What's going on in Bloodborne: The Old Hunters?

[Administrator]

Hidetaka Miyazaki and From Software have an outstanding approach to narrative design, creating worlds where the systems and lore are intertwined from first principles. These are not games with simple stories, easy answers, or even good and bad - which is why fans find their heady brew of fact, myth, and suggestion so intoxicating.
With that said, Bloodborne's expansion The Old Hunters adds so much to our understanding of this game's world that we're going to (mostly) leave aside the game systems and look at how it adds to the original narrative. If you want a refresher, here's my old article on that. There's simply not space to cover everything, so topics like Valtr, the Cathedral basement and in-depth analysis of the Research Hall will have to wait for another day.
The first thing to say about the Old Hunters, which might sound crazy but I'm 100 per cent sure, is that we experience events in reverse order - the DLC begins next to Laurence and the Cathedral, takes us through Ludwig (who is first 'the accursed', and then 'the holy blade'), then on to the Research Hall and the Church's first experiments, and finally the fishing hamlet where the corpse of a Great One washed up. All of this happened the other way around.
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