Blood, Dust, and Echoes: Investigating the unspoken narrative within architecture through analysis of FromSoftware Inc. and their use of architecture as a narrative device Part 2 Dissertation 2025 Isaac J.A. Stewart Queen's University Belfast | UK This dissertation, at its heart, is a love letter to both architecture and the hauntingly beautiful game worlds created by FromSoftware Inc. It emerged not from certainty but from curiosity: a slow accumulation of questions. fragments. and echoes. Much like the virtual spaces it studies, the project began in ruins, scattered ideas, uncanny thoughts, and theories only half- formed. A series of loose ends waiting to be tied together.Architecture, like narrative, leaves traces. In the hollowed keeps, scorched archives, and silent cathedrals of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, a question took root: how do built environments tell stories when no one is speaking?Drawing on textual analysis, image making, and a series of instrumental interviews with architects, designers, commentators, and scholars, the research explores how architecture functions as a narrative or storytelling device. It argues that these spaces are most meaningful when charged by proximity to characters, relics, and ritual, and the result is a spatial storytelling that relies not on explanation, but on suggestion. It is architecture as memory, as rhythm, and as silence.This project was never about finding final answers. It was about learning how to listen to a world built to be remembered, not solved. Tutor(s) Keith McAllister