzy followed by the Eldritch Abomination throwing you to the ground. Did we mention that this is also the way to get to the Nightmare Frontier and The Old Hunters DLC?
• Darkbeast Paarl, a giant undead werewolf◊ covered in clumps of singed fur and crackling with electricity. That all too human face will haunt your dreams...
• Vicar Amelia's Painful Transformation prior to you fighting her. She transforms from a normal-sized woman into...some kind of giant, eyeless white wolf-like thing◊ with More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
• The Nightmare of Mensis. This endgame level isn't difficult just because of the actual gameplay. As hard as that is, there's one thing that makes this area almost completely impossible to finish: It is fucking terrifying. First, on approach to the citadel in the Nightmare, you can't even look at the building without accumulating Frenzy. Then, spiders. Huge, honking, far, far too realistic spiders capable of making an arachnophobe piss their pants. And those are only two of the many obstacles within the level.
  • Another muted, silent one in the tower on Mensis; near the place where you fight the Host of Nightmares, there are entire rooms full of people wearing the same cage he was. They are all dead; nothing left but desiccated bodies and skeletons that must have expired some time ago. Some of them are quite small. Yet while ferocious monsters infest the entire building, each and everybody looks like they perished non-violently. No cuts, scrapes, or broken bones, everybody completely intact and reclining in a chair. For whatever inexplicable reason, the beasts utterly ignored these people, who were nevertheless content to sit and wait as their bodies withered, even the children. Whether they were unwilling, unaware, or simply unable to save themselves is never learned.
    • Another lovely example from the nightmare is The Brain of Mensis. She can make your frenzy skyrocket from almost a mile away,^note that's not hyperbole, the "unlight" that causes your Frenzy levels to rise when you look at the Citadel is eventually revealed to be her, though how and why are never made clear. Her design is also sickening; a terribly rotten, pulsating, misshapen mountain of flesh absolutely riddled with eyes, that is somehow aware and autonomous without a body. Once you drop it into the pit within its tower, the Brain will land in an dark abyss where its heartbeat reverberates through the space — thankfully, if you meet it there, it doesn't attack you (and even gives you a rune if you use the Make Contact gesture for a minute). Yet the subtle implications are arguably the worst; various texts and dialogs throughout the game imply that gaining enough insight will “line the brain with eyes”. Given the amount of insight you have obtained thus far, you could be looking at a 1,000x scale model of something currently inside your own head.
• So, you're walking through the Forbidden Forest. Nothing too bad just yet; mostly just more angry villagers and a few traps and pitfalls. But then you get to the lower parts of the forest where the villagers don't go. The first guy you see is walking towards from you... and his head explodes into snakes! SNAKES! The rest of the Forbidden Forest is filled with horrible hydras, some of which are still living inside people. Talk about ramping up the creep factor.
  • The area's local Wolf Pack Boss isn't any better, either. They first appear as shadowy hooded figures, which while still intimidating isn't too bad. Damage them enough however? The snake hydras pop out of their heads as well. Thought that was all? Damage them more and they will start conjuring GIANT snakes to attack you during the fight.
  • Even getting inside the Forbidden Woods is a chilly moment. The way is blocked by a door that will only open if you give the man on the other side the password. Going by his coughing and wheezing, it sounds like he doesn't have much time left. So, after you give him the password, the door opens to reveal an ancient skeleton seated on the other side. Long dead.
  • It doesn't help that the waterways in the Forbidden Forest are infested with monsters that look like drowned corpses, with only their rotted heads bobbing above the surface until they attack. You'll hear the drone of their utterly inhuman croaking sounds long before you see them.
• The approach to Cainhurst Castle takes the Gothic horror element up to eleven while mixing in a healthy dose of Mind Screw. You access it via riding in a mysterious, seemingly driverless coach (Dracula, anyone?) while someone apparently watches you from the bushes. At last you approach the huge, decrepit, snow-covered castle... and of course, the gates open of their own accord. All this is unsettling, but the horror doesn't set in until you look behind you and see the coach horses, dead. Not just dead, but half-rotted and completely frozen over. Not to mention a gigantic, impassable gap in the bridge... how exactly did you get here again?
• Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos is a Great One boss that lurks beneath the Great Cathedral. You can find her after you've beaten the boss in the Upper Cathedral Ward. Of all the strange and gruesome creatures that walk the streets of Yharnam, "her" bizarre appearance◊ stands out as something truly alien. Her bulbous head is covered in fungus-like growths, her slug-like body has a set of arms, two sets of tentacles, and a pair of huge, membranous wings. She's an intimidating fight, as well; she's much quicker than she looks, hits hard, AND has devastating long range spells she can fling at you. Any Hunter who wants to bring her down had better be prepared. She is apparently a celestial being from the cosmos that the upper members of the Church, known as the Choir, commune with for guidance and, in turn, lead their followers in worship of her.
• The introductory cutscene of Mergo's Wet Nurse. You are guided by the wailing of a baby, and when you stumble into the garden where said baby's voice is coming from, the Wet Nurse swoops down on the baby's cradle and appears to devour it, before turning her attention to you, armed with six blades and deploying dark, grim reaper-like wings. Bizarrely, her head is invisible, but the way her long hood stretches as she moves implies that she has something far more alien than just a humanoid skull...
• Winter Lanterns, oh dear god. These hulking monstrosities are formed from the remains of the Messengers you see regularly throughout the game, creepily adorned in The Doll’s attire, and their most prominent feature is their massive, bulbous head that’s more of an amalgamation of grotesque tentacles and eyes than an upper body, and let’s not forget they have More Teeth than the Osmond Family as shown during their nightmare-inducing grab attack. To make a long story short, they are deeply disturbing to look at. Even more unsettling is the off-key, disjointed singing they emit seconds before you encounter them that sounds like what Azathoth’s mindless henchmen sing to him to get him to sleep. Eeeugh…
  • As if their physical attributes weren’t bad enough, these things also have the ability to FRENZY THE PLAYER JUST BY LOOKING AT THEM — so that means if you don’t have a very significant number of Sedatives and Blood Vials ready before facing them, and/or you go into the fight without any plan, you’re fucked.
• The optional boss, Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen, is just horrifying as all hell. Mostly for the fact that she appears to be heavily pregnant, combined with how you can hear a baby crying every time you hit her, and how her stomach just gets bloodier and bloodier throughout the fight...
  • The fact she is pregnant of a Great One (Oedon's) baby, who most likely put it there without her consent, is bizarrely overlooked by players.
• After finding Father Gascoigne's and Viola's daughter and handing her back her mother's brooch, you have the option of taking her to Iosefka's clinic... unfortunately, the real Iosefka is dead by then, and the impostor taking her place pretty much intends to use the girl as her latest test subject.
  • The alternative? Send her to Oedon Chapel. But she won't make it. That little girl will creep through the streets and the aqueducts, narrowly avoiding beasts, drowned corpses, mutant crows, and come oh so close to reaching the Tomb of Oedon and salvation... only to come face to face with the giant pig blocking the way. Killing the pig will yield a bloodstained ribbon, the only thing left of her.
  • Think the game couldn't top itself after that? Wrong. If you come back to the house after the Blood Moon has appeared, you meet the sister of the girl, asking you if you've seen her sister. Now, you've got the choice of either lie and leave her in the dark, or give her the bloodstained ribbon and watch as she Goes Mad from the Revelation. Think that's depressing enough? Come back later. Look at the bottom of the nearby ladder and watch the game throwing the Nothing Is Scarier approach out of the window. With the girl. It's almost like the game is telling you "Yeah, you really should stop expecting something like a fetch quest to end well in this town."
• Words almost fail to describe The One Reborn. A hideous amalgamation of flesh, limbs, bones, and innards, it looks like an insane god's attempt to create life. This notion is reinforced in its introduction, where it oozes out of a blood-red moon like a grotesque, aborted fetus falling from a womb.
