The FromSoftware Corpus
The games gathered under the informal designation “Soulsborne” — Demon’s Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), and Elden Ring (2022) — are the work of the Japanese studio FromSoftware under the creative direction of Hidetaka Miyazaki, who became the studio’s president in 2014 and who has functioned throughout as the principal author of the design philosophy that unifies the corpus. The games are commercially successful, mechanically innovative, and formally distinctive in ways that have generated an unusually large body of critical commentary for works in the video game medium. What makes them relevant to the Timewar framework is not primarily their mechanics or their commercial success. It is the specific metaphysical architecture they depict, the specific operational relationship the player is placed in with respect to that architecture, and the specific philosophical content the game’s formal apparatus delivers to the player through the mechanics themselves rather than through the cutscenes or dialogue that conventional video game storytelling relies on.
The Soulsborne games share a set of structural features: dark fantasy settings in which a previous age of glory has collapsed into decay, protagonists who are the last or near-last of some lineage or vocation attempting to complete an operation the earlier inhabitants of the world failed to complete, oblique storytelling conveyed through item descriptions and environmental detail rather than expository dialogue, extreme difficulty requiring repeated failure and learning, a cyclical structure in which death and resurrection are mechanical features rather than narrative events, and endings that offer the player multiple incommensurable resolutions none of which is unambiguously correct. The formal features combine to produce a play experience that is itself operative: the player learns, through the repeated failures the difficulty requires, something the easier versions of the same game could not teach, and the learning is not cognitive but embodied — a form of patient attention, risk assessment, and acceptance of loss that the games cultivate through the actual process of playing them rather than through their stated content.
The Dying World
The core setting of the Dark Souls trilogy is a world whose First Flame — the source of the differentiation that permits existence, heat, light, time, and the distinctions between life and death, self and other — is fading. The world was, in the ancient past, undifferentiated gray fog within which indistinct dragons existed in a timeless equilibrium. The discovery of the First Flame by early beings called the Lords produced the age of fire, during which the world took on the forms that permit narrative, history, and the kind of existence the game’s events occupy. The age of fire is terminal. The First Flame is exhausting itself, the world is slipping back toward the undifferentiated state, and the protagonists of the successive games are undead figures tasked with keeping the flame lit by sacrificing themselves to it — linking the flame — thereby extending the current age at the cost of their own existence.
The player’s role across the trilogy is to reach the point at which this sacrifice can be made and then to choose whether to make it. Each game’s final encounter places the player before the flame with the option to either link it (perpetuating the current age), allow it to extinguish (ushering in the age of dark that the game’s lore associates with humanity’s true potential), or, in Dark Souls III, to usurp the flame for the undead protagonists themselves in a resolution the game presents with characteristic ambiguity about whether it is a third option or a degraded version of one of the first two. The choice is offered without the game telling the player which is correct. The game is honest about the ambiguity: keeping the current age alive preserves the world the player has been navigating and the NPCs the player has come to know, but it also perpetuates the suffering of a world that has already outlasted its natural duration. Extinguishing the flame permits the age of dark, whose specific character the game does not depict and whose desirability depends on assumptions the lore presents as contested. The usurpation is neither option and represents a specific form of personal power acquisition whose costs the game suggests without depicting.
The dying-world setting is the cataclysm cycle rendered as playable environment. The game places the player at the point in the cycle where the previous civilization’s accomplishments have already decayed into ruins, where the specific knowledge the previous age possessed is now accessible only in fragmentary form through item descriptions and the hints NPCs provide, and where the player’s own role is to make the choice about what happens next given that the previous arrangement cannot be continued indefinitely. The operative content the games deliver is the experience of acting within a system whose terminal condition is known, whose previous inhabitants’ attempts to stabilize it have failed, and whose next iteration depends on choices the player is making without adequate information about their consequences. This is the situation the Timewar thesis suggests the current civilization is in, and the games’ popularity among players who have no explicit framework for the thesis suggests that the operative situation the games depict is recognizable at a level that does not require theoretical articulation.
