Dark Souls
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This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it. |
Dark Souls is a game all about dying. Over and over and over and over. Except this time it occasionally has monstergirls.
Dark Souls is a third person RPG created by From Software and Namco Bandai Games. It is the spiritual successor of Demon's Souls (would have been sequel, but the developers lost the rights to the Demon's Souls name), and is considered by some of its playerbase to be one of the hardest games ever created, which is very wrong. Veteran players will tell you that the game is exceedingly fair (which is also wrong, because if you do everything right you can repeat it reliably every time so dying is your own fault for not doing it right, therefore it's not fair), and you only die as a result of your own fuckups. Just be ready to fuck the fuck up again and again until you learn it. And since it generally rewards skill and being a munchkin, it is popular in /v/-circles for its punishing gameplay.
For reference, imagine a fantasy tabletop game run by a Killer DM who wants your character to die if you get the least bit sloppy with your Spot checks, don't optimize your build (though that makes things easier, it's not remotely necessary), and don't carefully study the rulebooks and monsters manuals before you even start playing (or you can just learn through trial and error like you're supposed to). Oh, and other players in other groups will occasionally come to your table and roll some dice to kill you, often before you can even roll initiative, for some loot and lulz. At the same time though, the Killer DM is also fair by making your frequent deaths more of an inconvenience then it might be (loading screens, ugh) so that you can learn through trial and error if nothing else so that you do eventually beat his challenges. That is pretty much the Dark Souls experience.
Relevant to /tg/ mainly in that people sometimes throw it around as "this is how you do a grimdark setting properly", "wouldn't it be cool to set a game in this setting?" (Answer: No, because the damn thing is so vague), and "the material GMs can rip off file". It also pops up semi-regularly as the catalyst for quest threads and more than a few worldbuilding threads, most notably Lost Source.
Both Dark Souls and the younger brother Bloodborne have their own board game incarnations, with the former being a exploration dungeon crawler, and the latter a card game of collecting blood tokens and defeating monsters.
More pertinently, Fires Far Away is a homebrewed setting that owes its existence to the likes of Dark Souls, being designed for running games in a similarly-styled world.
Also explicitly said by the creator to have been heavily inspired by Berserk, be it in its aesthetic, character similarities, or just blatant references. That has to count for something.
Story
One of the most definable aspects of Dark Souls is its method of storytelling... or lack thereof. Besides the opening cutscenes of all three games, nothing is outright explained to the player. Any lore you find is either based on dialogue with NPCs or descriptions of items and weapons, and even then it's often cryptic and intentionally vague, usually left up to interpretation. As you play through the games, a bigger picture becomes painted as you gather items and converse with the world's inhabitants, with the player connecting the dots and speculating what's happened. This can feel rewarding to someone who finds satisfaction in building the world piece by piece and interpreting things their own way, but understandably infuriating to anyone who wishes for something more straightforward. Much of the lore explanations that we have are often speculative or what little we know actually did happen, which isn't much.
Dark Souls I
At the beginning of time there was shit-all but a bunch of trees and dragons. Then there was fire (no we don't know how, put your hand down), and four people crawled out of the darkness and got souls from the fire: Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight; the Witch of Izalith; Gravelord Nito; and the Furtive Pygmy. The first three of them used the power of these souls to become badasses, kicked the dragons' asses (with help from the turncoat Seath the Scaleless) and built the realm of man: Lordran. Things went pretty swell until the Witch of Izalith noticed that the fire was going out and tried to rekindle it, only for it to go wrong and become a horrifying abomination made of fire, cancer and evil. This spawned the demons in Dark Souls. In a desperate final attempt Gwyn kindled the fire with his own soul, which worked for a while. Around this time a few people became unable to die, and thus were dubbed Undead. This was swell at first until they started to go Hollow, turning into crazed murderous zombies. A search for the cure of this undeath started, and for the meantime the Undead were shipped to an insane asylum in the north.
That's where the game begins. You (your player character is called the Chosen Undead in the Dark Souls community) escape the asylum and kill a series of powerful creatures to gain their souls, and gather power to link the First Flame. That's as far as the story goes if you do exactly what you're asked to do, don't deviate off the path, and don't read any item descriptions. Without going into greater detail, there's a lot more to it but you'll have to work for it.
If you want spoilers, are too scared to play the game, or just can't be bothered to read every single item description, here's what goes down in the game itself. Spoilers straight ahead!