  • Even worse is the fact that it speaks to you. Every time it casts a spell, a horrific voice, a wet gurgling voice that sounds as if if comes from multiple throats, speaking in what sounds like either gibberish or a language you have to be insane to understand.
  • Not helping matters is that there is not a single piece of lore anywhere in the game that makes mention of this abomination. We aren't told what this thing even is, where it came from, or why the bell-ringing women summoned it. It is implied that the One Reborn is the final results of the School of Mensis' experiment with creating a vessel for a Great One in their image. It isn't an eldritch abomination or yet another horror spawned by the Plague of Beasts; a pack of sick human fools envisioned it, yearned for it to exist, and made it so. Mankind alone bears the guilt of this travesty.
• It’s a great testament to From Software’s atmospheric and storytelling abilities that no matter how desperate, dire, and bleak the situation is, it can always become much, much worse. Case in point; Yahar'Gul. Dear lord, Yahar'Gul.
  • It’s unsettling enough that a massive city has existed within Yharnam without anyone realizing it, but the real shock comes when you first glimpse the city... and see dozens of Eldritch Lords crawling over the cityscape like maggots on a corpse. That's the moment where you realize the game has been influenced by H.P. Lovecraft the entire time, and that you're stuck in a Cosmic Horror Story. It all goes downhill from there.
  • But it's very likely that your first visit to the city will be in the Hypogean Gaol, a jail beneath Yahar'Gul, before the events turn cosmic horror. After killing the Blood-Starved Beast in Old Yharnam, Kidnappers will start to appear behind the Oedon Chapel. Should you get killed by one of them, you'll wake up in the Gaol instead of the Hunter's Dream. A faint chant can be heard there; a chant that is so dissonant and sinister it might just be the creepiest and most unsettling piece of music in video game history (judge for yourself). And then you realize the chant is diegetic — somewhere, someone, or rather a large group of someones, in-game, are generating that constant chant. They stop chanting once you defeat Rom and gain full access to Yahar'Gul, and they're never seen or mentioned.
  • As you make your way through Yahar'Gul, you find an excessive number of bizarre statues. It’s a trivial detail at first. This is Yharnam after all, and Yahar'Gul in particular; it would be weird if a statue wasn't strange or sinister. Yet there is something... off about these sculptures. They’re clustered in nonsensical areas, in the streets, sometimes even blocking doorways. Dozens are inside already cramped rooms, and all of them are depicting horrified, panicked people either cowering or attempting to flee from something. Eventually, it dawns on you that these may not be statues after all. They're corpses.
    • Given the eldritch nature of Yahar'Gul, can we be certain that they're actually dead?
    • You never learn what exactly happened to them... although you expect to find out at any moment.
    • Some of those statues happen to resemble the messengers that inhabit the Hunter's Dream and Chalice Dungeons.
  • The Yahar'gul set says that they had their own Hunters. But did they hunt the beasts, or men? It was definitely men.
  • The most horrifying aspect? The Church knew about this, knew about the corpse statues, the horrors, the monsters, all of it. And what did they do? Put up signs to warn people? Spread the word that bad things were here and they should keep away? No. They built a city around it, and started worshiping the Great Ones, while keeping the true nature of their so-called gods hidden. How many people sickened, and became monsters, begging for help from a god that was real, but was a nightmarish abomination who was responsible for their being sick in the first place?
• The Upper Cathedral Ward in general is unnerving. Everything about this place is downright chilling. It's one of the few areas in the game where a persistent soundtrack plays, and the whole area is just one dilapidated building that's connected to the roof of the Cathedral Ward's main church, where Vicar Amelia was. Despite this, the area is absolutely draped in a thick fog, and the place is completely abandoned. The inside of the main building is severely dark, and only gets darker when a bunch of Wolf Beasts crash through the ceiling and knock down the chandelier, which was basically the only thing giving off any light. The place is also crawling with Brainsuckers, which really makes things even more tense. This is also not mentioning the Celestial Larvae all over the area, which implies that this was a site of mass human experimentation. What exactly is happening here is left up to interpretation, but it's undeniable that this is probably the scariest location in the entire game.
