If We Dig Up the Grave, Will There Be a Body? — The Lore of FromSoftware’s Games

It has been nearly ten years since the Dark Souls series took 3 as its final numbering. Hidetaka Miyazaki, director at the studio FromSoftware, publicly declared the series concluded, and with the success of Elden Ring its style has clearly shifted by subtle degrees. Even amid all this, there are people who still devise and upload lore concerning Dark Souls. A representative case is Hawkshaw, who shows a sustained interest in the “nameless blacksmith deity” who appears briefly in the flavor text of the upgrade material titanite[1].

Viewed objectively, the object of his devotion lies far from the main narrative that runs through the Dark Souls series — the story woven around Gwyn and his kin — and seems to offer only the thinnest ground for contact with anything else. Undeterred, Hawkshaw keeps returning to the first Dark Souls, pressing the blank spaces for every last drop within a world whose end has been explicitly declared.

Hawkshaw’s case may look excessively marginal. The videos of VaatiVidya, for instance — which anyone curious about the stories of FromSoftware’s games ends up watching at least once — produce a far smoother, more comfortable storytelling. His story videos run mainly through the major bosses and quest lines, realizing a more comprehensive and hospitable approach than Hawkshaw’s obsessive fastening onto a single piece of subtext. Representative is the Prepare to Cry series, a project that reconstructs narrative around the life of a single figure — a particular NPC or boss — gathering and rearranging storylines that the games’ nonlinear structure makes difficult to experience whole in a single playthrough. The series thereby functions as a device that fills the gaps between different play experiences and restores, after the fact, the narratives one missed.

Still, the two channels fundamentally reveal the general manner in which stories are enjoyed and conceived in FromSoftware’s games. They totalize the audiovisual sensations set side by side within the game, drawing up that feeling by which a receiver comes to believe they have experienced a “story” woven of causal sequence. Among those who enjoy FromSoftware’s games (and in wider circles besides), such work is called — by creators and viewers alike — lore.

On the Korean web, too, the word lore seems at some point to have entered natural use. One finds, for instance, cases like the tweet below.

[2]

The lore here does not seem to be invoked in quite the same sense as the lore that Hawkshaw or VaatiVidya practices. The “lore” named in the tweet is something that ought to behave coherently. It is posited as things and events that have already taken place; should it slip out of joint, it leaves the impression that the makers failed to exercise consistent control and management over their own product.

Working, as here, as a standard by which a work’s coherence may be judged, lore also sits somewhere in the game as a definite entity. When the tweet’s author views lore as bound up with the makers’ competence, those who produce lore videos about FromSoftware’s games pursue the same coherence. They set the hypothesis that some story unfolded on the game’s other side, and to prove it they explicate particular “clues” like source materials excavated at an archaeological site[3]. What matters is to erect, among the stories so devised, a flawless narrative free of error. Their work, in other words, proceeds in the posture of discovering something that already exists within the game — a practice, too, of reaching, through the structures and patterns salient in the work, toward the designer “implied” by them[4].

But can every backstory be reconstructed just by digging hard enough at the game? In Ash Lake — the region of the first Dark Souls that was released in an unfinished state — a single giant skull lies abandoned. It may belong to the nameless blacksmith deity, or to someone else entirely unguessed at, or mean nothing at all in the first place. When one tries to affix a story to the places the implied designer has left derelict, whoever produces FromSoftware’s lore ends up erecting causal relations between fragments that can never be confirmed, upon the very ground where the game keeps silent. And this is exactly why the attempt is thwarted even when the story is built pressed close to in-game clues. On the Korean and Japanese web, the pastime of “speculating, interpreting, and theorizing over the settings” of FromSoftware’s worlds goes by the word From-noe — “From-brain”[5] — a parody of “game brain,” the pseudoscientific term of the early 2000s that claimed gaming addicts’ brains become deformed[6]. The word carries a measure of self-mockery.

The word lore, then, splits into two subtly different webs of meaning. On one side is the lore transmitted from the makers and arriving to us — an object of verification and adjudication. On the other is the lore that swells extravagantly, whether or not it heeds that transmission. The two spectra of meaning do not exclude each other; they function like a kind of narrative engine that keeps producing story. Taking the lore of FromSoftware’s games as its case, this essay looks at how this desire, forked in two, sustains itself — and produces stories.

