Reach out and touch fae(ce)

 Im confused how you can go from making bloodbourne, to this.

 

This has to be boring. Really really boring.

The music and the nothing happening gameplay.

Accidental poetry by a YouTube commenter who shan’t be named (ca. 2018)

 

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

            William Blake, “The Sick Rose” (1794)

The worst part of watching someone stream FromSoftware’s Déraciné (2018) was the consistent, uniformly unfunny comparison to the studio’s other, more action-heavy recent titles, especially the 2015 role-playing game Bloodborne: “Is this Bloodborne 2?!” “When do we get to the poison swamp?” “Bloodborne sequel??” And so on. Granted, the game’s developers encouraged this attitude with what could be references to their other work, including elements like familiar character names and designs—This game’s ashen-haired Yuliya, in particular, bears a striking resemblance to “The Doll” and/or Lady Maria characters of Bloodborne. The baseline aural experience also has that “Victorian,” sawing, trembly and pensive, vibe fans of the studio’s output would most directly associate with the other game and its “Hunter’s Dream” hub area. The PlayStation Store description for Déraciné further associates it with that specific other game, probably for the simple, mercenary reason that Déraciné, like Bloodborne, is a Sony exclusive. The fact that they’ve been egged on in an official sort of way does not make streamer and chatter commentary in the aforementioned vein any more listenable, however!

             I would have played Déraciné myself, but I don’t have the VR machine for it. And since none of the streamers I might normally watch played through it publicly, to the best of my knowledge, I ended up settling for someone somewhat less familiar. I started with a commentary-less “FULL playthrough” but made the switch and stuck with that choice—despite the jokes about molesting the game’s children and dog characters—because I wanted to get a better sense of what the emotional and mechanical experience of playing the game would be like. Of course, the streamer experience is not the normal human experience, but I still wanted to see what the puzzle-solving process could have been if I’d actually played the game. Setting aside the intense frustration I felt when I knew an answer before the streamer, I thought the puzzles were satisfying enough. Which is to say that they seem to offer just enough friction to create a sense of accomplishment, in the conventional video-game-y switch-pulling and block-pushing style—just hard enough to make you feel like you did something but not so hard as to be genuinely taxing.

Comically, the PlayStation Store labels Déraciné as “action” and “adventure,” even though the latter is overwhelmingly more applicable. There is no reflex component here at all. If the game has fail states, I never saw any watching the stream. Instead, it is a pretty straightforward adventure game with a focus on mood and story over truly hardcore puzzle-solving. (I say, based on my limited childhood experience with kiddie point-and-click titles like Darby the Dragon and Mr. Potato Head Saves Veggie Valley, though also on my adult experience watching some YouTube reviews of somewhat more comparable games like Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon). You move around the environment, poking and prodding everything and everyone, often collecting items and then putting those items where they need to go in order to progress. Sometimes this process seems kind of perfunctory in Déraciné, to the point that there is no real “puzzle” to be solved and the game is instead providing a modicum of interaction to make the player feel involved. Alternatively, I guess you could characterize it as the equivalent of a mildly more intensive page-turning process. A magical clock item set to the player’s left hand provides hints/reminders to further streamline the puzzle-solving and lets you know without any ambiguity when every task is complete and you are ready to move forward. Another word I considered alongside “mood” and “story” was “cinematic,” though there is a certain irony to associating that word with Déraciné given how… “static” it can also be.

Déraciné feels very smartly designed for what it is—as both a side project for FromSoftware and as a VR title specifically. The studio has a reputation at this point for stellar design work and intriguing world-building triumphing over any shortcomings with visual fidelity, and Déraciné certainly has that familiar spirit, perhaps to an even more noticeable degree. I understand that VR games are probably more impressive in VR, but so many of these kinds of games that I invariably see trailer-ized at video games events just look so fake to me, like deeply spiritually sophomoric in terms of identity and ambition. I’ve never seen a VR game that made me want to buy the hardware to play it. The experience just doesn’t seem novel-enough justification for the price. Like, one sword-swinging or gun-shooting experience in VR has to be more or less the same as any other, right? Again, I’m just going to assume that the actual in-the-moment first-person-in-VR perspective is the missing note that makes these underwhelming visual and gameplay concepts sing for people. Déraciné is at once so much more unassuming but also interesting to me because it doesn’t try to indulge the usual gaming verbs (“kill,” “attack”) and instead tinkers with “explore,” a concept with a lot more real-world resonance. What the game offers—though I’m not arguing it’s unique in this regard—is the ability to get approximations of your hands directly on its fantasy world. Even if the effect can be spoiled by moving (yourself, physically) the wrong way and receiving an immersion-breaking “Player position is out of alignment” or “Out of play area” message. I suppose a shooter or slasher does fit the foundational nature of VR, with its hand-tracking granting the player this extra sense of synchronicity, but so does the adventure game prodding and poking which is normally even more abstracted through the use of a mouse rather than some more hand-like peripheral.