  • A rather interesting thing that should be pointed out here, is that, throughout this area, several Scourge Beasts have now made the abandoned location their domain... only... there's something rather odd about these beasts in particular. For one their eyes are all a deep purplish blue, in comparison to every other Scourge Beast, who all have piercing white eyes, like The Mad Ones The Witch of Hemwick summons. Second, they're also the only known Scourge Beasts to, albeit every now and then, leave behind an item called Blue Elixir upon defeat! What makes these Scourge Beasts so different from the rest of the ones that are stalking the streets of Yharnam? How did they become this way in the first place?
  • Initially, for the first half of the story, we aren't given too much information regarding the status of the The Healing Church as a whole, and we don't even learn about The Choir's existence at all until later by Nightfall. Since we encounter various Healing Church aligned individuals, such as Sister Adella and The Executioner Alfred, as well as some of The Choir's own personal agents, such as Yurie The Last Scholar and The Imposter Iosefka, still wandering around going about their evil schemes, we're presented with the possibility that The Church may in fact still be operating. However, upon arriving here, the remnants of the Upper Cathedral Ward puts to death any of those ideas or thoughts; The Choir, and The Healing Church as a whole, has been completely wiped out, both by the scourge and by their own quest for ascendance. The only living things left in the Orphanage are Scourge Beasts and Brainsuckers, with the implications that, with all of the dead bodies of Black Church Hunters scattered all throughout the interior and exterior, there indeed was a terrible massacre that took place here sometime before the beginning of the story. Of course, it can't be ignored that while they truly did deserve that fate, there's something quite disturbing about the knowledge that the Healing Church, which controls Yharnam, is essentially finished for good. For all of their grandiose presentation and their attempts at designing stronger weapons for use against the beasts, even their most elite members couldn't survive the night!
  • The Orphanage itself is terrifying as well, having once served as the very birthplace of The Choir originally. The name of the location is haunting enough, but it doesn't help that there are strange larvae lining the area that are just squirming about and won't attack you at all unless antagonized or approached. The major question is what happened to all the children that the Healing Church kept here, or was it only a horrible place used to house the Great One's larvae away from prying eyes?
    • Or worse if you believe in the Healing Church splitting and the Choir having its own goals, it was a place to keep the children of Yharnam in safety so isolated from the rest of the city. Then the Choir occupied it and created the Altar of Despair, bringing Ebrietas' attention, which could have corrupted not only all the living children, but all their caretakers as well. Hence, all the Celestial Mobs walking around the place.
    • The last one is the more crestfallen interpretation, if it was just a housing place for the larvae is one thing. But forcing all the helpless unwanted children of Yharnam to turn into monsters is another.
  • The Blue Elixir is an item that is stated to have been previously used by "The High Ministers of The Healing Church" when they conducted dubious experiments! With that knowledge under our caps, we then slowly begin to process the realization that the members of The Choir have not scattered to the four winds, but on quite the contrary, they are all still here in Yharnam! THEY SUCCUMBED TO THE SCOURGE AND BECAME BEASTS THEMSELVES! Like The Cleric Beast, who was a former member of The Church! In a wonderful example of Laser-Guided Karma, for all of their egregious actions, they became that which they sought so hard to avoid! Of course, then again, their selfish and immoral actions already gave them a rather beastly demeanor!
• The Insight system gives plenty of Nightmare Fuel. Going through an area on low insight, you'll initially see stuff like perfectly normal-looking statues in church hallways and whatnot. Get your insight high enough, and you'll see that those "perfectly normal" statues were in fact of Eldritch Abominations, and get it high enough, and you'll see some of those abominations watching you on the streets, even before defeating Rom, the Vacuous Spider. The scariest part? They've always been there, the entire time... watching you. It is possible to pierce The Masquerade, but upon doing so, it quickly becomes apparent why most people who do Go Mad from the Revelation...
