ENTRY 13: THE GARDEN OF EYES

Compared to other monster-riddled horror games, Bloodborne is actually a little light on the presence of Arthropoda...but you'd almost never know it, because they made sure every insect-like or arachnid-like creature in the game would really count for something, and one of the first you're likely to run into even fills multiple buggy roles at once!

The beautifully designed and gloriously named Garden of Eyes has a human body, but weighed down by an enormous, blackish, brain-like head completely covered in glazed-over, yellowish eyeballs up to the size of grapefruit. A tangle of extremely long, thin insect legs erupt from its hunched back, dangling crookedly behind it as it still relies on its human appendages for its mobility. It also has a pair of beautiful green-hued butterfly wings, not large enough for it to actually fly, and a winding, segmented tail kind of like a chitinous spinal cord.

Every wiki description of this monster will talk about it being spider-like or part-spider, but the first thing its legs bring to my mind are in fact those of butterflies, or the unrelated crane flies, which are Diptera. In fact, there are quite a few flying insects with extremely twiggy limbs! The wings are a sort that only Lepidoptera ever have, which I think is a pretty cool choice for a monster you might expect to have less "pretty" elements, and the head, while not really resembling any actual organism, ends up evoking a fly with its large size, bulbous shape and ocular visual focus.

The creature does, however, carry a little stone ball in one hand with a carving of a spider on it. We have no idea what this object is, it doesn't appear anywhere else, it isn't used for anything, and the creature doesn't even let go of it when it dies!

Obviously all this means something, but this may also be one of the most enigmatic creatures in Bloodborne. From its name, its presence in Byrgenworth and the fact that it often carries a "sedative" item, we can guess this must have been the result of experimentation with insight, either an attempt to evolve a human into something more perceptive, or more grotesquely, to create a supply of eyeballs for the researchers to harvest. An eyeball bank. Or, I guess, an eyeball garden! But what IS the significance of the spider carving? It could actually reference several different beings in Bloodborne!

There's tragically little we can say in the way of lore here, and no remarkable secrets or twists to really unravel, but the Garden is definitely one of the coolest designs in the game, interestingly combines aspects from several others will be seeing, and with all its big googly-eyes wobbling around, it's by far the most deranged looking menace most players will have seen thus far.




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