Lore, Emplaced

It is worth noting, first, that within the game industry lore circulates as a term of practice. The game designer Matthew Weise defines lore as content secondary to the main plot or to the interactions between characters — material that fills in the history and context around the story[7]. In such speech, the central resources are allotted to the directly playable region, and lore is set on the subordinate tier beneath it.

As a case of lore’s concrete deployment, Tanya Krzywinska looks to World of Warcraft: by expanding and drawing in narrative resources, it builds a grand worldness[8]. The game world establishes itself as a vessel able to receive all such minor stories. In this usage some magnetic pull of J. R. R. Tolkien seems to remain. Deeply versed in medieval English literature, Tolkien favored lore in the sense of transmitted tradition[9], and that imagination — passing through D&D and its kin — settled as the name for the work of designing and documenting worlds.

The game world is commonly required to hold an integrated consistency — one that applies, as Krzywinska writes, not only to spatial coordinates, style, and physical law, but to the past events that compose the present state of the world in which the player character stands[10]. The situation of the moment one inhabits must connect persuasively to the historical events and accumulated choices of which it is the result. Here lore — made concrete as maps, chronicles, setting books, item descriptions — narratively explains the game’s rules and origins, helping the player set the coordinates of individual scenes of play within a wider world. In this respect lore appears as a synonym for the worldbuilding, the setting.

In many games, the thing that centrally performs this function is flavor text — defined as text that has no effect on actual gameplay but supplies the player with additional information about the game’s world, or humor composed to delight[11]. Lee Seonin, meanwhile, writes of the Souls series as an “extremely scant stipulation of the world” — a world that “does not speak”[12]. In FromSoftware’s games, which do not readily tell of themselves, the place this text occupies is somewhat special. The anecdote that Hidetaka Miyazaki wrote every line of Bloodborne’s flavor text by his own hand[13] lends the player’s attitude toward that text a certain reverence. And the texts are indeed set in strategic places: dropped before an object of peculiar appearance, offered by an NPC in a particular register, or granted after a boss is subdued. Phases of play that resist neat division are translated into the form of collectible items in the inventory, and the flavor text inscribed on the item explains, after the fact, the history of the time and space just passed through.

Even so, flavor text is finally a “language of indirect speech,” a “language of detour”[14]. Indirect speech recalls the original utterance it has skirted by one layer, and in the same moment provokes the lack. The place left over does not remain as silence: it calls in words to take its place. Sentences that stand in for what the game did not say arise outside the game, and become in turn the grounds of the next sentence. Amusingly, this point resonates with the expanded web of meaning that derives from lore’s etymology.

Lore, Leaping

Before lore became, at a stroke, a term of subculture, folklore represented its usage. Lore here names knowledge handed down without the sanction of institutions — knowledge that spreads pliantly by word of mouth rather than in writing. As the site of story moved onto the network, this motive force expanded further. In Japan, for instance, “netlore” — the name for the horror-story posts of the bulletin board 2channel — compounds “net” and “lore.” Sometimes the entire process of a story’s being told is bundled as one lore, as with the Backrooms or creepypasta.

The force that creates and spreads lore tends, in this way, to arise from the leap. Na Won-young reads the lore spoken of today as a manifestation of the customs of nonlinear information-seeking and connection-making formed on the network. Lorification — an operation that, in Na’s words, “detaches its object from the original context and lines its reverse with fiction, serving as an excellent horror-production device and as the distribution network that spreads it efficiently” — is achieved by “leaping straight over the distances between pieces of information, or the standards already established on the basis of several facts, to produce a fictional other side larger than reality”[15].

This occurs even where no connection to lore’s point of origin can be claimed. In the period when Elden Ring had shown a single trailer and gone silent — days swollen with anticipation — a “fake lore” phenomenon broke out on the Elden Ring subreddit. This is one branch of the fake game: representations advanced with the intent of making people believe that a game’s rules, mechanics, and narrative actually exist, though the game itself does not. Users of the subreddit carried on as though the unreleased game were already out, bemoaning the difficulty of its bosses and trading strategies. As such posts bred confusion, the community later legislated a rule that related posts carry the tag “fake lore.” The fake-lore phenomenon can be classed as the limit case in which the customs of lore interpretation are made to precede the very absence of a source text[16].