  • Perhaps the scariest bit is this: when Rom is defeated, and you can see the Amygdalas, you'll see one is crouching right on top of the Healing Church where you'd likely directed all of those innocent people just looking for someplace safe. No wonder they're going crazy: They've got their world's version of Cthulhu squatting right over them!
  • And no wonder the monsters are leaving them alone: no one who can see those fiends wants anything to do with them...
• Cainhurst Castle, all the way. It may be hard to believe that things only get worse after the opening where you're chased indoors by a horde of humans swollen like ticks. Then there's the surprise ghosts, the surprise gargoyles, the disfigured cleaning staff trying to kill you (which are indistinguishable from the harmless cleaning staff, leading to yet more surprises...), and the constant, unending statues. Somehow, the ever-present legacy of the Vilebloods is worse than any of this.
• Generally, most people you run into have turned into Beasts or werewolves, but a certain kind is especially terrible: the Brainsucker. Humans who have achieved so much Insight, they literally hunger for more. The first one you'll probably find is by itself in a corner of the Upper Cathedral Ward, hooded and eating from a corpse. Their main mode of attack is to grab you, pull their hoods down, revealing a huge pulsating tentacle erupting from their heads that they use to suck your brains out, a move that actually drains Insight from you.
• In one of the endings, Childhood's Beginning, if you consume 3 or more thirds of an umbilical cord, and manage to defeat Gehrman, you get to fight the Moon Presence. Your reward for victory? You're turned into an infant Eldritch Abomination that looks like a strange squid-like creature. At least the doll will take care of you...
• Ever since the Old Hunters DLC has been announced, we've been witness to the beauty of one of the bosses, Ludwig. His design is like a mixture of the Cleric Beast, a horse, a dog and a human. Pure Body Horror. And not to mention the face...
• One would assume that the item descriptions at least would be mundane and bland. No such luck here...
  (Concerning the Constable's Armor Set) Once upon a time, a troupe of foreign constables chased a beast all the way to Yharnam, and this is what they wore. The constables became victims of the beast, except one survivor, who in turn devoured the creature whole, all by himself. This fable is a favorite among Yharnamites, who are partial to any stories of pompous, intolerant foreigners who suffer for their ignorance.
  It makes the blood taste that much sweeter.
  The Tear Stone's description "A doll sheds neither blood nor tears and thus its nature remains unknown. Whoever thinks this is precious must be troubled by severe naivete."
• The long-awaited Ludwig at last makes his presence known, and he is a sight to behold. A twisted, broken, massive wreck of a man and his once noble steed somehow melted together through means thankfully unknown, his every characteristic seems to ooze mockery; of the hope he once gave the people of Yharnam, of the Knight in Shining Armor Archetype, and in the second half of the battle, the reason and sanity of man.
  • Bloodcurdling howls would at least be appropriate for this guy, but the clear, intelligent way he soon speaks is somehow worse than the screeching, due to how surreal and wrong it sounds coming from such an abomination. It’s a shocking and grotesque testament to how our humanity can create the most horrific beasts.
• In the first part of The Hunter's Nightmare, you need to wade through a river of blood, fed by mounds of skeletal corpses. Initially, the fact that you are in a dream may lessen the terror. They aren't real remains; just another gross detail in an already horrible nightmare. But then one of them moves. And another one talks. The last one even knows Ludwig by name.
• Something else that's noteworthy is that the west wing of the Hunter's Nightmare is rife with Beast Patients. But something's amiss about them here; in Old Yharnam, they are super vicious and will whale on you until you're nothing but blood and pulp on the cobblestones. Here though? They're *cowering*. They'll attack you sure, but for the most part they're going to lengths not to fight. The Beast Patients have been getting slaughtered by the Blood-drunk Hunters for so damn long that they're afraid of what you might do to them. Now that's fucked up.
