Chapter 89 - #89: I’m Trapped in the Nightmare!

Whether in Ethan’s previous life or here on Terra, the title Bloodborne had rapidly become globally synonymous with dark, suffocating madness.

On a prominent Steam community forum, a highly upvoted thread was gaining massive traction. A user named Phantom_AC had created a sprawling, emotional post, tagging Nova directly.

He didn’t tag the official Sprout Studio support account. He directed his existential dread straight at the creator.

[Nova, I’ve rolled the credits on Bloodborne, but I feel like I can’t wake up…]

The post immediately caught the attention of Sprout Studio’s community managers because it deeply resonated with thousands of other players.

In the thread, the user described the sheer psychological toll of the Father Gascoigne boss fight. He wrote about the heartbreaking realization that the Tiny Music Box only brought the crazed father back to his senses for three pitiful seconds.

But what terrified Phantom_AC the most wasn’t the tragedy itself. It was his own reaction to it.

After dying to Gascoigne a dozen times, the fear had completely vanished, replaced by an intoxicating, blinding desire to hunt.

When he finally slaughtered the priest, his hands were shaking, not out of relief, but out of pure adrenaline.

He realized that in his desperate attempt to survive the game, he had mentally become just as blood-drunk as the monsters he was killing.

At the end of the sprawling post, he admitted that he finally understood Gascoigne’s dying words. He felt completely absorbed by the role. He felt like he was bleeding into the nightmare.

Scrolling to the bottom of the post, Ethan saw thousands of gamers echoing the exact same sentiment.

jacksepticeye: I honestly don’t know what kind of masterpieces Nova will make in the future, but in my heart, this game will forever be number one. The sheer darkness and cosmic madness… no other piece of media has ever made me feel this deeply immersed.

Kotvslape: The OP perfectly described my experience. The second I pick up my controller, I get tunnel vision. Within twenty minutes, my palms are sweating and I’m gripping the plastic like a vice. The thrill of the hunt is genuinely irresistible.

knapp: The scariest part is realizing that turning into a ruthless, blood-drunk hunter is only phase one of the psychological horror.

Senpai_for_hire: The most uncomfortable thing for me is the lore. None of the three endings are actually ‘good’. Nobody in Yharnam gets a happy ending. Spending sixty hours desperately trying to save these NPCs, only to realize your efforts are completely futile, is devastating.

LIRIK: Nova’s monster design is genuinely traumatic. I don’t usually get scared in horror games, but this perfectly captures primal fear. It’s unspeakable.

Vonhjin: When I was a kid, the grudge girl scared me. Now? My literal sleep paralysis demon is the Brainsucker. Every night I close my eyes and hear that wet, slurping sound. When it paralyzes you, grabs your head, and jams that translucent tentacle right into your skull… watching my hard-earned Insight get drained away makes me physically sick.

TRice: For me, it was seeing the Blood Moon for the first time. The skybox changes and you realize this isn’t just a plague; it’s the inner mind of a lunatic god. The omnipresent fear is suffocating.

NicoGab: Nova, I’m stuck in the role…

kindred: Waking up in that dark clinic, being told a hunt was starting… Pushing open those heavy iron gates into the gothic streets… Listening to the crazed, incomprehensible whispers of the infected residents… I knew right then that I was walking into a feast of fear. And as a Hunter, I was slowly, messily, but inevitably torn apart by the black mist. What an agonizing, beautiful journey.

There was an endless scroll of comments just like these.

Ethan always knew Bloodborne would leave a heavy impact on Terra’s gaming landscape, but he hadn’t expected the psychological bleed to be this severe.

There was nothing more inherently fascinating and terrifying than religious fanaticism, and Yharnam was a masterclass in gothic madness cloaked in the dogmatic rituals of the Healing Church.

The overall sentiment on the forums was incredibly heavy. It wasn’t negative criticism of the game’s mechanics—it was a profoundly negative emotional feedback loop.

The players genuinely felt like they had become sick, cursed outsiders. From the exact moment they signed the contract in Iosefka’s Clinic, they were trapped in an evil, maddening cycle, constantly seeking a relief that would never come.

Ethan read through the original post and meticulously scrolled through the replies.

Thirty minutes later, he called an emergency meeting, gathering all the lead developers and executives in Sprout Studio’s main conference room.

“Have you guys read the latest forum threads?” Ethan asked, leaning forward and projecting the Steam community page onto the boardroom screen.

“I’m sure you can all see that this isn’t standard internet complaining. These aren’t mechanical critiques. This is genuine psychological fatigue. The players are experiencing emotional burnout from the sheer weight of the gothic despair we built.”

Ethan looked around the long table, waiting for his team to propose a solution.

In his previous life on Earth, gamers had consumed decades of varied media.

They were used to intense narratives and could easily decompress by tabbing out and playing a colorful indie game or a casual shooter.

Terra’s player base didn’t have that built-up psychological immunity. They were absorbing the full, unfiltered brunt of cosmic horror for the very first time.

Ethan expected a brainstorm of engagement strategies. Instead, he was met with dead silence.

Every single developer in the room was just staring at him with heavy, exhausted eyes.

“Sir…” one of the senior level designers finally spoke up, rubbing his temples. “I’m going to be honest with you. I can’t get out of the nightmare either.”

Marcus sighed heavily from the end of the table. “We’re feeling the exact same way the players are.”

“It’s still hard for me to mentally process that I actually helped build this monstrosity,” an audio engineer muttered, looking down at his coffee mug.

“When my roommate found out I worked on the Cathedral Ward, he literally cried in our living room,” another programmer confessed. “And then I just sat on the couch and cried with him.”

“…”

The mixed, exhausted voices echoed through the conference room.

Ethan was genuinely stunned. He hadn’t realized that the suffocating atmosphere of Bloodborne was not only traumatizing the player base, but it was actively inflicting a massive psychological toll on his own creators.

“Okay. I have a solution,” Ethan said, clapping his hands together to break the heavy silence. “We are going to patch in an asynchronous multiplayer networking function. We’re adding the Notebook item.”

He had suddenly remembered the iconic message system from his previous life.

During the initial development of Bloodborne on Terra, Ethan had deliberately cut the asynchronous message feature.

He had wanted the players to experience the crushing, oppressive atmosphere directly, without being influenced or distracted by glowing text on the ground.

He wanted them to piece the terrifying truth together entirely on their own.

“A Notebook function?” Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow. “You mean adding an item just so players can leave glowing text messages on the ground for each other?”

Ever since they had developed Hollow Knight, the studio had embraced the profound, isolating loneliness that defined the Soulslike genre.

The heavy, negative emotions the players were feeling right now were the ultimate proof of the game’s artistic success.

“The most merciful thing in the world, sir, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” the narrative lead suddenly chimed in, perfectly quoting the core philosophy of cosmic horror they had built the game around. “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

The narrative lead adjusted his glasses, looking at the projected screen. “When a player finally pieces together all that disparate lore, the real truth of Yharnam either drives them to madness, or forces them to flee. That crushing isolation is the entire point of the game.”

He looked back at Ethan, genuinely concerned.

“If we add an online message system where players can talk to each other… won’t that completely destroy the emotional loneliness we worked so hard to cultivate?”

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gIVe mE tHee THe STOnesS!!!!! And review.

Yes,