The Hollow and the Extraction Mechanic
The Dark Souls trilogy introduces the concept of the Hollow — the condition that undead characters gradually fall into when they lose the humanity that maintains their individuated form. Hollows retain bodily existence and basic cognitive function but lose affective range, purposive orientation, and the particular qualities that made them distinct beings before the hollowing began. The process is gradual. Characters the player encounters early in a game in relatively intact form can be encountered later in hollowed form, their dialogue reduced, their recognition of the player degraded, their behavior becoming more aggressive and less considered. The player’s own character is subject to the same process and can be seen, in the menu screens, accumulating the visual deterioration that marks progress toward hollowing across successive deaths.
The hollowing mechanic is one of the most precise depictions in interactive media of what the parasitic ecology framework describes as the extraction of affect and purpose from consciousness that is still nominally alive. The hollowed are not dead. They are the unliving form of existence that the extraction architecture prefers because the hollowed are still ambulatory, still consuming resources, still performing the basic functions of participation in the world, while the specific content that made them individuals has been reduced to the minimum the extraction requires. The game’s use of hollowing as a game-mechanical feature rather than a cutscene event is operative: the player experiences the possibility of hollowing in their own avatar, notices the visual degradation across successive deaths, and comes to associate the condition with a specific form of loss that the easier games the player has previously played did not require them to contemplate.
The counter-mechanic is humanity — the resource the player accumulates by specific actions and consumes to reverse the hollowing process. Humanity’s narrative status is ambiguous across the trilogy, and later games complicate the picture by suggesting that humanity itself is a piece of the dark that predates the First Flame and that the war between the Gods of the age of fire and the dark that the Gods displaced was in part a war over who would control the substance that humanity turns out to be. The player’s use of humanity is therefore ethically ambiguous: the resource that maintains the player’s individuated form is itself a piece of the thing the age of fire was constructed to suppress, and the preservation of the player’s own integrity depends on the continued presence in the world of the substance that the final encounters will require the player to decide what to do with.
The Storytelling Method
Miyazaki has stated in multiple interviews that the storytelling method the Soulsborne games use was developed in response to his own childhood experience of reading English-language fantasy novels in translation with limited comprehension. The partial understanding the language barrier produced — the sense that a larger narrative existed behind the fragments he could parse, that the fragments carried implications he could infer but not verify, that the filling-in of the unknown portions was part of the reading experience — became the model for how the games deliver their story. The games do not tell the player what has happened. They place the player in the ruins of what has happened, provide fragmentary evidence in the form of item descriptions and environmental detail, and leave the assembly of the story to the player’s own interpretive labor. The result is a storytelling method whose final story exists, if at all, in the aggregated interpretations of the community of players rather than in any single authoritative version the game itself provides.
The method has a specific consequence for the kind of content the games can deliver. Because the player is always partly constructing the story rather than receiving it, the games can address material the player would resist if it were delivered directly. The hollowing process, the ambiguity of humanity, the possible malevolence of the Gods, the question of whether the player’s actions are preserving the world or perpetuating its suffering — these are all presentable in the indirect form the method uses, and the player who arrives at the interpretations through their own assembly of the evidence comes to hold those interpretations with a conviction that direct exposition could not have produced. This is the method the mystery schools described as initiatic disclosure: the withholding of explicit content so that the student’s own labor of interpretation produces the understanding, and the understanding so produced is owned by the student in a way that explicitly taught content is not. Miyazaki’s biographical story about the language barrier is probably true, but the method it generated functions at depths the biographical explanation does not account for.
Bloodborne and the Cosmic Horror Turn
Bloodborne (2015), FromSoftware’s Gothic horror entry in the Soulsborne lineage, shifts the setting from high-medieval dark fantasy to a Victorian Gothic city in which a blood-based healing practice has generated a plague that transforms the infected into beast-form creatures. The early game depicts a hunt against these beasts that appears to be the central concern. The mid-game reveals that the beast plague is a symptom rather than the disease, and that the actual situation involves the presence of entities called Great Ones — Lovecraftian beings whose partial intrusion into the human world has produced the beast plague as a side effect of the attempted communication. The late game reveals that the player character has been acting within a nested dream maintained by one of the Great Ones, and that the final choices the game offers involve whether to perpetuate the dream, to end it, or to become the next entity to maintain it.