You, of course, escape from the Undead Asylum and find yourself in Lordran proper, that is at this point in time almost completely destroyed and overrun by the Hollow Undead and very few people remain that are actually alive. You make your way from the central hub in Firelink Shrine to ring two bells in lower Lordran in order to open a gate to Sen's Fortress. After you rang them, you will encounter one of the Primordial Serpents (hideous snake-like creatures whose chewing sounds will absolutely drive you insane), Kingseeker Frampt, who gives you the mission to retrieve the Lordvessel (kind of a gigantic golden cereal bowl) and collect the souls of the 4 afromentioned Lords: The Soul of Death from Gravelord Nito in the Tomb of Giants, the Soul of Chaos from the transformed Witch of Izalith, now called the Bed of Chaos in Lost Izalith, and two different pieces of Gwyns Soul of Light from Seath the Scaleless and the Four Kings in the New Londo Ruins.
After you make your way up Sen's Fortress and reach the seat of the gods, Anor Londo, you find Gwyns Daughter Gwynewere, the goddess of the sun, fertility and PROMOTIONS. She gives you the Lordvessel and tells you essentially the same as Kingseeker Frampt: Get those Souls and relight the First Flame. This however, is a lie: If you shoot Gwynewere with an arrow, it turns out she was an illusion and Anor Londo becomes a much darker and emptier place than before. In her stead, her brother Gywndolin, who was left behind to guard Anor Londo against enemies, attacks and calls you a Heretic.
Furthermore, in the ruins of New Londo, after you have defeated the Four Kings and not given the Lordvessel to Frampt yet, you will meet the other Primordial Serpent, Darkseeker Kaathe, who tells you a very different account of the story the NPCs you have met so far told you. Kaathe seeks to spread the influence of the Abyss or the Dark (how or if these two are separate, different entities is not entirely clear, even in the later games) in order to overthrow the gods, who he claims to be gigantic hypocrites. And he has a point: The inability of the Gods (Gwyn specifically) to just let time run its course and their refusal to give up their power led to the eventual slow decline of Lordran and its people into madmess and decay. Furthermore, he tells you that Gwyn actually fears Humans, because every human has a piece of the Dark Soul inherited from the Furtive Pygmy, (those pieces are in fact called "Humanity") that could potentially grow even more powerful than his own and he fears that they would surpass and overthrow him. The power of the First Flame and his own, however, supresses the influence of the Dark Soul, so in a desperate bid for power, he enslaved Humans, branded them with the curse of undead and indirectly forced them to keep the Fire burning. When common, enslaved human souls are offered to the First Flame and its decendants, the Bonfires you light through the game as checkpoints, a bit of Humanity goes missing every time. When a Human has no Humanity left, he goes hollow. All this is the result of Gwyn just refusing to follow the natural order and artificially prolong the Age of Fire, something that is constantly framed as something so fundamentally wrong, that it shook the very fabric of reality.
You still following? Good. Kaathe seeks to accelerate the decline of the First Flame, in order to bring about the Age of Dark, or Age of Man as its also called, to free mankind from the shackles the gods inflicted on them. Sounds great, right? Well here's the problem: Kaathe is also lying. In the DLC you go into the past, to the lost kingdom of Oolacile, where Kaathe convinced its kings and inhabitants to consume the Humanity of other people through massive sacrifices, murder orgies and the torture of the decendant of the Furtive Pygmy, Manus. This caused Manus to mutate into a hideous abomination, destroy Oolacile and kill or mutate most of its inhabitants. This and the state of New Londo, where the Four Kings struck a similar bargain with Kaathe, are good evidence that it's actually a really fucking good idea to stay away from anything related to the Dark and that Kaathe is, just like Gywndolin and Frampt, manipulating you for his own ends.
The game ends with you facing Gwyn at the Kiln of the First Flame, who at this point has gone Hollow too and you are presented with two choices: Do what Gywn did and prolong the life of the First Flame, keeping the World going for a little while longer, or refuse to light the Flame, snuff it out and become the Lord of Dark, leading Mankind into its own, but uncertain future.
Dark Souls II
Your character (a different person than the Chosen Undead from DS1) has lost their memory as part of becoming undead and travels to the land of Drangleic to get it fixed. Drangleic has been ravaged by a war with an invading army of giants, and it really shows in places. Here you meet the Emerald Herald, a top-tier waifu who tells you to gather the souls of the four lords so you can meet king Vendrick and become a "true monarch," which is more elaborated on later on in the game.