This Is Not a Door — the Topographical Layer and the Topological Layer

In the case of the lore that emerges from FromSoftware’s games, the flavor text itself first courts lorification, appending description to items and to particular junctures. At the same time, there is a respect in which the medium of the game as such incites lorification through the leap.

With the advance of photorealistic graphics, digital games have evolved toward showing ever vaster worlds without a seam — but not every space realized in a game actually stands open to the player. Within it, the layer one can actually tread and the layer one can never reach are clearly divided. Behind the Cleric Beast boss arena in Bloodborne, for instance, there is a door that looks for all the world like a path onward and yet never opens[17].

This misalignment between the image the screen presents and the places one can actually go, Espen Aarseth distinguishes as two layers within the ludic landscape: the topographical layer, the sign-stream the game engine presents to the player; and the topological layer, the room-for-movement through which the player’s token actually travels[18].

At this point, the lore that players of FromSoftware’s games so fervently construct can be understood as an interpretive practice that seeks, within a ludic world ruled by topology, to return the topography to a space of explicable story. Lance McDonald, the well-known Bloodborne modder, tears open the space behind the Cleric Beast arena outright and — taking the surrounding structure, and its resemblances to other architecture in the series, as clues — deduces the space and the history that might have lain beyond, reconstructing in imagination the world’s completeness past the topological paths the engine permits[19].

Similarly, VaatiVidya makes active use of the free camera in producing lore videos. The original game software fixes the camera behind the playable character’s back, designed so that the player takes in the surroundings only within the range the character’s shoulders allow the viewpoint to turn. A free camera, achieved through external tools such as Cheat Engine, helps one detour around this design and slip free of the topological space. The character’s position, gravity, collision — all are temporarily disabled, and the world can be regarded from any viewpoint one pleases. It becomes possible even to inspect the hidden faces of objects that ordinary play never shows.

But is anything really there on that hidden face — if we dig up the grave, will there be a body? The Cathedral of the Deep in Dark Souls III takes for its boss arena the chamber enshrining Aldrich’s sarcophagus. Bishops pour out in a throng, ringing the great coffin against the player’s intrusion. In one video VaatiVidya, free camera engaged, vaults lightly up and shows viewers the top of the coffin, which the player’s view was never meant to reach. The lid, presumed beyond the player’s gaze, is blankness itself. And those who played the game knew the answer from the start. Clear the Cathedral of the Deep and return to the hub, and the NPC Anri tells you: Aldrich’s coffin was empty.

Nele Van de Mosselaer and Kathleen Murphy-Hollies observe a resemblance between those who advance lore in game fandom and conspiracy theorists. Both assume that someone’s intent lies dissolved on the far side of the phenomena, and form communities on the fuel of their zeal to decode that intent or find its meaning. The incomplete gaps and ambiguities a phenomenon or a text harbors become objects that must be brought to clarity[20].

Of course, those who produce the lore of FromSoftware’s games are fond of expressions that suspend assertion — “perhaps,” “maybe” — invoked wherever the context set behind some object is being deduced. Since the true state of affairs cannot be fixed, the suspension discloses that one’s added inference does not explain things whole — that a surplus remains. At the same time, because the suspension is bound to experience examined in one’s own play, it is also a word that quietly signals that the inference filling the text’s blank did not depart from arbitrary fancy but from evidence excavated within play. One ratifies, in other words, the existence of the author implied by the artifact called the game — and yet, in the places where that author keeps silent, returns the authority of utterance to oneself.