The cosmic horror structure Bloodborne imports from the Lovecraft tradition functions in the game as a specific theological claim: the higher-order beings are not malevolent in the sense of the Godhand in [[Berserk|Berserk]]. They are indifferent, alien, and operating according to purposes that the human instruments involved in the plot cannot accurately interpret. The game treats the communication with the Great Ones as genuine — the player’s character does acquire capacities by engaging with them, the knowledge the engagement produces is real in the sense that it changes what the player can see in the game world — but the game also treats the communication as dangerous in ways the engagement does not advertise until the damage has already been done. The character who has learned to see the Great Ones has also lost the capacity to not see them, and the restoration to the pre-communication state is not available.
The operative teaching Bloodborne delivers is that threshold technologies — the specific blood practices, the rituals of insight, the conversation with the entities — produce real results, but the results include modifications to the instrument that the instrument cannot uninstall. This is the warning the pharmakon tradition has always carried about its own operations: the substance that opens the aperture is the same substance that damages the instrument when mishandled, and mishandling is much easier than the mishandler tends to appreciate. The game’s various endings present the options the tradition has always described: retreat to ordinary life with the modifications concealed (the “Yharnam Sunrise” ending), succumb to the Great One’s original purpose (the “Honoring Wishes” ending), or become the next Great One oneself through a final transformation that the player can choose but cannot reverse (the “Childhood’s Beginning” ending, which is widely regarded as the closest the game gets to a true ending and which the game itself presents without clear valuation). The choice between the three is the same choice the pharmakon tradition has always asked its advanced practitioners to make, and the game’s refusal to provide a canonical answer is the game’s honesty about the fact that the answer depends on particulars the tradition itself has never resolved definitively.
Elden Ring and the Lands Between
Elden Ring (2022), FromSoftware’s open-world entry in the lineage, was produced in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, who contributed the backstory — the foundational mythology of the setting’s ancient age and the events that produced the current situation the game drops the player into. The core plot concerns the Elden Ring itself, a cosmic artifact whose shattering has produced the current age of decline, and the player’s role as a Tarnished — an outcast of the previous order returning to attempt to reconstitute the Ring or to reject its reconstitution in favor of one of several alternative paths the game permits.
The plot architecture compresses into a single game the cyclical structure the Dark Souls trilogy spread across three entries. The game presents the player with multiple final endings corresponding to different readings of what the current situation requires. The player can restore the existing order in a form that perpetuates the conditions that produced the current crisis. The player can accept one of several heretical alternatives that each promise to transform the world in radical but different ways — the age of stars, the age of despair, the age of the duskborn, the frenzied flame — each corresponding to a specific NPC whose questline the player has followed to reach the ending in question. The player can also, in the “Age of Fracture” ending, essentially perpetuate the current situation while giving the player’s own avatar the authority to manage it. None of the endings is presented as unambiguously correct, and the game’s lore provides arguments for and against each of them scattered across item descriptions, NPC dialogue, and the cryptic utterances of the major bosses.
The Martin backstory contribution is detectable in the specific shape of the Lands Between’s mythology. The founding figures — Marika, Radagon, the Golden Order, the Outer Gods — occupy the structural positions that the tradition has always placed at the origins of a current age: a divine figure who unifies the previous multiplicity and establishes the current order, a consort figure whose relationship to the founder is ambiguous and whose later actions destabilize the order, a set of external forces whose motives are not fully disclosed and whose influence on the visible events is mediated through multiple layers of intermediaries. The details are Martin’s, but the pattern is older than Martin, and the game’s use of the pattern to generate the specific choices the player must make at the end is an operative rendering of the choices the tradition has always said its advanced students eventually face.
The Difficulty as Method
The Soulsborne games are famous for their difficulty. The difficulty is not an obstacle to the games’ content; it is the principal vehicle through which the content is delivered. The player who completes a Soulsborne game has learned, through the embodied experience of repeated failure, something about patience, attention, risk assessment, and the acceptance of loss that the easier games the player has previously played did not teach. The learning is not articulable in the way cognitive learning is. It is closer to the kind of learning that traditional disciplines — meditation, martial arts, musical practice, alchemical work — describe as the fruit of sustained effort under conditions the beginner finds overwhelming. The games import the pedagogical structure of those traditional disciplines into the video game medium and adapt it to a form that permits delivery at commercial scale.
