This entry has gone up the third Wednesday of October 2023, and you all know what the third Wednesday of every October is, don't you? It's Hagfish Day, of course! The perfect day to discuss Bloodborne's Nautical setting! This is the final area added by the Old Hunters DLC, and if you have that DLC, you can tackle it from fairly early on in the game, so I felt it fair to place its unique creatures roughly mid-way into our review series. The lore it provides, in my opinion, even feels quite natural as buildup to what you'll learn as you play the rest of the game anyhow!

The Fishing Hamlet is a foggy coastal port where you'll find exactly the kind of ghastly fish people you should have expected. Hunched, soggy, covered in barnacles, they are unsurprisingly all that remains of the hamlet's human populace, but why did they transform into something so different from the beasts?

There are also terrifying giant fishmen, whose blind and bulbous heads kind of evoke a beluga whale, but the many rows of teeth crowding their gaping maws are more akin to a shark.

Even the dogs have gone all fishy! They behave like the hounds encountered elsewhere around Yharnam, but their heads are similar to those of the deep sea dragonfishes, viperfishes and loosejaws!

The piscoids are all well and good, but they all just kind of serve as more nautical takes on enemy types you've already seen. Not so for the hamlet's Snail Women. They're white, slimy, stretchy ladies with large, coiled, barnacle-encrusted shells, more dangerous than you might expect from their pitiful appearance. Their shells are completely immovable to the player, and they're one of the only enemies in the game with a total immunity to any damage type, in this case electrical.

There are also snail women without shells, revealing their long, tapering gastropod tails, who can move much faster and are much more aggressive!

Another funny thing about the snailadies is that you'll get an early preview of them in the Hunter's Nightmare, when one of them surprisingly falls out of the sky and dies. Once you're in the hamlet itself, you can actually see Yharnam through the ocean, implying that these dream realms exist as physical layers above one another.

Almost all snail women are, importantly, concentrated in the same cave area, one where the entire ground is blanketed in little white slugs! Obviously not just any slugs, from what we know of this setting. In fact, these specific slugs are thought to be parasites whose arrival ties in to exactly what happened at the hamlet, and now the little mollusks are the community's entire source of food and even fuel; you'll see them burning like candles in the port's lanterns, and there are explosive barrels full of them ready to go who knows where.

It would seem that the snail women have a specific role in farming these mollusks, but where did those come from to begin with, and how do they tie in with everything else? We'll actually talk about that in a later entry, including the final boss of the hamlet. For now, we'll be returning to the main game's content, and if you want more fishy stuff for Hagfish Day (or any day) I also uploaded this entry alongside a little page about some deep sea fish toys I've had for most of my life and my review of the anime series Deca-Dence!

On a final note, a few have pointed out that this is actually the hardest area in the game and that its boss is the last you could ever possibly face. While that is true, it's still also true that you can visit it early. Never said you'd survive!