Kotaku investigates Bloodborne’s “playable werewolf” rumour ahead of strategy guide release

I’ve seen a lot of chatter lately that indicates the werewolf connection in Bloodborne for PS4 is deeper than I wrote about last week, and in a gargantuan Kotaku post Patricia Hernandez catalogs the evidence. The conclusion: even though you’re killing werewolves in the game, you’re probably a werewolf yourself, too.

In-game dialog, items that refer to “temporary transformation”, an unexplained player stat called “Beasthood” and easy-to-miss details on character models have all led to speculation that the character you play in the game suffers from the same illness that transformed many of Yharnam’s citizens into werewolves (although the game refers to them as “beasts”). If that’s true, the difference between your character and the beasts you slaughter seems to be that you’re able to control your illness and only partially transform.

Bloodborne - Beasthood

To support this theory, Hernandez has collected a ton of community-sourced screenshots, gameplay footage and transcripts of comments by insiders. The results are intriguing, but suitably inconclusive for a game known for its difficulty, secrets and dense mythology. The whole thing might be the artifact of an abandoned feature, the seeds of a DLC story to be released later, or just something designed to make people like me write 300-word blog posts about games they don’t own on Friday nights.

I’ll probably never get a chance to play Bloodborne since I don’t own a PS4, but I love the idea that a game this popular might hold secrets that can withstand intense investigation by such a dedicated audience. The release of the official strategy guide next Tuesday might solve this mystery for us, especially given some of the comments attributed in the Kotaku piece to one of the guide’s authors. Before that happens, take a look at the evidence and draw your own conclusions – it’s more fun that way!