While not necessarily a bad game by itself, many consider it the worst Souls game due to its clunky controls, enemy placements, and bland-ish bosses. Others point out that it has the best PvP, build variety and magic system in the series by far. A collected edition with extra content and all the DLC called Scholar of the First Sin was released later, patching up a few problems and adding a new final boss to attempt to tie up the narrative. However, one of the most controversial changes was altering the enemy placement and behaviour - sometimes drastically - which might have been fun for older players looking for replay value but made it even more difficult for new players.
This game is generally totally forgotten about by most, but still has enough of a fanbase that mentioning it on certain boards will reliably generate pages and pages of strongly-opinionated arguments.
But one guy here actually happens to remember the story, and if you're not afraid of spoilers, here's what happens in it.
You are again a Chosen Undead of sorts, this time called the "Bearer of the Curse", tasked with finding the pieces of the four Lords and do basically the same stuff you did in the first game: Artificially prolong the life of the First Flame and the Age of Fire. However, there are a lot of twists to it. Vendrick was the great King of Drangleic and, unbeknownst to him, built his kingdom directly on the ruins of Anor Londo, and even he wasn't the first lord after Gwyn to do so. At some time, a woman called Nashandra came along and seduced Vendrick. She convinced Vendrick to attack the Giants in a war that lasted generations and reduced Drangleic to ruins. As if that wasn't bad enough, the First Flame started flickering again and the Curse of Undead spread, slowly driving the remains of Drangleic into anarchy. Desperate to find a cure for the curse, Vendrick and his brother Aldia sent the undead away in the thousands and dedicated their lifes to disturbing experiments with this one single goal. However, in time, Vendrick realized that this was all a ploy of Nashandra to seize the first flame for herself, for in truth she was a fragment of Manus from the first games DLC so in a last bid to buy his brother time, he sealed Nashandra and himself away, hoping that someone would come to kill Nashandra and rekindle the first flame or find a way to cure the curse of the undead.
Aldia on the other hand, eventually succeeded in finding a cure for himself, but this came at the cost of the lifes of thousands of people and his own humanity, only to be damned to live a torturous existence for all eternity. Aldia however also uncovered the truth of how the world works: He discovered that rekindling the First Flame doesn't save the world; it merely stalls its eventual end and damns the people in it to do this forever in a repeating cycle of a kingdom rising, the curse of the undead reappearing, rekindling the First Flame and so on. As long as this cycle keeps going, humans are doomed to eventually become hollow. In his last, desperate attempt in trying to break this cycle, he artificially created a young girl from Dragon DNA (Try not to think to hard about it), called the Emerald Herald who will guide the Bearer of the Curse (that is, you) to become the True Monarch, who will either rekindle the Flame, plunge the world into darkness or seek a way out.
Dark Souls III
The fire is going out yet again, but it's so terribly weak now that it might not even last another cycle. In desperation, the flame uses the little power it has in a last ditch plan. This sees the rise of the Unkindled, those Undead who tried but failed to link the fire back in a previous age and were turned to ash. In practice they're pretty much the true undead. Now the Unkindled seek to gather the resurrected Lords of Cinder, four powerful badasses who did pull it off back in their day but don't feel like trying it again. So it's your job to find them, kick their asses and use the cinders you take from them to link the fire yet again, or let it fade away completely, and so the Age of Darkness finally happens. Whatever is your decision, you are aided in it by the Fire Keeper of the Firelink Shrine, which is your hub world of the game where you can buy stuff, level up and advance the plot. Unlike the previous games, there is a third option: scattering the sparks of the First Flame amongst all of humanity. The Dark will then come and you will be the Lord of Hollows but the sparks will remain in everyone and as the human population increases the sparks of humanity will basically replace the fire and so the Dark will be slowly reduced as humanity rises again and Light returns to the world in a distant future. This also has made it somewhat popular to use in various Dark Souls crossover fanfictions as superpowers (such as aura in RWBY) can easily be explained by these sparks of the First Flame and also tying the Ashen One main character to the crossed series.
Due to it coming off the heels of Bloodborne, it takes many notes from it's cousin; a hub world, faster combat, and several other mechanical features. The game itself is remarkably Grimdark and depressing, both in tone as well as in the story.
Here's the backstory in detail.
