Yharnam memory

There is a city called yharnam, a place I know well even though it does not exist; It is a place that I have traveled several times, some more thoroughly than others, and that it brings me very alive images when I close my eyes and think about it. There is a group of people walking with torches and grocery, a tetric procession crowned by a bonfire in which the corpse burns from a huge beast. There is a giant who shouts you from the top of some stairs in the district of the cathedral, pointing out with her great stake and caught the attention of her companion. There is a cemetery: how many things happen in that tiny cemetery, so small that one would say that there has been almost dead in the history of Yharnam. There are narrow and dark and humid alleys, authentic traps for mice even for the most experienced, dense hunters because the lit lamps next to some windows indicate that there is someone inside, a person who may be terrified listening to the grotesque noise of the Hunting, or perhaps already consumed by fear definitely. There is, of course, a troll that hits with a hammer the large door of the central Yharnam Square, a sound that puts the peak hairs. There is a giant boar who lives in the sewers.

The city of Yharnam, the main scenario of Bloodborne, is an example of the type of design economy that causes the Software Games to be compact and concisely at the same time they show up from extraordinarily large, imposing, almost overwhelming worlds. It is also one of the best designed maps in the history of the video game, at the same time functional and evocative, fun as a battlefield, interesting as a puzzle, intricate as a narrative artifact. A handful of examples come to my head when I think about what are the best designed levels with which I have crossed, but the first is always YHARNAM; If I have to stay with one, I stay with YHARNAM: the new and the old woman, and the oarsar of Hemwick, and Yahar'Gul, and the forbidden forest, and Byrgenwerth, Impossible not to remember Byrgenwerth and her lake!

Of course, the design of levels is one of the strengths of the projects that leads Hidetaka Miyazaki; He highlighted (in the interview that comes in the Bloodborne guide he published Future Press) the "Design of the Maps" of Bloodborne and the Souls as the part that has most fun of the development process. "Out of the dungeons of the chalice, I myself prepared all the maps of Bloodborne, something I really like to do," he said in that interview. "Add ups and downs and meaning to the structure of the map helps to offer a kind of enjoyment of the player, the fun of drawing the maps of the land on his head. That adds value to the acts of it. Related to that, I think it's a very video game design. I really like those things. "

In many ways, if Dark Souls was a way to expand and widen the proposal of Demon's Souls, to bet "by the thickness and completion of meat," as Eva Cid writes, Bloodborne is a return to that more massive format of the nexus and the archipens, here the sleep of the hunter and a series of tombstones; By the very nature of the project (A commission of Sony, as was Demon's Souls, which at a certain moment was trying to be something like the Japanese Skyrim) is tempting to make that connection, although it is worth not standing in it more than the account. Yes it is seen more clearly, thanks precisely to its structure, a level design that could be applied that innocent numbering with which it is talked about the areas of Demon's Souls, calling them 1-2 or 3-1 or 4-2 As if they were the screens of a super mario. To Bloodborne, a game in which he already shows hand of artisan (equal demon's souls was chance, although he dudes; this, without a doubt, is as far as it is possible to be), those trust do not fit so well, and the Reason is in Yharnam and in the way we travel, from the streets of the center to the forests that surround it, and beyond, or more inside, until you stop knowing what is reality and what a nightmare.

Bloodborne does merge the design of enigmatic levels and captivating Dark Souls with the most direct approach of Demon's Souls, not strictly linear but much more direct and readable. We will never go through Yharnam thoroughly, for many laps that we give for its streets: we know it from the edges, walking it in such a way that there always seems to be a fucking that is out of our reach, as a hive of which we know about what we know He says of her and what we can intuit reading the environment. It is a very taste scenario of from Software, which allows to generate impacting views and generate eccentric and economic levels; Whether you get used to Yharnam to your sights that when we walked its narrower streets it almost seems that we are in underground dungeons, although we can see a thread of heaven between the facades of its buildings, above. Each beam account and is useful to hide a handful of blood echoes, or the entrance to a hidden balcony in which a mysterious character awaits you. At the same time, Bloodborne is played from lamp to the lamp, the equivalent yharnamite of the fires that take you to the nexus or the fire link sanctuary. These tours between checkpoints are designed to be stimulating in its own right, to function as closed levels of a Super Castlevania IV or a demon's Crest, for putting two connections that seem more or less defensible: they play again and again and you face a And again to the same groups of enemies, selected and handled here or there to generate exciting, fun, even comic moments when the situation allows it. This tension between the RPG and the Action Adventure, two of the containers where these games are usually putting, is better achieved in Bloodborne than in any other frame from Software.