Déraciné is very modest in scale. It is primarily set within a single school/orphanage map and is not all that long either. It is also modest visually, with only fleeting, limited animations, which heavily contributes to the “static” feeling I alluded to before. It’s genuinely impressive, however, how well the technology and the game design intertwine and complement one another. The core conceit is that you play as a faerie, a being that is invisible to the human characters and that also exists somewhat outside time. Consequently, you perceive the world as largely unmoving. You can find the various characters frozen in place, both in their current physical location and as translucent golden echoes of their recent past so that the game can imply their actions rather than show them outright. A person might move a little if you interact with them, but any major changes will happen after a clean break that takes you into the next “epoch” (read: level or stage). This accommodates a more budget-conscious approach to storytelling while also serving the mood, as there can be uncertainty at times about what exactly you’ll find after a jump that could take you into the near or somewhat more distant past or future as the story progresses. Even the load times can ultimately contribute since they hold you in that moment of chronological uncertainty for longer, and/or can serve as more of a definitive end point or period of decompression for a particular story beat or feeling. It’s a perfect example of how a seeming limitation can serve the artistry better than a smoother, more seamless experience might.

The conceit that the player is a magical creature further justifies the teleportation method of movement that the game employs and that, as I understand it, tends to result in fewer issues with motion sickness in VR. In other games, though, it just looks unappealing and unnatural to me. Here, it Makes Sense for the type of being that you are. Furthermore, the way that you can only shift from one predetermined position to another mimics the perspective that I associate with adventure games, where “exploring” actually meant rooting yourself in front of one scene or the other. I have to imagine this was easier to program and playtest since the player cannot freely move around and collide with things, or potentially slip out of bounds. It also probably makes puzzling a bit easier since it limits the number of potential points of meaningful interaction to just where you are allowed to go. The visual of a quiet, museum-esque world populated with what amount to statues that you approach almost like exhibits or wax-work tableaux adds to the unsettling atmosphere when the game gets a little spooky (see, especially, when it ultimately subverts your expectation by showing you something that can move freely).

As a “faerie tale,” Déraciné ultimately goes a little big for my taste. The initial more domestic vignettes—of pulling a prank with some herbs and of helping the orphans decide where to set up a chair for you on the premises, to name two—felt more appropriately on-scale for a VR title and for roughly the kind of story I estimate this to be (like). I was thinking about David Almond’s YA novel Heaven Eyes (2000), although I simply often am anyway. In brief, Heaven Eyes is a story about three orphans in England who run away together and encounter a strange child (the titular Heaven Eyes) and her eccentric caretaker who live amidst some ruined buildings along the river. Here is a representative early passage, after the orphans meet the web-fingered girl and her “Grampa”:

“Where did you come from, Heaven Eyes?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I memory little,” she said. “There is nothing but a deep deep dark. Grampa tells me this deep dark is the Middens. He tells me that he dug me out one moony night. That is all I memory, Erin Law, before Grampa and the printing works and the ghosts.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else excepting sleep memories, and these I do not speak of for they must be wrong.”

“What are the sleep memories, Heaven Eyes?”

“Must never tell them. They does angry Grampa.”

She shifted closer to me.

“Grampa is old,” she said. “Him does say that mebbe one day I must cross the river to the world of ghosts.”

She took a chocolate from a pocket and pressed it into my palm.