At this point in time, the cycle Aldia wanted to end has gone on for so long that the fabric of reality itself is slowly falling apart and different dimensions start to clash together like glaciers grinding against the earth. Different people of all manner of kingdoms eventually lit the fire, and the royal family of the Kingdom of Lothric eventually set itself up to produce people spefically for the purpose of rekindling the fire, culminating in the young prince Lothric. Lothric however, read about Kaathe, the Dark and Aldias discoveries in forbidden archives, and when it was time to rekindle the first flame again, he refused to do so, choosing to wait out the end of the world instead. This enacted a contingency plan of sorts, ressurrecting the Lords of Cinder, powerful entities and individuals that managed or were convinced to rekindle the flame in the past, to rekindle the flame in Lothrics stead. However, like Lothric, all but one, Ludleth of Courland, refused to take up their thrones and the other three, Aldrich, Saint of the Deep, Farrons undead Legion, the Abyss Watchers and Yhorm the Giant made the choice Lothric made: Accept their fate und let the world end.
You make your way through the ruins of nearly every location of the first two games in some form or another but everything is decidedly bleak and horrific. Eventually, you face the Avatar of all past Lords of Cinder and face one of four decisions: Link the flame, Snuff out the flame and put the World to rest, usurp the flame and become the solution Aldia so desperately looked for, or simply take the flame for your own gains. Like a dick.
The game drives the point home that this may well be the very last time the flame could be linked, as all of the Lord of Cinders are horrible people that were appointed out of desperation; Aldrich was a cleric who, after a fateful encounter with the Dark, began cannibalizing his fellow priests and faithful. This went so far that his bloated body decayed into undead, but still conscient slurry. His first follower, Sulyvahn, founded the church of the deep as a means to seize power in Aldrichs native land, the hidden realm of Irithyll in a series of deeds so absolutely dispicable that they would give Honsou a run for his money (gave Aldrich thousands of people to devour, raped and enslaved Yorshka, Gywns bastard daughter, fed Gwyns son Gyvndolin to Aldrich just moments before you arrive in ruined Anor Londo, corrupted the remaining gods to become his servants and many, many other things) and to make Aldrich a Lord of Cinder, in the hopes that this will secure his power for all eternity. As far als Aldrich is concerned, he just really wants to eat everyone as long as he still able to.
The Abyss Watchers were an order of human knights descended from one of Gwyns lieutenants, called Artorias, dedicated to the eradication of the Dark by the most literal means possible, they killed, murdered and burned uncounted millions of people and destroyed entire kingdoms at the slightest hints of corruption. The collective order was made a Lord of Cinder (combining the souls of its hundereds of members into one) as a means to escape the curse of undead so that they could continue their fight against the dark, but their process of resurrection got corrupted by said dark and they are all trapped in an endless, never endling battle to the death in their keep, unable to escape.
Yhorm the Giant was a king who started to care about his subjects as time went on but became increasingly depressed when he lost someone dear to him and swore to defend his unthankful subjects to the last. He was made a Lord of Cinder when the Profaned Flame, a corrupted fire born from the Dark, appeared as a means to stop it. As it turned out, it was all for naught; his people still hated him after his death, his kingdom, the Profaned Capital, was destroyed and everyone he tried to protect was killed.
As you can see, these people were the absolute bottom of the barrel; Aldrich became a Lord purely out of selfish reasons, the Abyss Watchers were in an eternal deadlock and Yhorm simply didn't care anymore. As if that wasn't enough, the "Link the fire" ending hints that the fire has grown so weak that it won't even survive another link. Luckily, (or unluckily) a group of followers of Kaathe, called the Sable Church, seemed to have found the answer Aldia from the second game so desperately looked for: To usurp the flame and elevate the Ashen One (you) to the Lord of Hollows to lead Mankind into its very own destiny. This does require a lot of preparation; you need to become a hollow yourself (Unkindled are different from regular undead), sacrifice a loved one and then defeat the Soul of Cinder.
Speaking of the Sable Church, the first DLC centers around the story of the first of the three Sisters who founded it; disillusioned with their cause and with no hope, she retreated into the Painted World of Ariandelle, which has its own predicament: It starts to rot. Normally, the guardian of the painting, Father Ariandelle would use his version of the Lordvessel to burn the entire painting and the world within to the ground, but the Sister, called Friede, convinced him to just let the rot happen. You get sucked into the painting by the Slave Knight Gael who seeks to help the girl who originally created the Painted World to create a new one, which leads into the second DLC.
In the second DLC, you look for Gael who went missing in the Ringed City, a city that Gwyn gave to the first humans as a token of gratitude for their help in the fight against the dragons, but in reality was little more than a fancy prison at the edge of the world. Gael was looking for the Dark Soul itself so that the Girl may finish a second painting that save everyone else in Lothric. When you meet Gael, so much time has passed that everything has sunk into dust. Dark Souls 3, and the trilogy ends in the most Dark Souls-esque way you can even think of: Two nobodys, fighting at the end of the world, over something that barely even exists anymore and doesn't even matter.
Demon's Souls
Technically the first in the series, since Dark Souls was supposed to be a sequel to this. Notably this game actually explains the story a bit more so you know what's actually happening.
The Kingdom of Boletaria is engulfed in a deep fog and the fog is slowly spreading. Nobody knows why and all who go into the fog never return. Eventually one of the kings knights, Vallarfax of the Twin Fangs, manages to find his way out and tells that King Allant XII has awoken the Old One, and now demons have overrun the land, stealing peoples souls and driving them into madness, with the fog marking how far they can go. He also tells how awesome and powerful the souls of the demons are, and so a bunch adventurers, including you, set out to Boletaria to kill demons and find a way to stop the fog. You eventually die at the end of the tutorial and wake up in the Nexus, your hub world, where a lady with pancakes stiched on her face candle wax covering her eyes tells that your soul has been bound to the Nexus.
From there you wander throughout the land, seeking a way to stop the fog, whilst going through the five levels.
Bloodborne
While it was made by From Software as a spinoff to the Souls series, fans are still divided on whether or not it is officially a Souls game (but it deserves an honorable mention). Bloodborne changes the tone from the previous Souls games' Berserk-inspired medieval setting to a dark, gothic world which draws heavy influences from H.P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker. The biggest differences in gameplay is the inclusion of guns to replace shields from Dark Souls, both as a (mostly shitty) ranged weapon and as a parry tool. Yes, you read that right: the Hunters in Yharnam, through painstaking research and unflinching dedication, have discovered that shooting somebody in the face is liable to break their concentration. This is what the cutting edge of national security looks like in Yharnam.
The player takes on the role of a foreigner who's come to Yharnam seeking its special healing blood, said to cure all wounds. One blood transfusion later, and you're plunged into a waking nightmare where horrific beasts roam the streets and hunters... er, hunt them. Upon your inevitable demise (or upon activating a mysterious lantern, if you're smart or talented enough to outrun or defeat the various horrors of Yharnam bare-handed), you are transported to the Hunter's Dream, a hub world for every hunter that partakes in the Hunt. The Dream's inhabitants consist of a waifu-tier Doll that helps level up the player, an old man in a wheelchair named Gehrman, and the freakish but reliable Messengers, who sell items and deliver messages. In contrast to Dark Souls' more cautious playstyle, Bloodborne encourages aggressive, proactive action. You are frequently outnumbered, enemies are less susceptible to being split off individually than previous Souls games, and you can regain lost health by damaging enemies within a small time frame. This encourages you to go on the offensive as much as possible, as well as putting enemies down as quickly as possible. Many characters and factions also differ in their nature from Dark Souls as well. Whereas many characters in Dark Souls, even the villianous ones, are more or less victims or circumstance, Bloodborne has no shortage of absolutely horrible people. The main faction that drove most of the events in the story (as explained in the spoiler section), the Healing Chruch, has to be one of the most evil factions ever devised. Whereas Dark Souls characters exist in varying shades of grey, nearly everyone in Bloodborne is evil in some way or form, including the player character.
Whilst initially a fairly conventional gothic horror setting, the game gradually morphs into a Lovecraftian cosmic nightmare. One of the in-game currencies - insight - is gained upon interacting with various characters, seeing horrific monsters, and consuming eldritch knowledge from the trepanned skulls of madmen. As your insight increases, you start noticing things that weren't visible before, like lanterns being covered with eyes or huge multi-limbed creatures perching on church spires (and yeah, they were always there). It also means the local shoggoth can blow your head off more easily. In a pretty big twist to the usual Lovecraft formula, the religion worshiping the Great Old One analogues are actually the overwhelming majority in Yarnham, not a hidden cult plotting in the shadows (although there are a few of those as well). It garnered largely positive reviews, both from Souls fans and new players alike.
Here's the backstory in detail.
Hundreds of years ago, a civilization called the Pthumerians found the Old Ones, godlike cosmic beings who they worshipped as gods. Their late queen Yharnam had a particularly strong connection to them, but things started to go awry when she got pregnant with the Great One Mergo and the Pthumerians sealed themselves into the ruins of their civilization.