This suspension of the “perhaps” is the very form by which lore keeps running as lore. The engine of story-imagining — in which faith toward the transmitted design, and the extravagant proliferation that exceeds it, turn interlocked without excluding one another — will not stop where the author is silent; nor, perhaps, where there is no author at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Hawkshaw

[2]  Posted Mar. 13, 2026. x.com

[3] Paul Thomas., “The Analytical Behaviors of Genshin Impact Lore Enthusiasts: An (Auto)ethnographic Look at r/Genshin_Lore”, Game Studies vol.25(2), 2025, https://gamestudies.org/2502/articles/paul_thomas

[4] The concept of the implied designer is Van de Mosselaer and Gualeni’s adaptation to games of Wayne Booth’s “implied author.” Booth’s implied author is distinguished from the flesh-and-blood person (FBP) and from the narrator within the text: a figure implied from a personal standpoint arranged and staged by particular themes, values, and ethics. (Wayne Booth, “Resurrection of the Implied Author,” in James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz et al., trans. Choi Ra-young, Narrative Theory 1, Somyong, 2015, pp. 139, 143.) Van de Mosselaer and Gualeni explain the implied (game) designer as “the conceptualization of the designer that players construct in the process of dynamically interpreting the game (understood broadly, down to paraludic elements such as marketing materials).” In short, players attribute to this inferred figure every intention thought to fundamentally underwrite the creation of the game in question. (Nele Van de Mosselaer· Stefano Gualeni,. “The implied designer and the experience of gameworlds”, Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA international Conference, 2020, Tampere, Finland, p. 12.)

[5] “From-noe” (From-brain), Namuwiki, https://namu.wiki/w/%ED%94%84%EB%A1%AC%EB%87%8C,

[6] 박상우, “게임뇌 증후군，<정원사 챈스>”, Cine21, posted Nov. 28, 2002, https://cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=15417

[7] Matthew Weise “Narrative design myth-busting: It's not "just lore"”. Game Developer, Posted Oct. 27, 2021. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/narrative-design-myths-2-it-s-not-just-lore.

[8] Tanya Krzywinska, “World creation and lore: World of Warcraft as rich text”, in: Hilde G. Corneliussen, et al. (ed), Digital culture, play, and identity: A World of Warcraft reader, MIT Press, 2009.

[9] Dimitra Fimi, “Hobbit Songs and Rhymes: Tolkien and the Folklore of Middle-earth”, Dimitrafimi.org. Posted Mar. 2009, https://dimitrafimi.org/articlesandessays/hobbit-songs-and-rhymes-tolkien-and-the-folklore-of-middle-earth/

[10] Krzywinska, op. cit., p. 127.

[11] Kim Hong-gyun, “A Study on the Translation of Game Flavor Text: The Case of Hearthstone,” T&I Review 9, 2019, p. 74.

[12] Lee Seonin, “What Are We ‘Role-Playing’ Now?,” GameGeneration, posted Apr. 1, 2025, https://www.gamegeneration.or.kr/article/0a3f1970-eaf4-4a88-938b-9cd24e586eda#viewer-s7mgg128631

[13] Anayama, “[Interview] A Summary of SIE Producer Masaaki Yamagiwa on the Making of Bloodborne,” Ruliweb, posted Mar. 3, 2020, https://bbs.ruliweb.com/ps/board/300001/read/2208936

[14] Lee Seonin, op. cit.

[15] Na Won-young, “The Rotten Internet Hypothesis: Brief Notes on the Web of the Early 2020s (1),” Ma-te-ri-al, posted Sep. 16, 2025, https://ma-te-ri-al.online/archive/1494/ 

[16] Nele Van de Mosselaer, "Fake games: On dark and deceptive representations of non-actual games", Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 16(2), 83-84p.

[17] conjee, “[Question] Where on Earth Is That Door in the Cathedral That Won’t Open?,” Ruliweb, posted Apr. 25, 2016, https://bbs.ruliweb.com/family/4892/board/182048/read/9208780.

[18] Espen Aarseth, “Ludoforming: Changing Actual, Historical or Fictional Topographies into Ludic Topologies”, in Espen Aarseth·Stephan Günzel (Eds.), Ludotopia: Spaces, Places and Territories in Computer Games, 2019, transcript Verlag, p.131.

[19] Lance McDonald, “Bloodborne Cut Content :: The Door Behind The Cleric Beast :: Unused Shortcut”, Youtube, posted May 9, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2ojsgp1SCw

[20] Nele Van de Mosselaer · Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, “Conspiracy Thinking and Videogame Interpretation”, Conference: Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads.