Solving the Labyrinth: Crafting Discovery and Intuitive Design
Bloodborne
One of a game designer’s most useful tools is the player’s own intuition. Giving the player too much direction can make for a stifled and uninteresting experience, whereas designing a game so as to force the player to rely on their own instincts and assumptions does a lot to invest the player in the experience, and to see the accomplishments of their character as personal achievements rather than scripted, inevitable victories. Crafting an experience that makes the player feel a genuine sense of discovery is one of the subtlest but most effective tools of video game storytelling.
The opening minutes of Bloodborne, where the player must proceed despite being given very little information
A game that requires an immense amount of effort from the player’s own intuition is Bloodborne, an action-RPG that provides almost no context for plot or the player character’s motivation before handing the wheel over to the player. After two short cutscenes and going through the character-creation process, the player is simply plopped into the world and expected to figure things out. What little information the cutscenes provide is cryptic and indirect, so immediately the game has the player asking “what’s going on?” and more importantly: “What am I meant to do?”
While the game’s story has you asking such questions, at no point do you actually feel lost. From the earliest point where you’re granted control, there is only one path forward, and with no other interactive elements in the immediate vicinity, you know to follow the path. The moment that more than one route forward opens up, you’re given another guiding beacon in the form of a distant, giant cathedral that an NPC suggests you make your way toward in order to complete whatever obscure objective you’ve set out on.
So you set out with the goal of reaching the cathedral, quickly realizing that the streets of Bloodborne’s world are labyrinthine in their design, which makes keeping the cathedral in sight a challenge in itself, let alone reaching it. Options abound the deeper you get, with paths forking or being blocked, making it easy to get lost or overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the level’s layout.
Encounters with significantly difficult enemies often signal that a path is too dangerous for the player to take at their current level, subtly guiding players in the right direction
Not to mention the hordes of enemies meticulously placed throughout the level, ambushing you when you least expect it and often overpowering you with ease given your relative weakness so at this point in the game. Such areas actually work as something of a guide, as there’s nothing quite like getting absolutely pulverized by an enemy to make you reconsider your options and choose to explore another path.
Such subtle means of guiding the player are commonplace in most games, but they are usually supplementary to more streamlined tutorials, or thoroughly explored narrative context that establishes what the player ought to be doing. Bloodborne has almost none of these other elements, though, and trusts the player to proceed accordingly. As such, Bloodborne demands that its players engage with its world in a deliberate and methodical way in order to progress.
Assuming you overcome the many challenges the game sets between you and your goal, you’ll eventually find your way back to a gate that connects to an earlier part of the level that you previously couldn’t open but now can, your continued exploration having earned you a shortcut between the old, likely-mastered path and the new as of yet unexplored one.
"Bloodborne demands that its players engage with its world in a deliberate and methodical way in order to progress"
Trust me when I say there are few things in Bloodborne more relieving than stumbling upon these moments of interconnectivity within the world. These moments serve as symbols for having conquered – or at least survived – what was at first seemingly insurmountable, at having discovered a viable path through the oppressive thicket of Bloodborne’s level design.
The little victories throughout Bloodborne, be they finding a new shortcut or besting a previously opposing foe, never feel like they’re simply fulfilling the steps of the game’s script, but instead feel earned and owned by the player. The game’s lack of direction in both navigation and general gameplay forces the player to rely on their own intuition, to experiment with mechanics and explore the world in such a way that would be considered demanding by most games’ standards.
While this may prove a roadblock to some players, those willing (and able) to persevere and take the reins for themselves will find Bloodborne an enthralling and rewarding experience, not in spite of the how much the game demands of the player, but because of how much the game demands of the player.
The key, I’d argue, to crafting a rewarding sense of discover in a game is to make the player feel as though what they’re experiencing wasn’t strictly scripted, but something they instead stumbled upon or were able to conjure based on their sensitive interactions with the world. When we break it down, the little victories of Bloodborne are, more or less, scripted and the same for every player, but the experience of progressing that script feels so satisfying because of how little hand-holding the game does to guide the player.
Despite its relative linearity, Bloodborne instills a strong sense of discovery in its players thanks to its emphasis on intuitive design
Even if every player eventually comes face to face with the same boss, having progressed through the same pathways and past all the same enemies in-between, Bloodborne’s design means that none of this is possible if walked through thoughtlessly. It requires deliberate action and thought on part of the player, meaning that even if the path towards victory is ultimately linear, every player will have come to discover that path through their own methods and reasoning.
This sense of discovery is an essential component of Bloodborne’s experience, and it could be argued that the individual stories of how one navigates the game are more significant that the actual plot of the game itself, but that too is essentially informed by the player’s investment. Rather than answer any of the questions it establishes in the beginning, Bloodborne's story leaves the player with even more questions, meaning that the only way to make heads or tails of what is going on is to engage with the world and what little pieces of lore the game offers with the same deliberation that the gameplay requires.
The story of Bloodborne is not paced at the speed of a script, by cutscenes or in-game texts that come to you in a specific order to unfold the grander story around you, but is paced instead by the player’s own exploration of the world and their development of an understanding for what that world embodies. Even should the player find every piece of lore and compile it all together in the most organized fashion possible (as some fans have), there are some gaps that simply cannot be filled without some work on the player’s end.
"Each player will make of Bloodborne’s story what they will, and it will be heavily informed by their own experience navigating the labyrinth of the game"
This is meant to replicate a very specific experience of the game’s director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, who, in an interview with The Guardian, detailed how much of what he read as a child was above his reading ability or in languages he didn't fully understand, meaning he had to make up quite a bit of it for himself (Parkin). It’s a storytelling style that utilizes ambiguity – sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility – to incentivize active engagement and imagination on part of the player, an approach that echoes the same values of the game’s exploratory mechanics.
The gaps in Bloodborne’s story aren’t oversights, but are instead deliberately placed opportunities for the player to use what they’ve learned to extrapolate onto a bigger, partly obscured picture, investing them in the experience in a deeper sense than any concretely laid-out story could. Each player will make of Bloodborne’s story what they will, and it will be heavily informed by their own experience navigating the labyrinth of the game.
Taken at face value, Bloodborne offers the player very little to work with in terms of story, but once the player begins to engage with the game and their experiences from a perspective beyond what the game explicitly puts forward, it opens up into something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a game about discovering your own path, defining your own meaning, and everything from the world design to the gameplay to the purposefully obscured lore works to reinforce that idea. The essence of discovery is a piece to the experience of any game, but few put the sensation of conquering the unknown at the forefront quite like Bloodborne does.