This is not a key item вЂ“ unusually for the game it has no function whatsoever вЂ“ but it is kind of a capstone to one thread and, more than that, a hunterвЂ™s memento. The Yharnam Stone came to symbolise this and soon lodged in my thinking, its proportions growing by the day. When I realised I was saying goodbye to Bloodborne, I did so with a certain reverence, because this world had reverberated with some part of my mind. In assembling everything you play many roles, not least as actor and creator. Imagine exploring a collapsing civilisation, where you piece together the history through what survives, and add new meaning to it through your actions. I have played MiyazakiвЂ™s game over and over, peeling back the narrative layers, luxuriating in the asymmetrical multiplayer design (which allows players to leave messages for each other in their separate worlds) pushing ever-onwards and learning more in a quest that may well be endless. My sleep-addled mind tuned back into this confluence of themes and, as with any great work, I began re-seeing Bloodborne, projecting my situation, re-immersing in the minutiae.Д«loodborneвЂ™s combat system is a beauty, built around precision, aggression, and the irresistible flourishes of its вЂtrickвЂ™ weapons. As this is a horror game, beasthood is eventually realised literally, but is presented as something innate to humanity: at the bottom of BloodborneвЂ™s many different stories of human failure is denial or ignorance of this nature. At a basic level, the experience reminds us that we are animals.Дuring BloodborneвЂ™s development it had the working title Project Beast, and manвЂ™s inner nature is the crux of the whole thing.

No matter how your mind is set, the fears still hover, and when you become a parent you come to appreciate the purely biological nature of existence. Even with human beings, the birth rates in more advanced countries are lower, right? Looking back, I wonder if facts like that were at the root of the idea.вЂќД«abies are beautiful but theyвЂ™re also a source of enormous anxiety. When it comes to living creatures, the stronger or more advanced you are, the fewer offspring you produce in your life. In FuturePressвЂ™s Bloodborne CollectorвЂ™s Guide, Miyazaki said: вЂњThe story setup was something I came up with pretty readily in my mind. This is one of the great powder kegs in MiyazakiвЂ™s storytelling technique: introduce big themes, imply certain solutions, and then leave room for the imagination. The nature and fate of MergoвЂ™s birth is of enormous consequence in BloodborneвЂ™s world, but the interpretation is up to the player. IвЂ™d spend my days changing nappies and trying to comfort a screaming baby then, when she slept, IвЂ™d sneak back to BloodborneвЂ™s cursed township of Yharnam to listen to another.ДЄs this is a horror game, beasthood is eventually realised literally, but is presented as something innate to humanity. MergoвЂ™s cries are initially heard in one of the nightmare realities you find in the late game, but when your character has acquired enough of one of BloodborneвЂ™s trippy metaphysical commodities, Insight, the infantвЂ™s shrieking seeps into every strata of the world. The baby in this game is called Mergo, the offspring of an unholy liaison between humanity and the deity-like Great Ones. IвЂ™d already sunk hundreds of hours into Bloodborne before the birth of my second child, but what first inspired my return was that motif of an infantвЂ™s harrowing cry. From Counter-Strike to Rocket League, I love games you can invest in. Some might call my tastes вЂњhardcoreвЂќ I go for games with deep systems that slowly unfold over dozens and dozens of hours, ones where your mastery of the controls, mechanics and possibilities only ever increase. IвЂ™ll never stop playing video games but, with two kids, there are no longer enough hours in the day to play games like this.

Not for the first time, I realised the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, thinks of everything. During that time, players discover that a core theme of the game is progeny, covering the whole gamut, from birth to infanticide. Bloodborne.ДЇrom SoftwareвЂ™s 2015 masterpiece, a dark action adventure set in a plague-ridden gothic metropolis, is a towering achievement of interactive media, but it is also a grim and intimidating challenge requiring at least 50 hours to appreciate.

What I didnвЂ™t expect was that, in the zombie hours at the edge of night, the harrowing cries of our newborn baby would keep pulling me back to something dark, distant and seemingly unrelated. R ecently, my partner and I had our second child and, over the subsequent weeks, as is often the case, we barely slept.

Watch dog of the old lords