And of course Yharnam is again and the main reason, because it is this Gothic and tetric city in which the hunting nights are celebrated in which citizens go out to kill the horrendous beasts that come attracted by the moon of blood. From the beginning, the tone of Bloodborne is purely melancholy. There is something that does not fit into this infinite hunting night, there is something dark and twisted in the many directions in which the blood flows, and it does not become less twisted as you discover the weaves of the academics of Byrgenwerth, the Church of Healing And the mensis school, no less dark when you enter the old Yharnam and you know Djura, one of the key characters of the game. Like all the characters of Bloodborne (and, to some extent, like all the characters of Miyazaki), Djura is not a presence or a body or a voice, but an idea: to protect the beasts of the old Yharnam, who does not They are but people perverted by blood.

So you go through Yharnam, of course, wore with everything, eliminating the monstrospits with which you cross using wild weapons with trick that could be butcher or surgeon tools. With great intelligence, from Software reaches a variation of its usual, methodical combat and in which pesos are of great importance, which provides an inimically yharnamite texture: when you receive a blow, the life bar does not lower everything but a part From the received damage can be recovered by coupling fast, filling the orange part of the bar at blows. It is a combat system that makes them dispense with the shield be absolutely necessary and that rewards aggressive and decided game, and that also leads you to risk more than the account on many occasions. It is blood that allows you to keep up, prolong hunting, keeping you alive. Blood can cure, as he deduced the church of healing, but he can also tighten your mind and take you to dangerous psychic spaces, as you discovered by the BYRGENWERTH scholars. The consequences of this frenzy by blood are seen throughout Yharnam, in its urbanism (which builds over the areas that are uncontrolled, burying them, as pthumeru was buried before) and in its architecture; the results are terrifying, of course, but the melancholy comes from everything that led to the situation that you discover when you start playing: there are not large operet villains or, in general, bad intentions in Bloodborne, but a series of impulses very humans and understandable that just end up bad.

YHARNAM is the perfect scenario for what since 2015 began to call a "soulsborne" (such was the impact that Bloodborne had in the formula) because he supposed history: every corner, every alley, every left of the map has a reason. Each weapon, each piece of clothing, every detail of the combat system; Everything points in the same address: YHARNAM. You can not move Bloodborne to another location without changing everything, without necessarily converting it into another game totally different. It is, in my opinion, the top of that characteristic design of froming software, in which nothing exists in a vacuum and yet each piece is perfectly replicable d infinitum and for the reason it is: an old man in a wheelchair can Transmit sadness in one place and give a scare in another, even being the same old one with the same aspect and the same behavior; He can be the guardian of the old abandoned workshop and also a good opportunity to Farmear bullets, if you want it to be.

Nothing seems randomly left in Bloodborne; the balance between body terror, tangible, material (blood, operations, patients) and the abstract and unassailable, that face of the game that connects it with lovecraft, is so perfect that I feel that I have been in yharnam_, that I have lived The same as the hunter. Between July 5 and September 8, 2021 I played Bloodborne almost exclusively, first by doing something and then because I was trapped a real obsession for squeezing everything that the game can offer; checklist Through, in my third game, the last before getting the coveted platinum trophy, I got all weapons and armor, I complete all the secondary missions, I picked up all the objects that are thrown on the floor, I opened all the chests, I faced myself to all bosses; I descended to the deepest floors of the cassroom dungeons, and there I found Yharnam, Queen Pthumeria, the same one who cries by her son's son of her in front of the nodriza's apartments. Although he knew his story (in the months he dedicated Bloodborne last year I read several times The Paleblood Hunt, a complete analysis of the argument of the game written by someone who responds to the nickname of RedGrave), that combat, otherwise relatively simple, He left a very deep brand. How amazing poetic capacity has a study as from software, which gives it to what is no longer a video game of action in which you face all the usual monsters of the repertoire of horror cinema, from wolf or ghostly to ogres and MARCIANITOS, a texture and density such that as soon as you let yourself be penetrated by their universes their images and ideas do not stop chase you, to rumble on your head; You stop playing Bloodborne but Bloodborne continues with you: Before a city, Yhangram was a queen.

This article is part of the monographic from Software (2009-2022) **.