What is Déraciné?

A quiet fairy tale in virtual reality, made between Dark Souls III and Sekiro, the studio’s gentlest game.

Déraciné was released in 2018 for the PlayStation 4 with PlayStation VR, a collaboration between FromSoftware and Sony’s Japan Studio, directed by Miyazaki. The player is a faerie in a boarding school where time has stopped, moving unseen among the children, piecing their story together by touching the frozen moments of their lives. There is no combat to speak of, no difficulty discourse, none of the catalogue’s famous furniture, it is the director of Dark Souls making a small, sad, gentle thing with the same hands.

It belongs in this archive as the counterweight: proof that the method, fragmented story, environmental evidence, a world explained by its objects, is a storytelling preference, not a difficulty fetish. The same fragments, arranged for tenderness.

Déraciné key art, hands holding a fairy over a book — **DÉRACINÉ · 2018** The key art of Déraciné (2018), FromSoftware’s PlayStation VR fairy tale — the studio’s quietest game, made with Japan Studio between Bloodborne and Sekiro.

THE QUIET WORK

Déraciné · 2018

A Japan Studio collaboration

Like Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne before it: when FromSoftware experiments furthest from its commercial line, Sony’s Japan Studio is in the credits. Three collaborations, three of the catalogue’s strangest objects.

The method, without the wall

Story by fragments and objects, yes, the Library notes it because Deracine isolates the variable. Remove combat difficulty entirely and the Miyazaki narrative machine runs unchanged.

What is Déraciné?

THE QUIET WORK

THE FIRST WORD