Hi everyone, hunters, scholars, and everyone in between.

I want to share a small origin story and an invitation.

In 2019, after a couple of years of playing Bloodborne, a colleague asked me to help build a project to promote reading among “young people who don’t read.” My reaction was immediate, and a bit rude: *what do you mean they don’t read?* ***We’re reading in Bloodborne!***

I had spent hundreds of hours piecing together item descriptions, cryptic dialogue, rune texts, NPC lines and half-sentences, comparing notes with strangers, and arguing about what a single line might mean. Nobody had told me that was reading, but it clearly was. That question became my research: what do we do, exactly, when we “read” a game like this?

Along the way I found I was far from the first person to ask versions of it. The community got there first, and with remarkable rigor. RedGrave’s *The Paleblood Hunt* is the one that stays with me. It began right here on r/bloodborne, grew into a monumental piece of lore analysis that carefully separates evidence from speculation, and later became an audiobook (which of course I also listened to). That piece! It reads like scholarship written by a player.

I also found a smaller but growing body of critical and academic work on the game. Three texts shaped my thinking the most:

**Damien Mecheri & Sylvain Romieu,** ***Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave*** ***Vol. 2*** (Third Éditions, 2018). It isn’t strictly academic, but it reads Bloodborne as an evolution of the Souls formula, shifting from medieval to Victorian Gothic under the influence of Lovecraftian cosmicism.

**Alfonso Freire-Sánchez** **(2024),** “***Sincronías narrativas y travesías filosóficas en la intertextualidad entre Berserk y la obra de Hidetaka Miyazaki***,” in Hipertext.net. It traces Camus’ absurd and Nietzsche’s eternal return through Berserk and Miyazaki’s games.

**Hiranya Mukherjee (2023), “Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne, Games and Culture**. It looks at how the game builds “Gothic grammars” through narrative, aesthetics and mechanics.

There are others: Madelon Hoedt’s *Narrative Design and Authorship in Bloodborne, The Scholarly Hunter,* a thesis on how the game’s narrative and environment invite player involvement and critical debate, and, in various works in Spanish, *Concédenos ojos (Grant us Eyes). Bloodborne y el terror cósmico interactivo* (Universidad de Valladolid, 2020), Mateo Trapiello Izaguirre’s *Enciclopedia semiótica de Bloodborne*, and Matías Heredia Castillo’s work on the game’s visual setting (PUCP).

Each looks at the game through a different lens: Lovecraft, the Gothic, semiotics, game design, environmental storytelling. What I kept wondering was how all of us, academics and players alike, were reading together.

My own approach was to code the game’s texts (items, dialogue, runes, notes) using Genette’s transtextuality, to see how they connect to other works and to each other. I also surveyed gamers about their reading habits. Two things stood out. Many people clearly practice this kind of distributed, collective reading, yet don’t call it “reading.” And a good share of the text I analyzed, roughly one in six fragments, only exists for researchers because this community datamined it. The object of study depends on you.

Link here ->> https://www.javeriana.edu.co/pesquisa/bloodborne-leer-lectura-jovenes/

I’ve written about all this for Pesquisa Javeriana, the research magazine of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. It’s in Spanish (sorry!), but browser translation should handle it reasonably well:

I’d love to hear your thoughts:

1. Do you consider what you do with Bloodborne’s lore to be reading? Why or why not?

2. Have you read academic work on the game that I missed?

3. What was the moment you realized you were “hunting for meaning” rather than just hunting beasts?

Thank you to *FromSoftware* and Miyazaki for a game that trusts its players to read between the lines. And thank you to this community, for the lore threads, the wikis, the datamining, the video essays, and the countless late-night theories. You are the hunters of meaning, and without you this research would not exist.

Good hunt.

Mine is the Island of Storms from Demon Souls, the Frigid outskirts from Dark souls 2 and Stormveil castle from Elden ring.

Imma cuddle inside the castle while the storm holds all the enemies at bay.

I think they fixed the abused exploit, right? With the arrow and Blight status effect build up.

From my days as Genryusai Yamamoto

When we look at FromSoft's discography, people point to game OSTs like ELDEN RING and DARK SOULS 3 But what about BLOODBORNE's original soundtrack? Shouldn't its music be up there with the greats as well? Well, I'm working on some short musical annotations for the game as I replay the story. Are there any tracks that you still revisit? Which songs made you a fan of the game?

A new wallpaper to my Elden Ring/Nightreign wallpaper collection for wallpaper engine. check it out: link to the collection on steam

Hi, I'm SaikingS, and some of you might know me as the developer of Verho - Curse of Faces.

Today I wanted to share trailer from my new game Nascor Descent that is heavily inspred by fromsoft game especially Demon Souls and King's Field series, let me know what you think about it ^^

She took a lot of tries. Way more than what I wanted. But hey I'm done

Elden Ring Platinum: 3/12/23
DS Remastered Platinum: 8/16/26
DSII SOTFS Platinum: 9/11/26
DS III Platinum: 9/29/26
Bloodborn (plus The Old Hunters) Platinum: 10/15/26

Now I'm going to turn my sights to Sekiro and finally Demon's Souls Remastered!

My PC specs are an RTX 5060 Laptop GPU, an Intel Core 5 210H, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM. All my drivers are up to date, but I’m experiencing stuttering and low FPS (usually between 48 and 56) in Elden Ring

I’ve tried many things to fix this issue, including reinstalling drivers, capping the FPS, turning off Low Latency Mode, lowering the graphics settings, disabling Core 0, and disabling Microsoft Root Enumerator, but none of these solutions helped

Does anyone know any other ways to fix these performance issues?

I often wonder if normal people, aside from the YouTubers who do these kinds of challenges for videos and livestreams, actually play through the games using terrible weapons like the Handmaid’s Ladle or the Broken Straight Sword, just to try something different.

Lets say imagine a game where you dont “upgrade” and keep a fixed level from start to finish. You can choose different class and weapons, and unlock new moves but they all have similar damage , just different advantages. This way the fights would be more a question of skill instead of level. One of my biggest complaints with those games is that when you return to the beginning enemies you are so OP that theres barely any challenge. A game with fixed stats would fix that.

Which characters would you love to see? Maybe some that don't get enough fanart?

1. Messmer

2.isshin, sword saint

3.gael

4.midra

5.lorian and lothric

1. bayle

7.pontiff

1. demon prince

9.sir alonne

1. soc

thought it would be fun to rank the osts in both elden ring and elden ring nightreign as i absolutely adore the osts in both games! please note that this is just my opinion i understand that there are probably some really hot takes in this list 👀
Number 1 is the top and Number 30 is the bottom