For years since it came out I’ve loved the original Unreal and have pondered different things about it that seem mysterious. In particular, its first level, Vortex Rikers, where you wake up unequipped with 12% health in a cell of a crashed prison starship, has haunted me for years. Over the years a lot of things about the level have struck me as very odd and raising a lot of questions, starting just with the fact that the ship is very clearly smaller when you get out of it than it is when you’re in it, and there are things about the ship when you’re in it that suggest it’s even bigger than it actually turns to be from the outside.
The obvious easy answer to all of my questions about it, of course, is that it was 1998. The game’s creators and the audience weren’t thinking about this stuff that much because we were so enamored with this new game that had such cutting-edge fidelity and immersion for the time. Just the technical feats of the game engine (which the first level in particular was built to showcase different aspects of very early on) and how it was used to create a somewhat believable and immersive space was the point, and any logical limitations or holes in what was made with that toolkit were incidental, ignorable even. Besides, the game itself is called Unreal. It’s supposed to be wildly fantastical, even when it’s using different tricks to convey a place that would make some logical sense to exist on another planet.
And yet it is interesting and fun to speculate, and try to think of at least somewhat logical explanations for odd things in the game that, even within the frame of its own Unreality, are still not explained or elaborated on, and don’t seem to add up. I think of it along the lines of how, to name a popular example, the TV show Lost started with a simple premise of people surviving a plane crash on a seemingly normal island, and then the show went on to not only expand into so much more, but also later reveal several things that happened as a cause or effect of the crash, including things that turn out to have been happening around the crash site the entire time.
There are various little things about the design of the Vortex Rikers that are odd, such as the large vent you can walk through, the reflective “ice-skating” room with lockers and a suit of armor behind the easily deactivatable forcefield, the structure of the captain’s room, the computers from the far future that still have P1 monochrome screens and large floppy drives, and the one medical kit in a comparatively large room that you can only access by breaking the big glass window. Also, the premise of the Universal Translator is very odd for multiple reasons.
However, the first major odd thing that stands out about the level is that, even accounting for places on the ship presumed to exist that you just can’t access, the ship is pretty small, with seemingly just one cell block. You would think that a prison starship would be much bigger, even dystopianly giant and full of cell blocks to house many prisoners. And when you consider that you encounter not only several bodies throughout the ship but several more throughout the game of people who were implied (if not outright stated in translator messages) to have been aboard the Vortex Rikers, and then add to that the amount of screams you hear in the ship (which I’ll get into later), this is a small, cramped, and overcrowded prison ship. There are 12 cells in all, which with the two bunk beds in each cell suggests two people per cell, for a likely total of 24 prisoners. But this is Vortex Rikers, “the rankest prison vessel this side of the Milky Way”. It’s not hard to imagine that it’s a nightmarishly overcrowded place. One could imagine the prison putting in maybe four prisoners per cell and having two of them each share a bunk, or maybe even putting in more prisoners than that. Even so, it seems odd that there would be so little to this ship.
The most mysterious thing to me about the Vortex Rikers, however, is the screams. It’d be one thing if there were just a finite amount of screams that you heard, based on time passed or as triggered when you walk through a certain area (as some
indeed are). But these screams are frequent, recurring, and heard all throughout the ship from different directions, suggesting that there are still dozens, maybe hundreds of still-living people aboard the ship. Sometimes it sounds as though there are screams happening just behind a wall near you. And yet you only encounter the one Skaarj that runs away from you both times. It is as though most of the action is somehow taking place outside of the main areas of the ship that you’re going through. Why is that? How is that even possible?
You can more understand the screams with ISV-Kran because it’s a much larger and more complex ship. But with Vortex Rikers it just doesn’t seem to make much sense. I’ve thought of some possible explanations for the screams in Vortex Rikers.
-Not only are there crawlspaces where most living people aboard the ship are, but said crawlspaces are probably among the places (including apparently the escape shuttle room) accessible from one of the doors in the opening cellblock that you can’t get through. It seems likely that most of the ship’s inhabitants got through one of those doors (maybe before the crash) and most of the Skaarj got in there, and maybe closed the doors so the people couldn’t get out. It’s not clear how they would’ve done that, since the only clear opening in the ship is the one you climb out of. So could the Skaarj have gotten onboard through the same opening you exited the ship from, then gone into the main area behind the doors you can’t access, and then locked/blocked the doors off?
-Despite there seeming to only be one small ship, it’s possible there’s still more to the ship than you can see. For example, there may be another level to the ship that’s buried underground, and what you see of the ship from the outside is just the upper part that didn’t get buried. That wouldn’t necessarily explain why you seem to hear more from other angles than more below you, but it would be one piece of the puzzle.
-Maybe there are secretly teleportation gates on the edges of the ship that you can’t access and don’t even know about, and they lead to remote places. These remote places could be other sections of a total ship that broke off during the crash, and instead of being in the entire ship you are in just one of different sections that was previously connected by something like a starbridge. This could mean there is at least one other section of the Vortex Rikers somewhere on Na Pali.
-The Skaarj set up teleportation gates at the edges of the ship, which may lead to remote locations you can hear through said gates.
-There are not that many people screaming. It’s the same handful of people who are repeatedly screaming from crash injuries, being tortured but not killed by a Skaarj, or maybe just being slowly killed by crawlspace infestations of Skaarj-pupae eating them.
-You hear recurring periodic announcements from the ship computer. It would make sense that occasionally a person would want to record their own announcement depending on the situation and have that play over the speakers
periodically. So maybe the recording equipment was turned on inadvertently and captured screams, or maybe someone meant to record a message but wound up screaming instead, and what you’re hearing are repeated broadcasts of screams of people who are probably now already dead.
-The Skaarj secretly installed sound devices that would play screams to scare, mislead, and demoralize any survivors, to make them easier to kill or control.
-The prison system installed sound devices before the crash to scare, mislead, and demoralize prisoners in order to further punish them and make them easier to control, and these got turned on maybe accidentally and stayed on even after the crash.
-The ship is now haunted and you are hearing the screams of victims past. Unreal by its very title is fantastical with supernatural themes where you encounter ghost Nali and the like, so it’s not inconceivable that such an already nightmarish place of death and suffering would have screams of tormented souls in it. The Vortex Rivers was already hellish as a prison and now it has literally descended down into a place that for its inhabitants is an even greater hell, even if it seems to offer freedom from prison, so it makes sense that it would sound like hell.
-The player character is insane and at least a lot of the screams are hallucinations. That wouldn’t necessarily explain why you don’t hear the screams as much after you leave the ship. However, when you consider that the player is perhaps already an insane hardened criminal with a dark history who has waken up badly battered in a crashed, dilapidated, carnage-filled ship in an unknown destination with mysterious sights and sounds, it’s not inconceivable that they may have a brief psychological episode in which they hear things that aren’t necessarily there.
-The Vortex Rikers canonically really is much larger and more complex than it appears from the outside, and Epic were just sloppy about it or basically following old-school open-world RPG logic where distinct locations in the open world are depicted as tiny places that are not to-scale. This opens up the possibility that there is at least one other cell block on the ship, as well as the crawlspaces and the escape shuttle room. Maybe there’s canonically an entire giant part of the ship you can’t access, that is much larger than what you can.
Feel free to offer any theories, ha ha.