Centuries later, a group scholars found said ruins under the Village of Yharnam and traces of a substance called the Old Blood (basically a mix of bodily fluids produced by the Great Ones). To study the ruins, a guy called Master Willem founded the academy of Bygrenwerth to research and try to understand the cosmisc lore the Pthumerians left behind, but he remained highly suspisous of the Old Blood and advised against its use, preferring to gain insight instead of actively experimenting with the stuff the Old Ones left behind. His pupil Laurence however couldn't care less about Willems fears and used the Old Blood to develop Blood Ministrations with the help of The Choir (a sect within Byrgenwerth that worshipped the Old One Ebritas that lived in the ruins); essentially meaning dissolving some of the Old Blood in regular human blood or something similar and inject the stuff directly into your veins. This had the immediate effect of curing any disease whatsoever, opened access to magic and arcane secrets and made the Choir, by this point in time known as the Healing Church famous and brought them and the town of Yharnam fame and fortune.
Laurence and the Healing Church did this not out of altruism however. They hoped that the widespread use of the Old Blood would eventually elevate mankind into a higher state of being and bring them closer to the Old Ones. As it turns out, Willem was right and the abuse of the Old Blood turned out to be extremely dangerous; every time an Old One tries to procrate in a cosmic event, users of the Old Blood would turn into werewolf-like beasts. To keep the connection between Old Blood usage and the beastly affliction a secret, the Church found an answer in the proposal of the bounty hunters Gehrman and Ludwig; simply murder everyone who turns into a beast. After a series of events the majority of the population of Yharnam was transformed into beasts and the hunters themselves also succumbed to the curse. It was then that Gehrman, in a desperate attempt to still do his job, was picked up by an illusive Old One called the Moon Presence and transported to the Hunters Dream, a pocket dimension of sorts where he would send new Hunters to stop the birth of new Old Ones.
Enter the third faction of the Healing Church, the School of Mensis. The School of Mensis under the guidance of Laurences Protege Micolash, tried to create methods of communicating the Old Ones with dreams. To this end, they abducted a lot of people and did horrifying experiments on them that put the Nazis to shame, resulting in the creation of a being called the Celestial Emissary. Encouraged further by this success, they found one third of Queen Yharnams umbilical chord and used it to ressurrect the infant Old One Mergo and have an audience with him. However this failed spectacularly and they were all killed. Only Micolash survived and was trapped in a nightmare of his own creation.
The player arrives in Yharnam with an undefined disease that needs Blood Ministration to be cured; this however causes them to get trapped in Yharnam after they pass out and get transported to the Hunters Dream, where Gehrman gives them gear and tells the player to go out and hunt the beasts. Eventually, this escalates into a fully fledged attempt at stopping the Old One Mergo from emerging, which would likely transform almost all humans that are still left into beasts.
The game has three possible endings: After you kill Mergo, you get back to the Hunters Dream, where Gehrman offers you to kill you in the dream. You will wake up, forget everything and go about your day, being none the wiser about the cosmic knowledge you have gained. If you refuse his offer, he will attack you. When you defeat him, his elusive master, the Moon Presence, descends from the sky and binds you to it; with you effectively replacing Gehrman and continuing its bidding. The secret ending is unlocked if you manage to find the three thirds of Yharnams Umbilical Chord and, erm.... consume them (yuck) and kill Gehrman. The Moon Presence will try to embrace you, but you resist and kill it as well. As the dust settles, you realize that you have, in fact achieved what Willem and Laurence didn't: You became an infant Old One.
The DLC The old Hunters details the events surronding the experiments the Church and the Schools of Mensis conducted as part of their efforts to create something to communicate with Ebrietas, the aftermath of the death of the Old One Kosm, who was worshipped by a fishing hamlet "Shadow over Innsmouth"-style which lead to the Church genociding through the entire village in search of insight.
Sekiro
In another departure from the traditional Souls formula, Sekiro placed players in the sandals of the imaginatively named Wolf, a one-armed shinobi tasked with protecting his young (as in, literally prepubescent) lord from a variety of different enemies. Nominally set in the Sengoku period of Japan, there are plenty of mythological elements in addition to historical reproduction. The gameplay is paced very different from previous Souls games, relying on perfect timing to parry enemy blows and break their posture, rendering them more vulnerable to attack and giving you the ability to finish them off. You have fewer weapons at your disposal (technically just your sword) but a variety of tools that can all be used and upgraded as soon as you find them. You can also come back from the dead without going back to the bonfire-analogue, although usually only once, there's a light smattering of stealth elements (you are a ninja, after all), the boss fights are even tougher, and the story carries more samurai cliches than you can shake a fedora at.