The specific capacities the games cultivate in their players deserve naming. Patience: the willingness to attempt the same sequence repeatedly across many hours until the timing is internalized. Attention: the observation of enemy patterns and environmental cues that the game will not explicitly flag but that success depends on noticing. Risk assessment: the evaluation of whether the current situation can be pushed through or requires a tactical retreat to preserve gains. Acceptance of loss: the willingness to continue after the loss of substantial in-game progress without abandoning the project. And what might be called the refusal of shortcuts: the player who seeks the easiest path through the game will typically experience the game as frustrating, while the player who accepts the game’s demands will typically experience it as rewarding in ways the shortcut-seeker cannot access. The capacities the games cultivate are the capacities the operative tradition has always required from its students, and the games’ ability to cultivate them in players who have no explicit framework for what they are learning is one of the more significant accomplishments of the medium.
The Rendering-Model Reading
On the rendering-model reading, the FromSoftware corpus is the most sophisticated interactive depiction of the situation the Timewar thesis describes: a civilization approaching the end of its current cycle, with the previous inhabitants’ knowledge accessible only in fragmentary form, with the current instruments called upon to make choices about what happens next without adequate information about the consequences, and with the choices themselves unavailable to be delegated. The games place the player in this situation and give the player the tools to navigate it — limited tools, difficult tools, tools whose use requires the development of specific capacities the player does not initially possess — and then ask the player to make the final choice without telling them which answer is correct.
The operative content the games deliver exceeds what their creators probably intended to deliver. Miyazaki’s stated design philosophy is that the games should give players a sense of accomplishment through the overcoming of difficulty, and the auxiliary elements (the storytelling method, the hollowing mechanic, the cyclical endings) were developed to serve that primary goal. The rendering-model reading is that the accomplishment the games deliver is not the overcoming of difficulty but the transformation of the instrument that the overcoming produced, and that the transformation is the same transformation the traditional disciplines have always aimed at. The games arrived at the method through a design process that did not explicitly identify this goal, which is either evidence that the goal is convergently discoverable by any serious art form that takes its audience’s interior life seriously, or evidence that the method has transmission sources the design process did not consciously access. The esoteric media hub’s meta-question about whether the encoding is coincidental, epiphanic, or deliberate applies here with the same force it applies to the other works in the canon. The answer is probably all three, with the proportions varying across the corpus, and the useful response is not to resolve the question but to play the games and notice what the playing changes.
Open Questions
- What specific traditional disciplines informed Miyazaki’s design philosophy, and are the parallels to meditation, martial arts, and contemplative practice intentional or convergent?
- Is the storytelling method Miyazaki attributes to his childhood reading experience a complete account of the method’s origin, and what other sources should be considered?
- Do the games’ multiple endings constitute a genuinely pluralistic refusal to assert one answer, or do they reveal, on close reading, a specific valuation that the design obscures?
- How does the transformation the games cultivate in their players compare to the transformation the traditional disciplines aim at, and what specifically can the games accomplish that the traditional disciplines cannot, and vice versa?
- Will the corpus expand to include further entries that address the current age of the Lands Between or the post-flame age of Dark Souls, and what would such entries be able to depict that the current entries cannot?
References
FromSoftware. Demon’s Souls. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2009.
FromSoftware. Dark Souls. Namco Bandai Games, 2011.
FromSoftware. Dark Souls II. Namco Bandai Games, 2014.
FromSoftware. Bloodborne. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2015.
FromSoftware. Dark Souls III. Bandai Namco Entertainment, 2016.
FromSoftware. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Activision, 2019.
FromSoftware. Elden Ring. Bandai Namco Entertainment, 2022.
Juba, Joe. “The Miyazaki Interview: Elden Ring and the Philosophy of Hidetaka Miyazaki.” Game Informer, 2022.
Klepek, Patrick. “Hidetaka Miyazaki on the Unique Narrative Technique Behind Dark Souls.” Giant Bomb, 2012.
Vaatividya (YouTube channel). Lore analysis videos for the Soulsborne corpus, 2012–present.
VanOrd, Kevin. “The Art of the Difficult Game: FromSoftware and the Souls Tradition.” GameSpot, 2015.