My freshman year of college was rough. I barely had any friends and didn't do much besides play video games and go to school. One of the few boons that I had to get me through was the game Bloodborne. I first played the game when it was released in 2015, but I had no idea of the philosophy of the story and the allegory of the game in and of itself. When I picked the game up again, I decided to research the lore of the game, since FromSoft, the developer of the game, is notoriously vague and ambiguous with its storytelling.
My mind was absolutely blown by what happens in the story. On the surface, Bloodborne is a fairly simple Gothic horror-themed action game where you kill beasts and relish in the copious amounts of blood that cover your avatar. However, the game slowly unravels to reveal that the world is actually much more Lovecraftian in its design. There are implications of higher beings, the Elder Gods, and the cosmic horror that is always evident in H.P. Lovecraft's tales of suspense and fear. It also has a fair bit of allegorical philosophy included within the game mechanics and the story.
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher of the 18th century, put forth ideas about how we perceive the world and how knowledge is found. In Kant's view, there were two separate realms in the universe: the phenomenal and the noumenal. The phenomenal world is the one that we directly experience. All of our five senses, the physical world, and our ideas are subject in the phenomenal realm. The noumenal, however, was one of uncertainty. This realm is composed of that which we cannot perceive. We cannot know what is in this realm, if anything, and that is an idea that is ever-present in Bloodborne.
There is an infamous spot in the game located close to a cathedral in one of the very first areas you explore. It is a small plaza surrounded by graves. One enemy patrols the area, and when you enter the area, you are likely to kill him before moving on. However, there is also an item on the ground, hidden between the graves. Naturally, a player is drawn to the object and proceeds to pick it up. Then they are immediately killed by an invisible force if they stay in that one spot for too long.
This invisible force isn't revealed until much later in the game, or if the player has enough insight, which is a value similar to insanity in the tabletop Cthulu RPG's. The more insight you have, the more you can see the true nature of the world. Gather enough, and that invisible force that killed you and more will be perceivable by the player. The other way to reveal these forces is by finishing a boss fight halfway through the game.
Kant's ideas of the noumenal ooze out of these mechanics. The true nature of the world of Yharnam, the setting of the game, is hidden from everyone, undetectable and within that realm of the noumenal. Only when the player gathers enough eldritch truth does he or she gain the potential to cross the threshold of the noumenal realm and bring the unknown into the phenomenal realm of our senses.
Bloodborne has a fair amount of metaphysics and philosophy in its story and gameplay, as well as some ethical issues and themes, but Kant's noumenal and phenomenal realms of knowledge are the strongest philosophical foundations of the game. Its literary roots in the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft
Indeed, the game even serves its own metaphysical brand of horror by reinforcing Kant's ideas in reality. If the noumenal realm is real, then who knows what monsters or horrors exist and affect us without us knowing? Are our perceptions reflective of the true nature of the universe? These questions and more are the true horror of Bloodborne. The enemies and dark architecture of the game are chilling, but they are only symbolic of the possible limitations of the human mind and the broader world we cannot know.
