The Best Bit is a new video series by Clocked that’s about the key moments in history’s greatest video games. For the first instalment, relive the sequence that made Bloodborne unforgettable.
Today we’re introducing a new series. It’s called The Best Bit, and it’s all about that one perfect moment that makes your favourite games so special. Why did that moment make you cry? Why did it terrify you so much? Did it leave you feeling humbled? Or just plain filled with wonder?
The Best Bit is about those moments in gaming you simply can’t forget. It’s about the moments that turned games you like, into games you love. And for the very first episode we have a personal favourite – this is The Best Bit of… Bloodborne.
Bloodborne is a hellish journey through cursed lands with a mystery so wretched at its heart that it will make your skin crawl. About halfway through the game though, it all starts to make horrifying sense. At the beginning, you awake in a mostly abandoned clinic, and after a famously quick first death, are profoundly told to: “just go out and kill a few beasts. It’s for your own good’.
Soon, your gothic adventure full of monster hunting and wickedly inventive weapons begins to unravel, revealing a far more mysterious and surreal underbelly.
With each new discovery, the world seems to suggest that all is not as it seems. Questions start to plague your mind; what are your motivations? Why has everyone seemingly gone insane? And crucially, why do the monsters insist on referring to you as a beast?
The only thing that is clear is that something has gone horribly wrong, but who or what’s responsible remains unnervingly opaque.
Through the in-game resource of Insight, Bloodborne establishes the Lovecraftian link between knowledge and danger. Which, if you follow it through, suggests a terrible truth that lurks just beneath the surface of the game’s world.
As your sanity-threatening journey continues, the player finds themselves in what was once a place of forbidden learning: Byrgenwerth College. Various clues and scraps of lore, scattered around the city, have led you here – none more so than the note which reads:
“The Byrgenwerth spider hides all manner of rituals, and keeps our lost master from us.”
Once you find this spider and defeat her, your view of Bloodborne, quite literally, will never be the same again.
After a wonderfully trippy cinematic which sees the swollen Blood Moon hauntingly rise and eventually engulf the entire sky, you will finally see the world of Bloodborne for what it truly is. The realisation that gangly, eldritch horrors were always there, skulking right under your nose, watching your every death, will send a shiver up the spine of even the most hardened genre fan.
This moment of revelation elevates Bloodborne from a classic souls-like game to one of the finest examples of cosmic horror in any medium. It raises the stakes in such a way that everything that came before, as well as everything that will surely follow, has been unforgettably painted with dread.
The scene marks the pivotal point in Bloodborne where the mystery is revealed, allowing the madness to take its course. Your journey, which started with the simple hunting of beasts, has become a quest to disrupt events of an incomprehensible cosmic scale.
This moment sits proudly amongst the best bits of video game history, and like many of its comrades, the greatest tragedy is that it can only truly be experienced once.
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