#Code vein endings no spoilers code
#Code vein endings no spoilers series

#Code vein endings no spoilers series

This is the mechanical foundation of Dark Souls, upon which the game and the series built robust meditations on futility and the Sisyphean task of making meaning in the face of incorrigible meaninglessness. One of the many elements of the Dark Souls series that other games have sought to emulate is that of an unforgiving world whose labyrinthine paths and aggressive creatures lead the avatar to die many times as the player fails, learns, and retries brief stretches of the adventure before finally gaining enough skill to make an iota of progress-at which point the cycle typically begins anew.

#Code vein endings no spoilers code

In that spirit, before I can articulate the exact kind of monster that the player of Code Vein is, I want to articulate just what the game borrows from these three genres so we can see the storytelling sleight-of-hand that makes the player monstrous.įrom Dark Souls, Code Vein borrows gameplay that emphasizes an avatar dying many times in the course of trying to progress through the world of the game before actually succeeding in making progress. In reality, Code Vein’s unique blend of elements from games like Dark Souls, Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), and vampire stories is precisely what enables it to slyly turn the player into a monster without their even realizing it-but you wouldn’t intuit this by simply knowing the game as “anime Dark Souls.” The downside of having shorthand for everything we’d ever want to talk about is that the nuance of new stories gets lost in our rush to compare them to those stories with which we’re more familiar. (Be warned: spoilers for Code Vein abound.) What “Anime Dark Souls” Really Means Finally, I explore how we can view Code Vein as a blueprint for a new way of telling stories about the ethics of players and video-game worlds. After that, I step back to examine how the blend of elements from Dark Souls, JRPGs, and vampire stories unexpectedly managed to trick the player into taking on the role of metaphysical vampire without even realizing it.

Then, I show how the game presents Cruz Silva as its main antagonist-and how she ultimately functions as a mirror to reveal the vampiric nature of the player as the true antagonist. I begin by articulating precisely what features of Code Vein come from Dark Souls, JRPGs, and vampire stories.

While this horror may seem bizarre and niche at first glance, I ultimately argue that this increasingly common model for video-game storytelling may hold the key to further innovation in players’ relationships to the worlds and stories of games.

More precisely, I want to show you that by setting up a point-by-point analogy between the player and Cruz Silva, the game’s apparent main antagonist, the game frames the player as a kind of metaphysical vampire: a horrifying entity that parasitically engages with the world of a video game, sustaining the world for her own sake rather than the sake of the characters within the world. I want to convince you that true horror Code Vein is you, the player. Yet what seems at first glance to be a random mix of concepts empowers Code Vein to present a challenging, horrifying image of what it means for a player to invest herself in games that treat the very characters she’s meant to care about as pawns rather than intrinsically valuable individuals. Ĭode Vein is an ambitious artwork that I worry many have overlooked because of its apparent mishmash of various genres: it blended the punishing, death-oriented gameplay of Dark Souls with the rich character focus of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) and added a vampire motif for good measure. Great horror makes the familiar monstrous, and in a video game, nothing is more familiar than the person behind the controller.

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