The story isn’t definitively supernatural—there is always some element of deniability you could point to—but it has a somewhat magical vibe overall and a mixture of both whimsy and sadness, as well as some upsetting, credible menace with the Grampa character in particular. It freaked me out pretty soundly when I was younger and first listened to the audiobook because of, I think, how it straddles the line between realism and fantasy. To a kid who was used to thinking in terms of cleaner genre borders, this muddy, freaky middle ground was something very unexpected. A not entirely inaccurate comparison would be with seasons one and three of the very adult True Detective: The show has a recurring element of supernatural horror that never manifests physically/for real but that feels inches away from doing so at times (and it may finally break through in the most recent, fourth, season). Heaven Eyes is very similar, though altogether more gently dark, like Déraciné can be. Both the book and TV series carry themselves with a lot of confidence that makes buying into their magical side downright pleasurable, enthralling, and natural-feeling. The effect in the game is spoiled by its most obviously video-game-y elements, however, like the focus on a faerie’s red time-stealing ring (an infrequent mechanic but very important bit of the narrative) and on golden wands that can transfer a person’s time/life force to a faerie. These are contrivances that signpost/contextualize/enable player actions in the transparent way necessary for playing a game and so fit awkwardly into a proper narrative. Meanwhile, the background focus on science experiments to turn people into faeries and on how the world outside the orphanage might just be an apocalyptic faerie hunting ground (foggy elements conveyed in FromSoftware’s patented roundabout way, and perhaps even less compelling for it) feel a bit shlocky and excessive to me. More video game taint, if I’m utterly ungenerous! Despite this ultimately being comparatively quaint for a video game, there’s part of me that wonders about the potential “obligation” to go big, even if only marginally, in order to meet the expectations of the medium and/or fans of FromSoftware specifically.

The overall experience (and arguably the narrative) of Déraciné is also impacted by the choice to render the game’s controllers as part of physical objects in the environment that tutorialize the controls. See the wall hangings pictured above, for example, or perhaps an early note given by Yuliya that also reveals a “Move” controller alongside the credibly handwritten text. Making what would normally be… non-canonical pop-ups that exist only for the player “real” here might nominally be more immersive, if you disregard the anachronisticity of the downright futuristic, bulbous, alien hardware depicted in this setting that could otherwise pass for historical.

There’s an attempt to make the arrangement feel more natural and to better align the player and player character by having the dual controllers correspond to the hands (and the items associated with those hands) in the game. I still ask myself if this is really more immersive than just sitting in front of a TV holding a conventional controller, though. I will “disappear” into a game, where the controller is as good as a natural extension of my body and effectively weightless, but does that still happen with the VR setup? I obviously can’t say, and I’m not willing or able to conduct some sort of study. In the stream that I watched, there was some early vocalized discomfort attributed to the PlayStation VR (in contrast to some of the alternatives), and the streamer ran into issues with their work/play space not letting them reach out for items in the game’s world as naturally as intended. For what all that’s worth, it seemed like there does exist some potential for extra self-consciousness. The physical reality seems like it could undermine the fantasy. My hard, long reach is that maybe the altered, awkward reality of the faerie outside time can be harmonious with the awkward, altered, dampened reality of the headset-wearer-and-controller-swinger. You are yourself a strange creature in playing the game.

One interesting thing about Déraciné’s story is how it ends and how it incorporates the theme of cycles that has become so synonymous with FromSoftware’s Souls-y stories. While multiple endings are typically possible, at least one amounts to you generally continuing some sort of cycle that, in-game, cleverly justifies the existence of New-Game-Plus since the events of the plot could conceivably just happen again. Depending on how loosely and poetically you’re willing to conceive of the games’ worlds, you could also see the alternative endings as still cyclical somehow, even if the odds of the more distinctly apocalyptic options somehow reverting to the original status quo feel astronomically huge. The fact that all endings do loop the game endlessly, however, thanks to the existence of New-Game-Plus lends credence to the impression. Nothing ever ends, one way or another. Déraciné does contain cycles—A notable chunk of the game concerns your attempts to change events in the past to prevent the children of the orphanage from dying in the future, and you go through multiple loops of attempted fixes, never quite managing to avoid the tragedy. Eventually, your task becomes to completely remove the motivation that will drive the children outside, where dangerous faeries lurk, by resurrecting the deceased Yuliya. Without her death, the children won’t become obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. Doing this, however, ends with Yuliya herself turning into a faerie and still consuming the other children. The only way to truly fix things is not to bring Yuliya back to life but to instead never let her die in the first place.

In a somewhat revised version of the opening tutorial where you originally received your red life-stealing ring, you now learn where it actually came from: Your faerie character took Yuliya’s time and set off the whole chain of events. This go-round, when you receive the red ring, the solution is to reject it and instead return the ring to Yuliya’s own finger (and thus restore her time), effectively removing yourself from the story. The catch is that you can still loop the game endlessly by taking the ring yourself as before. If you do, the bad choice is not acknowledged and you simply continue on to the first proper level again, albeit with the kindness of an option to skip back to the finale. I’m not sure looping this way counts as an “ending,” which makes terminating the cycle your only true choice, forcing a clean and clear and definitive conclusion on all players. The option to return to the finale without playing through the whole game again highly suggests this is not a “real” path to take. You simply chose wrong (solved the final boss puzzle of the game wrong), but it lets you realize that wrongness at your own pace and so to sit with and better own it. I like to be hyper-critical of FromSoftware’s hands-off approach to narrative these days, but this is undeniably a good, even off-putting (connotation: positive!), application of their design habits. It further closes the gap between the player and the player character by making you in the wrong along with them, though this may be a cliché reflex of the medium at this point. A shortcut to (attempted) pathos by way of making the player “responsible” for something with no actual alternative, unless you count refusing to play the game any more.

(The stream I was watching ended up doing not quite a second full loop of the story before jumping back to the finale to conclude things properly. Consequently, I was able to skip a large chunk of content and reach the ending much faster than I had anticipated based on the VOD’s total runtime. Although, given how much I’ve since had to rewatch while working on this piece, I may have seen as good as the whole thing and then some…)

If we exclude the awkward contrivances of wands and rings, this is a much more compelling story: Someone has to choose not to be obsessed with the past and, “kind faerie” that they are, erase themselves from existence to make the lives of other people better. The only kind faerie is one that does not actually exist, because to exist as a faerie is to take from others to sustain yourself out of necessity and then to work some of your impressive faerie feats, of time travel and resurrecting the dead. Told another way, I think there’s a lightly spooky, sad little tale in there somewhere. It is perhaps deflating from a gaming standpoint to be told, in a sense, that your hours spent were pointless, but that’s arguably what makes it a better story story. That’s the grim fairy/faerie tale bit. Or, you could see it as a cliché—“The only way to beat the game is to stop playing,” basically—on par with “It was all a dream!” Which is at best a massive cliché and at worst a massively hated twist across all genres of media.

Speaking of clichés, in this context: I’m going to do what I already established that I hate and connect this thread to other FromSoftware titles, specifically the 2022 ARPG Elden Ring, a game that couldn’t be more different from Déraciné—violent, ill-advisedly large, stats- and leveling-focused… I’m giving myself permission to do this since it’s in the interest of theme rather than some attempt to create a multiverse via Obscure Lore Analysis. In Elden Ring, there’s a faction of “recusants” you can join that hunt their fellow “Tarnished” that are chosen to serve the ends of the religious order this faction is rebelling against. One of the members of the recusants says something that really stuck with me, which is about the way that they take from others—“To take power and make it his own, [t]he recusant must hunt his own kind. . . . We recusants must become the most wretched of predators.” (This idea is also reinforced by the area boss’s acquirable weapon and its special ability, Taker’s Flames.) After hearing that, it reframed how I thought about the rest of the game, particularly with certain late-stage secret areas where a couple of groups are trying to establish their own factional turf. In both cases, there are also certain misshapen, reviled, and oppressed creatures that have seemingly made their way to these remote places in search of sanctuary, and naturally you end up killing everything in your path when you explore those areas. It’s the fundamental nature of the game that you can’t really avoid (outside of some sort of unintended gimmick run), and I kept thinking about how these games are all about “taking,” in some way. Whether your enemies deserve it or not, you take from them and take from them, across deaths and across replays or New-Game-Plus cycles.

I’m not going to make a grandiose statement about video game violence or anything like that, but it was an impression that stuck with me and made me sad. Déraciné, you could argue, is ultimately about choosing not to take from others. In this regard, it does feel like a noticeable break from FromSoftware’s recent work and the gameplay and themes of that work, even if familiar aesthetic or aural elements give players fodder for their annoying Bloodborne references. There was a truly never-ending litany of this stuff in the stream I watched. (Also: I look up a post on ResetEra about the game, scroll down to the comments, and BLAM—immediate Bloodborne reference!) I never really wanted an Elden Ring, and I was disappointed by how close the historical fantasy ninja game Sekiro (2019) also hewed to the “formula” FromSoftware had established for themselves. What I wanted them to do was to parlay their Souls clout into a weirder and different pursuit, and there is a bit of that here. Déraciné being a VR title certainly, justifiably, delayed my engaging with it, though I was also, on some level, unjustifiably more interested in taking, like yet another obnoxious and unadventurous chatter.

“Aren’t you excited? You’re going to be a faerie... And live in the world where time stands still… Where nobody can see what you’re up to, ever again.” In all seriousness, I wonder how in-depth the conversations are when developing a game like this one, where the player is able to free-form manipulate approximations of human hands and interact with a world with human bodies in it. How deeply is the question of “What will they get freaky with?” considered. I assume that as long as the game is not encouraging that behavior and is not “reactive” to it that it doesn’t torpedo the content rating. You can put your hands all over the characters in Déraciné, but it’s more or less exactly like the museum comparison I made earlier: These are more statues than living things; they typically only respond to the correct item being given to them in the correct way. It’s not simulational at all.

I don’t actually believe the streamer I’ve been talking about is some mega pervert. In fact, since they are a content creator in general and a video game streamer in particular, I’d, frankly, have been more surprised if the “joke” didn’t get made. Pretending to be a sex pest in that context while playing this kind of game is the lowest of low-hanging fruit, right alongside the jokes about other Souls-likes. I’m not as much of a stuffed shirt in this regard as I’ve pretended to be, but these are the most obvious (and therefore obnoxious) ways to talk about and play this game. In a critique, they’re worth bringing up.

One could even argue that there is an under-tapped vein of perversion beneath Déraciné. The last bit of the above quote, from the early moments of the tutorial, certainly sounds suggestive to me—both the words and the delivery. There’s an ambiguous, whispery mischievousness to it. Your faerie isn’t canonically that much of a little stinker, however much the player goofs off as them, yet you’re in both a poltergeistly and voyeuristic position, and there could have been more done to play around the margins of empathy and good taste. Maybe indulging would have put the more accessible “T” rating at risk, or maybe it’s just not meant to be that kind of game, to the point that I don’t recall noticing evidence of even the now-legendary, at least “semi” apocryphal foot fetish that gets brought up with seemingly every one of these FromSoftware titles. Or, I don’t remember noticing anything independently, didn’t hear anything called out during the stream, and Google-searching this topic (thankfully?) doesn’t seem to return anything either. Perhaps there’s your evidence that this one is meant to be incontrovertibly chaste.

             A cursory Google of the French “déraciné” suggests that it means “uproot,” though looking at a dictionary provides a bit more nuance—that it could be a noun meaning “a person who has been uprooted from his or her native environment or society.” That is the likely intended use in the game’s title. It makes the most sense because it also fits with the Thing-based titling of the medium. However, if we just go by the literal text on the screen/box, it is also one conjugation of the verb “déraciner,” which can mean “to eradicate” a feeling and/or opinion but “to uproot” either a plant or person. The way that it is used in the title of the game, “déraciné” most resembles the present perfect: “[Pronoun of your choice] has/have uprooted…” If I pretend the accent on the second “e” doesn’t matter, we can expand that list to include “I uproot” or “He/she uproots” as well. Although infinitely more awkward and nonsensical as a game title, there is part of me that likes the… special ambiguity of the verb because of the question of who/what is uprooting what/who, with the added layer of mixing person, plant, and feeling. The verb, with the uncertain subject and missing direct object, appeals because of how faeries are associated with experimentation in this world, so it’s not so much something you are as it is something done to you. It might be grammatically impossible for the title to be a verb, but that ominous action works with the themes and story in an “extra” way. (A quote from FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki in an IGN article threads the noun-verb needle: “‘Déraciné is French for uprooting,’ says Miyazaki. ‘Or someone who’s been displaced from their natural environment.’” A happy accident for moi?)

