Highlights
- Soulslikes often draw inspiration from the fantasy genre, allowing for reinterpretation of familiar motifs and tropes while maintaining unique gameplay mechanics.
- Bloodborne stands out among Soulslikes due to its ghastly and grisly cosmic horror steeped in science-fiction, giving it a distinct and incomparable identity.
- While fantasy is a more widely explored genre, the niche genre of Bloodborne's gothic cosmic horror presents a challenge for creating a sequel that expands on its themes without replicating too much or straying too far from established lore.
Soulslikes everywhere have taken to unsurprisingly rooting themselves deeply in the fantasy genre. Of course, FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls would create the subgenre while embedded in their own brand of dark fantasy, and so it is only natural that imitators would find inspiration by looking to fantasy as well. Fantasy is a fairly wide umbrella where a lot of different motifs and tropes are laid bare, which likely makes it a great genre to reinterpret with authentic ideas while many other mechanical features are almost identically stripped from FromSoftware games, and that’s where Bloodborne once again made a distinct mark in the developer’s pedigree.
Dark Souls’ dark fantasy would go on to fulfill a trilogy and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was a fantastical reinterpretation of feudal Japan, while Elden Ring branched out from FromSoftware’s traditional fantasy and into a similar yet unique enough vein. Bloodborne, however, is easily the developer’s most alien game in the Soulslike action-RPG subgenre due to its ghastly and grisly cosmic horror steeped in science-fiction. This genre gives it a highly distinguishable and incomparable identity, but that might also make a possible Bloodborne 2 much more difficult to execute well.
Dark Souls, Elden Ring Can Look Openly to Fantasy for Inspiration
Besides the traditional iconography of castles, dragons, and knights, fantasy is decently open to interpretation. It’s been iterated upon countless times in literature, movies, TV, and any other entertainment media imaginable with many similar features bleeding over into each as inspirations facilitate new ideas.
Soulslikes are the same way, where what has come before them greatly influences its makeup and creates a foundation for each new Soulslike to hopefully deliver something novel. FromSoftware may have been the pioneer of this subgenre and its games will always be hoisted higher than any other developer’s Soulslike imitations as a result, but fans still expect FromSoftware to craft immersive fantasy worlds with each game.
Elden Ring truly pushed that boundary of imagination with an enormous open world of content in the Lands Between, and with aid from legendary fantasy writer George R. R. Martin an equally massive amount of lore was built to sustain Elden Ring’s fantasy. That said, fantasy is ubiquitous and therefore more manageable to wrap one’s head around regardless of how little is explicitly discernable, whereas a marriage of cosmic horror and gothic science-fiction seems much rarer and harder to depict.
Bloodborne’s Gothic Cosmic Horror Might Be Too Niche to Iterate on
The content matter Bloodborne deals with isn’t entirely impossible to parse, but it is arguably much richer and more creative due to how far removed it is from the traditional medieval fantasy that many Soulslikes adopt. Bloodborne features a gothic European setting on its surface and an underbelly of gruesome, surreal occurrences beneath it, woven together neatly with blood ministrations and otherworldly nightmares.
Unlike fantasy, there is no clear blueprint or template for Bloodborne’s incredibly niche genre besides Lovecraftian works, and that gives FromSoftware an unenviable challenge if it ever decides to work on a Bloodborne sequel. If any developer could possibly extrapolate on the themes, settings, and atmosphere of Bloodborne, though, it would be FromSoftware.
Still, it might be tough to do so without replicating a lot of the same imagery or branching away too far from its established lore. Bloodborne fans want more Bloodborne, and giving them a sequel that leans heavily on the same gothic iconography of the original could actually be in line with what players hope to see.
Bloodborne is out on PS4.