• After finally pounding your way past the boss who waits at the end of the blood river, you climb the steps to a cell block. You find a Hunter bashing his skull against a wall, a horned man ringing a silent bell, and a giant female Hunter who died praying in the corner. Climb more stairs, and an operating hall set in the cathedral awaits. Ride the elevator shrine up by inserting an eye-shaped amulet into the open skull of the patient. And then you arrive at the Research Hall, where the Healing Church experimented with blood on the innocent and those they declared heretics. It is both a laboratory of eldritch science and a mental asylum. You stand in the birthplace of the nightmare that Yharnam is trapped in.
  • The fate of the patients is absolutely horrific. They are painfully experimented on until they lose their mind, lashing out at everything around them, and their head becomes a mass of flesh, in an attempt to ascend their human form. They eventually become nothing more than lumps of flesh with no body to speak of.
    • What’s worse, it’s implied that the Healing Church brainwashed people into WANTING to be experimented on in this way.
  • What makes the Research Hall so horrific is how plausible the horror is. Werewolves, vampires and alien abominations aren’t exactly real life horrors. Human experimentation, however? Scientists experimenting on people without their consent, all in the name of knowledge? Those are very real horrors, even in the present day.
    • At least a few of these people were apparently criminals or otherwise guilty of something, which is another dash of real-world horror. The Church, which as far as we know is the closest thing to a government Yharnam has, sent convicted criminals to the Hall as fodder for these ungodly experiments. The implication is clear: There is absolutely nothing to stop the Church from picking people up off the street, accusing them of some made up crime or heresy and then forcing them to choose between death, jail or a harmless medical trial.
• The Living Failures boss is pretty unnerving. At least partly because of the clashing serenity of fighting in a garden of flowers against a group of faceless abominations. The music helps give the feeling of something wrong with the whole situation. Oh and unlike other boss fights against multiple enemies, don't think it will get easier as you kill them, as they will start spamming area covering homing spells while cloaking the arena in darkness.
  • It gets worse when you consider they are likely what the Research patients turned into.
  • Why were they Failures? What were the Healing Church and the Choir trying to create?
• Lady Maria's sword, the Rakuyo? It's description says she threw it away when she could stomach it no longer. Read all of the above, and then look at that statement. By the time you've obtained that weapon, you've faced almost everything on this page. What sort of mind melting horror must a Hunter go through to find something terrible enough that they can't stomach it anymore?
• Anyone who's worth their snuff when it comes to involvement with an Eldritch Abomination and the Cosmic Horror Story genre will most likely feel a pit in their stomach when they read the name of the final area in The Old Hunters: the Fishing Hamlet.
  • This level is comprised of the site of an atrocity so stomach-churning, that it damned every Hunter to the Nightmare forever. Gehrman and Maria, under orders from Master Willem, led an unknowable number of Hunters and Scholars to the hamlet to investigate Mother Kos. Somehow this investigation turned into a full-blown orgy of violence, human experimentation, and death as the Hunters razed the town, murdered its inhabitants, and strung up their bodies. The last straw was the hunters dragging Kos ashore and killing her, which defiled the village forever.
  • The end of this area contains possibly the most horrific thing to exist in Bloodborne: A fully grown Half-Human Hybrid child of Kos, crawling out of her desiccated corpse. The sight of this creature is deeply disturbing thanks to its hellish looks, but the existence of this entity also sheds light on two mysteries from the base game. The first is that Kos was a real, flesh and blood creature; no one could interact with her because she is a sea creature, and more importantly, long dead. Two, against all odds, Kos actually succeeded in creating an heir.