In terms of exactly who/what is being déraciner-ed, there are a few options, starting with people: one obvious possibility being the player character themselves—formerly the baby Alexis from the orphanage, uprooted from reality and re-planted in “the world where time stands still” as a faerie. Another option would be Yuliya, who has also been uprooted from her life in the orphanage and has become a spirit in death. I like this possibility a lot because of how it interacts with the game’s box art, which technically depicts Yuliya but has a flower (in-game, revived by the player faerie as one of their first feats proving their existence) as its focal point, mixing person and plant in terms of imagery and apparent significance. For feeling, consider that faeries are also associated with an obsession with the past in the game, or how the children are obsessed with Yuliya’s passing, or how Yuliya herself was willing to give up her own life to try to see Alexis again. Only when these feelings are all eradicated is a happy ending achievable: The player faerie has to reject the obsession with the past to give Yuliya back her time, which denies her the reunion with Alexis-in-faerie-form but also spares the other children their own feelings of sadness which will kill them in turn, in time. Or maybe all of the children are uprooted since they are orphans? It’s a word that gestures at multiple characters, concepts, story beats, and themes in the game in a way that appeals to me artistically, as a critic of art and as a sometimes-artist who titles things. Granted, I am also writing as an ignorant, non-French-speaking person about a word with potential connotative meaning that I simply don’t know. Of course, similarly, FromSoftware is a Japanese company, and some of their best work is associated with “western” fantasy re-interpreted through the artsy-fying lens of a different culture. It’s not that Déraciné is discernibly French—most people probably think of jolly old Bloodbor- ER: ENGLAND!—but the title at least might continue that trend of incorporation and re-interpretation in a sly way.

             The art-critiquer and art-maker in me also likes how this title stands in contrast to the names of FromSoftware’s other, adjacent, recent games. These seem to be named for important objects in the games’ lore (Demon’s/Dark Souls and Elden Ring) or for the protagonist (Sekiro) or a central element of play (the robotoid vehicles of Armored Core, the resurrection mechanic referenced by the Shadows Die Twice subtitle of Sekiro) or narrative events (the Fires of Rubicon subtitle for Armored Core VI). Bloodborne is a bit cleverer—named for both its primary fixation, thematic and visual and narrative, on blood and what might be… borne by it. You can definitely get creative with it in a way that isn’t that dissimilar from this game (by focusing on what is “born from” rather than “borne by” blood, for example). Déraciné, by contrast to at least the first few if not also Bloodborne, is named more thematically and poetically. Even if we use the less ambitious (more logical) noun form of the word/title, it still carries more abstract weight and suggests ambiguity and artistry. There are demon souls and a Dark Soul and an Elden Ring; there is a Sekiro who can die multiple times, and there are many Armored Cores fighting over the fiery “Coral” energy on Rubicon 3; diseases and monstrous transformations are borne by Blood (institutions are born from it/the pursuit of it and from its consequences), but who exactly has been… “uprooted”? The Déraciné cover art prioritizes Yuliya—and associates her with both the word and a plant—but it could still be the player character/Alexis or all the orphans at once or the faeries as they exist in this world or even the proprietors of the orphanage, who started their research elsewhere but went on to continue their work in what amounts to monastic exile. We could put together a definitive list of names, but it’s more fun to just assume it applies to everyone at once. It is a non-specific, and also non-literal, title that is harder to pin down, which one could argue makes Déraciné more like art, despite its dual reality as a product.

              As far as the VR exclusivity is concerned, you could see this as a niche title for a niche bit of hardware, or you could uncharitably see it as a pearl before swine-type situation, in that the people with the income and space available to most easily experience the game firsthand via a fairly expensive add-on to an already costly gaming system would be streamers, tech bros, and, like, Drake. People whose fantasies of immersion involve really feeling like they’re kicking someone in first-person? People unlikely to be moved by the nuance of a name or the quiet snooping and benevolent groping you get up to here. Maybe the already high price of entry for VR justifies the game’s shorter runtime, though! It can “afford” to be more of an Experience precisely because it could only be bought by those who’ve already invested so much that a little more for a little something wouldn’t seem like a crime. I don’t think there’s anything about Déraciné’s design or control scheme that would preclude it being made available on more accessible hardware, but I don’t think it will be. A non-Souls FromSoftware game probably wouldn’t register as worth the effort; plus it would make the VR feel that little bit less exclusive and well-served; plus the modest length and simple design of the game would only be thrown into starker, less flattering light if separated from the novelty of the VR experience. If a camera adds 10 misperceived pounds, does an expensive, awkward piece of hardware required to interface with a game add 10% additional apparent quality? I’m at least 85% performatively bitter. My genuine hope is that FromSoftware goes back to this game design well again via a format I can actually engage with, and I will try to actually be receptive about seven-ish years sooner this time around.

              (Also: Read Heaven Eyes! Re-experiencing it for this piece, I realized it might have a serious claim on a spot as one of my favorite books.)