Bloodborne is breaking my heart.
It’s very easy to miss it, but there are many smaller stories taking place in the world of Yharnam. Many of them are kind of dark. ( And on this note, if you don’t want to be spoiled on one of the sidequests in Bloodborne, you should stop reading now!) Here’s one example.
If you happen to knock on a specific window with a red lantern attached to it, you’ll come across a little girl whose parents are missing. If you decide to help her, she’ll give you a music box. She tells you that, even though her dad is a beast, if he hears the music, he can still remember her and her family. This is just the start of the story—things get much more bleak!
Later on, as you progress through the game, you’ll come across a character named Father Gascoine. Immediately, he’s hostile to you—so you have to kill him. After you do, you find out that THIS was the man the little girl told you about, and if you play the music box during the fight, you can actually stagger him. Making things worse is the fact that after you kill this man, you find the body of the dead mother nearby. You can loot the body to take a brooch, which the little girl told you to look out for.
You can then tell the little girl what happened—you killed her father, and her mom is already dead—or you can send her to a different location that’s supposed to be safe, the chapel. If you tell her what happened, you give her her mother’s brooch. This, naturally, upsets the little girl. There’s nothing you can do except listen to her cry. Ugh.
Later on, you can find a little ribbon on a huge pig enemy. The implication seems to be that the pig killed the little girl. But you also know that people typically don’t leave their houses on the night of the hunt, making it likely that the girl left her home because she was upset. And it’s partially your fault.
If you happen to return to the window with the girl later on, the person that answers that time is her older sister. You can give her the ribbon that you found. Turns out, it belongs to the younger sister—she’s dead. And so the older sister ends up grieving her entire family. Again, you can’t do anything except give her the bad news. It gets even worse!
If you come back later, the older sister has clearly gone mad. And then, to top all of this off, if you come back later, you might even find that that girl is dead too. Holy fuck. This is but one story in the world of Bloodborne, a game that is equally enticing as it is depressing.
You can watch this particular sidequest unfold in the video above by Sanadsk. The hilarious thing is that things can get even worse. If you happen to tell the first girl to go to the clinic, for example, the doctor there will turn her into a monstrosity. Cripes.
The joys of playing a From Software game, eh? I love it.