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From Software’s Hidden Theme

The fear of invasion

Leo Cookman
Counter Arts
10 min readJan 18, 2025

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Still from ‘Shadow of the Erdtree’, copyright From Software Inc.

A lot of ink has been spilled about From Software’s most popular games. A lot. Whether it is the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, Sekiro or Elden Ring there are endless articles, lore videos or video essays explaining and exploring the history, story and symbolism of these video games. It is its own cottage industry. For my money, the best video on Elden Ring is Morbid Zoo’s brief yet comprehensive look at what makes that game so special. But despite this forensic examination of the gaming world’s most influential series, there lacks a more gestalt analysis of the developer’s — and, perhaps, more explicitly, the most popular games’ director, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s — underlying, thematic preoccupations.

There are thousands of think pieces about recurring themes in the mechanical aspects of the games; the ‘hardcore’ difficulty, the much vaunted ‘verticality’ of their level design, and the story being told largely through item descriptions and environmental storytelling. There is not, however, so much critical analysis of those games intent that comes along with these mechanical aspects. “The mechanics are the message” as the saying goes, so what do these things tell us? And what are the recurring elements within each game that can help us decode this message?

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Counter Arts
Counter Arts

Published in Counter Arts

The (Counter)Cultural One-Stop for Nonfiction on Medium… incorporating categories for: ‘Art’, ‘Culture’, ‘Equality’, ‘Photography’, ‘Film’, ‘Mental Health’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.

Leo Cookman
Leo Cookman

Written by Leo Cookman

Peripatetic Writer. “Time’s Lie” out now from Zero Books.

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