  • The Orphan of Kos is one of the most horrific things in the entire game. It is a huge humanoid creature, almost skeletal-like, that shrieks and hollers as it attempts to cut you down with its own placenta, molded into a sharp club and covered with pustules and eyes. Even more disturbingly, it becomes clear after seeing it in action that the The Orphan of Kos is a pale imitation of the Hunters — an extending, transforming weapon, agile movements, ranged shotgun-like attacks, and brutal swings. Hell, the organ it uses to fight even looks like the sawcleaver, and the way the Orphan's skin flaps in the wind during the second phase looks awfully similar to the glowing cloaks and mantles of Hunter outfits. Kos's greatest creation, her goal all along, was to create a beast powerful enough to cut down those who hunted her own kind and killed her. It's not clear which is worse — that Kos hated humans so much that she molded her child into a weapon to destroy them, or that the Orphan is really good at his job. What does said creature do once it is revealed to the player? Crawl out of its mother's corpse, stand up in the rain, look into the sun… and begin to sob. Is it crying because it is the last of its kind, or because, as a hybrid, it doesn't truly belong anywhere?
• We finally get an answer to Micolash's question "Kos, some say Kosm, can you hear our prayers?" No, she can't, she's dead. And has been for a while. So all those profane rites you performed, trying to gain its attention? They were for nothing.
• One final horror, and it is a big one: when you pick up the Kos Parasite, you'll note that it looks a lot like the phantasms, the items that you use to cast spells. Take a stroll through the fishing hamlet, and the caves that lead up to the Orphan of Kos, and look around: the ground is littered with thousands upon thousands of slugs. If even one tenth of those slugs are phantasms, that still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of the little things there. And if those... things allow one to attain knowledge of the Great Ones, and grant powers to others, then that fishing hamlet is just a Cosmic Horror Story waiting to happen for anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon it, or any ship that accidentally gets wrecked there. Worse, given that there's no evidence that the fishing hamlet was ever destroyed, those fishmen could still be there... multiplying, and raising more phantasms, awaiting the day that the Great Ones come to claim the world. And worst of all? There's no guarantee Kos was one of a kind, so this story could repeat itself again at any time if another Kos-creature comes ashore.
• Just the healing method can be this for those who are Afraid of Needles, since your only method of healing is violently ramming a syringe into your thigh.
  • Fear of Needles is just the start; given the how limited medical knowledge was during similar time periods, the popularity of blood within Yharnam, and the difficulty of producing effective syringes, those needles have likely been used dozens, maybe even hundreds of times before now, all within a rampant plague zone. Anyone even remotely worried about infection or blood-borne taint will struggle to make it through even the first ten minutes of the game.
    • While on the topic of infectious disease, you'll spend a lot of time in some truly foul locations, all while getting cut and injured on a regular basis. For example, if you are struck while in the sewers and roll away to gain some room, you've effectively submerged an open wound in raw sewage.
    • Forget about healing with blood vials. Ever wonder how the Hunter can heal by attacking right after they're wounded? They're having the blood of their victims splash on their open wounds. Barely any of the enemies you fight are even human anymore, and you've been bathing in their blood throughout the entire game.
• The question of just what the witches were actually after, given that they appear to have been accepted by the Hunters and Church, they are protective of the One Reborn and are likely connected to its creation, can be found near the baby Great Ones, implying that they were either aware or involved with their creation as well as the creation of Mergo, and the only way to Cainhurst is in their main area implying a connection with the vampires as well.
• The more you speak with Alfred, the better you are able to glimpse a more sinister side of the otherwise friendly Hunter, and it all comes to a head at the culmination of his quest. If you give Alfred the Cainhurst invitation, he'll take the opportunity to turn Queen Annalise into ground beef to properly canonize Logarius as a martyr. While this is already horrific on its own (and admittedly standard fare for Bloodborne), seeing him stand triumphantly over her remains, completely covered in blood and sinew and raving madly all the while, is a far, far cry from the kind, helpful Alfred you first met in the Cathedral Ward. Arguably, the fact that he shares Solaire of Astora's voice actor makes hearing the following dialogue even more disturbing.
  • If you attack him in the Vileblood Queen's chamber, he delivers a lengthy and disturbing rant as he charges toward you with the Logarius' Wheel.
  Alfred: "Just what is the meaning of this? Why turn your blade on me? You're jealous, aren't you? Unclean wench! Vile monstrosity! Bloody fool! Has the blood gone to your head? Pathetic, as you deserve!"

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