Chapter 91 - #91: Conscience is Really Not Much

“God damn it! Who the fuck left this twisted message right here?!” Zoe yelled, realizing she had gullibly fallen for another player’s trap.

“You guys are so freaking annoying!” Zoe wiped fake, frustrated tears from her eyes as she respawned back at the lantern.

She began the long, agonizing trek back to the exact spot where the glowing message had murdered her.

Even though her gaming skills had become highly proficient, getting sent all the way back to the spawn point still managed to break her mental defenses.

She finally reached the edge of the cliff, glared at the glowing message on the ground, and angrily clicked the ‘Fine’ upvote button.

“Pfft… hahahaha.” Immediately after rating the message, Zoe burst out laughing, actual tears of frustration still hanging in the corners of her eyes.

[ N_______r: She’s literally losing her mind. She upvoted it so it would heal the troll who killed her! OscaR: She’s just imagining the next person getting baited by the high rating LMAO kotvslape: True villain arc activated. Nheka: Victim’s normal operation. Passing the trauma forward. Vantas: Honestly, some people just want to watch the world burn. ]

Since the Notebook function went live, Zoe had seen countless bizarre, cryptic messages scattered across Yharnam.

Every single time she saw a message that was obviously trying to swindle players, her first instinct was absolute disbelief.

For instance, she never believed the messages claiming [Treasure ahead] when they were placed right next to bottomless pits.

But then she would inspect the message, and a glowing blue phantom of the original author would materialize, sprinting right off the cliff without a second of hesitation.

Seeing the blue phantom plummet decisively into the abyss, her gamer brain would kick in. Is there actually a secret ledge down there? What if there’s a hidden baby Great One?

But as long as she entertained the mentality of “just giving it a try,” gravity would deliver a painful, fatal blow.

“Chat, I literally can’t help it! You know how it is!” Zoe yelled, slapping her desk. “It’s that specific mentality where you know with ninety-nine percent certainty that you’re going to die, but you still have to try it just in case!”

“And these people are so incredibly evil! Nova’s games really attract the absolute worst scumbags from all over the world!”

“You guys in chat are just as bad! You were spamming ‘DO IT’ even though you knew it was a fake wall!” Zoe laughed loudly, cursing out her viewers.

The chat eagerly played along with the music.

[ knapp: I know exactly what you mean. I do the exact same thing in my playthrough. Deepwood: The bloodstains are the worst. I see a death replay, I watch a red phantom get brutally ambushed, I tell myself to be careful… and then I walk forward and die the exact same way. The bloodstain isn’t a warning, it’s a forecast. NicoGab: I heard from a buddy working at Sprout Studio that Nova only added the Notebook function because he saw the massive negative psychological feedback from the player base. ImAGamerGal: Wait, is that true? I was genuinely getting depressed playing this, but after the messages dropped, the game really felt inexplicably lighter. ]

Zoe glanced at the chat on her second monitor.

When she read the message about the psychological feedback, she was genuinely stunned.

If no one had explicitly pointed it out, she wouldn’t have realized it.

But ever since the Notebook patch went live, playing the game genuinely felt a lot less suffocating.

The difficulty of the game hadn’t changed at all.

The oppressive, terrifying atmosphere was still fully intact.

You could still immerse yourself deeply into the tragic lore.

But the subtle glowing text on the ground served as a constant, comforting reminder: You are just playing a game. You are not actually trapped in this nightmare.

“Sure enough, absolutely nothing Sprout Studio does is pointless,” Zoe muttered to herself, her respect for the developer deepening.

When the Notebook function first dropped, a lot of the hardcore, veteran Hunters had actually frowned.

They felt that the new players needed to experience the crushing, helpless loneliness of Yharnam entirely on their own, just as they had.

But as the mix of malicious traps and genuinely helpful tips began to flood the cobblestones, the veterans who had initially dismissed the feature couldn’t help but join the carnival.

There’s an old saying: the things you lacked in your youth will trap you for a lifetime, but the fleeting moments of your old age will wake you up.

Every veteran player had walked through the brutal, blood-soaked rain of Yharnam alone.

But when they saw the new players getting drenched in the exact same storms, they couldn’t help but leave a tip to hold an umbrella over their heads.

Through the Notebook, the players truly felt like they had become the Old Hunters, guiding the new generation.

It allowed them to be fully immersed in the game, while simultaneously grounding them in reality.

That little notebook and those glowing messages acted as a window connecting Yharnam to the real world. It was a subtle, brilliant way of breaking the fourth wall.

In traditional media, the fourth wall is the conceptual barrier between the actors on a stage and the audience.

In a naturalistic play, the actors pretend the audience doesn’t exist, and the audience simply watches the plot unfold without interacting.

But when a player became too immersed in Bloodborne, unable to pull themselves out of the psychological horror, the glowing messages acted as a lifeline, waking them up.

After discovering this design secret, Zoe immediately picked up her smartphone and called Chron, who she knew was currently streaming his own Bloodborne playthrough.

“Chron, you idiot, I just saw on Twitter that you got baited by a message and jumped off a cliff in the Nightmare Frontier! How could you let these scumbags lie to the best pro gamer on the platform?” Zoe teased loudly. While talking, she pulled up Chron’s stream on her browser.

Chron burst out laughing over the phone line. “Okay, some of the comments are incredibly twisted, but most of them are genuinely well-intentioned!”

“I just got some insider info. Do you know why the Notebook was actually patched into the game?” she asked mysteriously.

“Why?” Chron paused his game, leaving his character standing in the Hunter’s Dream.

He had just assumed the feature was added for community engagement; he hadn’t thought about it on a deeper level.

“Remember that massive Reddit thread a few days ago? The one where thousands of players said they were having genuine psychological breakdowns from the lore?” Zoe said, her voice dropping into a serious, emotional tone. “Word from the inside at Sprout Studio is that Nova developed the Notebook specifically to pull those players out of their depression.”

“Isn’t that absolutely insane?” Zoe couldn’t help but share her newfound respect. “Look around the forums now. All the players who said they were losing their minds have completely recovered.”

“Wait, really?” Chron let out a light gasp. He quickly glanced over at his own stream chat.

The screen was already overflowing with agreement.

[ Senpai_for_hire : It’s true! I was in that thread. The Notebook completely saved my mental health. Vonhjin: A Hunter is never alone! sooman: Secret ahead, therefore try jumping! ]

Reading the short, chaotic texts scrolling across his screen, Chron could genuinely feel the shift in the community’s mood.

He never expected that such a small, seemingly simple asynchronous setting could have such a monumental impact on the global player base.

It was just a few preset words on the ground, but it managed to weave millions of isolated emotions together.

“Honestly, from now on, whenever Nova drops a new game, I’m not even reading the genre or the marketing tags. I’m just blindly pre-ordering it,” Chron declared, waving his hand at his webcam.

“There are really not many developers left in the industry who care this deeply about the player’s emotional state. Look at Titan Interactive. Their games get completely blasted for predatory mechanics, they refuse to fix game-breaking bugs, and all they do is push a new set of 20$ skins to cover it up.”

“You’re totally right. He absolutely designs his games with his heart,” Zoe agreed over the phone, before letting out a wry chuckle. “But let’s be real… the man still doesn’t have much of a conscience.”

Chron laughed in tacit agreement.

Nova’s game design was undeniably arrogant, pushing unfriendliness to the absolute extreme.

New players would always have their confidence violently crushed under the weight of his mechanical destruction.

But at the exact same time, he used brilliant, shining details to completely change your prejudice against him.

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Where are the stones! Where are the stonesSS!!! God, no!!! Where are the stoness!!!!