Lady Maria is a mysterious figure in Bloodborne. She appears front-and-centre on the cover for The Old Hunters DLC, but when you finally meet her, she's not exactly in the condition you might expect. Data digger Lance McDonald has figured out why.

Since the release of FromSoftware's Demon's Souls in 2009, it and its spiritual successors — the Dark Souls trilogy and Bloodborne — have acquired reputations that are both built on the games themselves and players' responses to them. Demon's Souls and its descendants are as dependent upon their mechanics, level design, and art direction for effect as they are upon narrative obfuscation, and audiences have happily engaged this by spending years picking at details to assemble interpretive webs.

Bloodborne is a game filled with characters whose tragic histories intertwine with the game world around them, and the tale of Ludwig is one of the saddest ones. A wordless comic by Reddit user yutacustoms conveys it better than I can.

The final version of Bloodborne featured coldblood, what were essentially portable blood echoes. In the alpha build of Bloodborne, these items were "fresh livers" - and bosses would have dropped special livers of their own.

The practice of decorating graduation caps is often seen as a rite of passage for incoming graduates of universities and (now, increasingly) high schools in the US. Students often spend months contemplating what they will include on their graduation caps on graduation day.

This year, many chose to adorn their caps with inspiring quotes, memes and song lyrics. Others chose to incorporate elements from games that they love or find inspiring. Here are some of the stand-out gamer grad caps from this year's graduating class.

Over the last few years, I've started playing more difficult video games. Unfortunately, tough video games tend to include tough boss fights, and I don't really like tough boss fights.

Bloodborne's Chalice Dungeons are a lot to dig through, and people have discovered some strange things in their game files. Now data digger Lance McDonald has found several boss rush arenas that never made it into the final game.

You know how you tell yourself you're gonna finally try some new restaurants, then a week later you're back at the same pizza place you always go to? I've been doing that same thing, except with Bloodborne.

I love Souls games, but until recently, I hadn't played much of the first Dark Souls. That's changed with Dark Souls: Remastered, and it's been a fascinating experience.

A modder has extracted a map of Bloodborne's Upper Cathedral Ward from Dark Souls Remastered and opened it within Grand Theft Auto V. Now you can drive a car in it.

When Bloodborne first launched, players quickly discovered a door at the end of the bridge behind the Cleric Beast. There's no way to open the door, but the alpha version of Bloodborne shipped with a prompt telling users they could only open it from one side.

So, what's behind the door?

Return To Yharnam is a Bloodborne community event that is happening right now. It's all about bringing long-term fans back into the game, and people are really getting into it.

From Software's Souls games and Bloodborne have online co-operation, but some areas become more abandoned as time goes on. Return To Yharnam is a community event set to start on March 10 that's working to revitalize Bloodborne's online world of bell-ringing hunters.

The beasts howl, and the hunt is on. That's how the worst nights begin Yharnam, the world of Bloodborne. And as the game illustrates, and as Ales Kot and Piotr Kowalski wisely remember in their tie-in comic, the worst nights in Yharnam never end.

Aussie developer and From Software fan Lance McDonald has had a ball of a time messing around with alpha versions of Bloodborne. So far, he's recovered deleted NPCs, brought cut enemies back to life, and scoured areas of Yharnam that were closed entirely.

And just like a set of steak knives, of course there's more.

People are still finding stuff in Bloodborne. It never stops.

It's one thing to discover all the bits and bobs in Bloodborne that ended up on the cutting room floor. But what are those characters like patched into the game, running around in the flesh?

Bloodborne's chalice dungeons offer hundreds of thousands of possible crypts to explore. Dedicated players have found lost enemies and keep looking for more. Thanks to dataminers searching the game's files, a new group of dungeons have been found containing developer test areas and unused bosses.

Bloodborne's Lovecraftian setting is full of creative enemies, from multi-eyed brain beasts to half-flayed wolf demons. It's exciting to think about what creatures may still be lurking in the game years later or lost on the cutting room floor. The game's files recently ended up in the hands of dataminers, one of which decided to show off some of the game's cut monsters.