Ongoing GTA 6 leaks might be the biggest gaming news story happening right now, but there’s something much more important to discuss: Zork. We finally know what From Software’s new Switch 2 exclusive, The Duskbloods, actually is, and among the many details we’ve gotten is a reveal of some of the game’s playable characters, known as Bloodsworn. One, in particular, stands out. I’ll let you take a guess who:
That’s Zork on the right, a man in an exceedingly pear-like diving suit who wields a hunk of undersea cable as a weapon. He can also howl, fire a cannon carried on his back, and launch his entire body at enemies, which can actually knock enemy players off the map in the ultimate form of humiliation.
Despite loving lil’ weirdos, in using character creators, I often fall short of making something interesting; my Commander Shepard’s not so different from the one on the front of the box. And, so often, premade characters in games are basically white bread–acceptable in their generic, mass-appeal kind of way. So to see Zork, who looks decidedly uncool in a traditional sense, available as one of the six characters in The Duskblood’s network test is thrilling to me. (I’m also tickled that the names of others range from something as simple as Albert to Senator Samir Patres, a name I will never abbreviate or shorten under any circumstances.)
In speaking with From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki recently, our own Jake Dekker had to ask about Zork. “There’s always going to be your traditional characters, especially in a vampire-like game,” Miyazaki said. “You have your traditional Victorian Gothic characters, and then you have other characters that are a little bit more off to the side with Asian influences [like Trang Lanh]. I think Zork is basically as far off to the side as you can get, where he’s a bit of a wild card. It’s always fun to have characters like that, and there’s always people who like characters like that.”
“I really want the multiplayer landscape of this game [to] almost feel like a festival,” he continued. “You have all these different kinds of characters, they feel and look very different from each other, and [they all come] together and it [feels chaotic]. Zork is definitely a piece of that–just a weird guy who’s in the midst of it, right?”
We also got to the bottom of that beak thing on the front of Zork’s mask, and is appropriate for a game about vampires, it is indeed for drinking blood.
“[I]f you ever win with Zork, you’ll get a cutscene that will probably reveal that a little bit more,” Miyazaki explained. “[His] beak thing extends like a straw, and sucks [blood] up like a mosquito. That’s probably another Ultraman reference of some sort, some sort of monster.”
Miyazaki also noted that Zork is one of his favorite characters to play as in the network test version of the game. Based on the internet’s reaction to him so far, I expect he won’t be alone in that.