In Dark Souls III, the roughly seventh boss (there are a couple optional bosses you might face before him) is Pontiff Suleyvahn. He's the sort of halfway boss in Irithyl of the Boreal Valley, a city below the lands that are being drawn to Lothric, and whose true identity we won't discover until we've beaten him (though there are hints along the way).
Ultimately, Suleyvahn is a roadblock and checkpoint before you get to the area's main event - the horrific Aldrich, who is one of the four missing Lords of Cinder we need to collect in order to open the way to link the fire and refresh the world (if indeed that's what we want to do - I'm fully in the Usurp the Flame camp, as it feels like the most radical departure from a cycle that doesn't seem to be working anymore).
However, it's highly possible that this boss you fight roughly halfway through the game is actually the main villain of the story.
Breaking it down: between item descriptions, environmental hints, and the appearance of particular types of enemy we find in various parts of the world, we can eventually infer that Suleyvahn was born in the Painted World - a realm meant to give people who experienced tremendous loss in the real world a place to escape that pain and live peacefully (though, this being Dark Souls, it's now got its own problems). Living in a place of quiet grief clearly didn't work out for a person who had never experienced loss, so he ventured outside of it and became a sorcerer.
He eventually found his way to the Profaned Capital, where the Profaned Flame burned eternally, fueled by the darkness of the Abyss. That darkness inspired or corrupted him, and he set about doing several horrible things - he fed prisoners including children to Aldrich to increase his power, and he enslaved people and turned them into beasts with magic rings. It's implied that he was the scholar who convinced Prince Lorian to shun his purpose to link the fire and become a Lord of Cinder.
The way that the game is built, though, you wouldn't figure that out easily on your own. Dark Souls and other FromSoft games of the same sort are all about hidden hints and lore to be discovered by going all corkboard conspiracy theorist and linking tiny bits of information.
I think it's appropriate that George R. R. Martin was involved in creating the initial lore for the studio's newest effort, Elden Ring. While his Song of Ice and Fire series (the one that was adapted as Game of Thrones) has a story you can easily follow just by paying attention to the broadest strokes, the books (far more than the show) is chock full of stories-within-stories and lore that is bubbling in the background.
For example, a close reading of a few off-hand remarks can suggest that Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen fell in love after Lyanna competed in a tourney in disguise as a man going by the "Knight of the Laughing Tree." There's implications that Euron Greyjoy (whose show version was utter crap) is some kind of dark avatar of a horrifying kraken god, or he intends to become one.
One of the things I really find fascinating about FromSoft games is how it's never really obvious what the "good" endings are. The most complex ending to get for Dark Souls III is the Usurp the Flame ending - this has the unkindled one take the First Flame within themselves and become the Lord of Londor, ruling as the true face of humanity. On one hand, there's this sort of tyrannical feel to it - usurpers generally aren't a "good guy" trope. And this is a land of Hollows, meaning everyone there is kind of zombies, and all look really messed up and undead. But on the other hand, it seems as if the whole Age of Fire was kind of unnatural in the first place - that Gwyn's arrogance really screwed the world up (or maybe his naïveté). Perhaps, after so many ages in which gods have repeated these cycles of cruelty and exploitation, maybe Londor represents something new, recognizing an internal balance of light and darkness, and life and death, and perhaps finding balance between them.
Indeed, in these games, sometimes what we're even actually doing is left vague. Yes, we find these powerful bosses to fight and kill, but what exactly are we accomplishing by doing so?
And, I think, in lesser games, that unsatisfying nature would be infuriating. It would feel like a haphazard scaffold of a story that did not match the quality of the gameplay.
But, somehow, these games make the obscurity of their lore and story a feature, rather than a bug. There's a kind of abstraction to the storytelling here that invites speculation and interpretation, rather than dismissal as meaninglessness.
I wonder to what extent the creative forces behind the games have solid answers. I imagine that some of them, like primary auteur Hidetaka Miyazaki, probably consider their version just one interpretation that isn't inherently more valuable than a player's. The fact that so many hints match up so well suggests to me that they do actually have some firm ideas about hidden lore, and it's not all just a bunch of darts thrown at the wall.
But even if they really do not have the same degree of narrative depth that the fans assume they do, I think it's a testament to the potency of their formula that it can feel this fun to delve into the games and attempt to unpack all the subtle implications.
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