Unitary lore and story discussion thread (obvious spoilers)

[TΛPETRVE]

I'm surprised we don't have an official, pinned thread for Underrail's plot and lore yet (or maybe there is one, and the search function just refuses to spit it out?). It's been officially out for a month now, with most of us having been familiar with the game for longer, and while I presume that a large number is playing the game for its mechanics more so than for its narrative content, I still think the latter is absolutely worth discussing.

I suppose the anticlimactic reveal of Underrail's origins and the decidedly unmysterious nature of Tchort, the Faceless et al. are not to everyone's taste, but I for one really love the way Underrail handles its buildup, remaining grounded and downright stoic from beginning to end, antithetical to the sweeping epic plots with their contrived twists and turns in many modern RPGs, and even pulling off a bit of a meta commentary on the genre itself, without going all self-aware and ostentatiously ironic unlike e.g. Larian's Divinity games tend to do.

[Erwin the German]

I was actually never terribly clear on the origins of the Underrail (though I think it's safe to assume Biocorp is somehow involved) - but then I missed the Oculus stuff, anyhow, so maybe it's explained there (for some reason Quicksilver never got back in touch, though I'm fairly sure I performed all his quests to his satisfaction.)

I thought the reveal of Tchort's (implied) origins was cool, as it sheds a suspicious light on Eidein's supposed discovery of a millennia old being. I'd be surprised if Tchort was any older than two hundred years.

[TΛPETRVE]

I think what makes the exposition dump in the final third particularly awesome is the serious tonal shift it invokes onto the entire experience; from bleak, but not hopeless, to downright nihilistic.

Ironically, it's not even much of a twist, more like an anti-twist, complete demystification. Love it.

[Erwin the German]

Yeah, the story stuff at the end (Caerus logs aside, bloated and largely irrelevant as they are,) was undoubtedly the high point of the Deep Caverns for me. Poor Tchortists seriously had the wool pulled over their eyes - I always liked their agenda, even if it did serve a potential eldritch abomination / horrific experiment gone wrong.

[TΛPETRVE]

I think the only "poor" ones were the almost childishly naive scientists and other youngsters that worked for the Tchortists. Seeing them mowed down alongside the degenerates that were their superiors when the Faceless came in was actually quite sad. But that's just how it goes. The game generally does a rather good job at mixing up morality without going down the stupid "everyone is blatantly morally ambiguous" route, apart from a few missteps.

[Tygrende]

Alright, explain this.

If what the Faceless Commander says is true and Tchort indeed is just an amalgamation of Biocorp scientists made with mutagens (which is probably true given the mutagen tanks during the fight and the fact that Exitus is harmful to it) then it means it's just 100+ years old, 200 tops.

From what it tells you, it wanted the Cube solely to lure Tanner/Six, eat them and gain their knowledge in the proccess. How in the hell does Tchort know anything about the High Ones and the Cube in the first place?

[TΛPETRVE]

I'd say the cube had already been in BioCorp's possession for a very long time. The Faceless probably nabbed it when they revolted against their creators and ran off to form their own civilisation.

Since the entirety of Underrail is essentially a massive ant farm run by BioCorp, with both their scattered remainders vying for control, and their countless victims doing their own thing, and Oculus being sort of the resident assassin's guild that operates outside of all affiliations and acts sort of like the Outsider from Dishonored, I'd say that it's not particularly hard for spies to find out whatever they want in Underrail, if they know where to look. Underrail's society in itself is a massive network of information that just needs to be tapped. And since time in Underrail pretty much means nothing anymore thanks to wildly varying life expectancies, it's easy to assume that Tanner had been around for quite a long time, too.

[Tygrende]

I'd say the cube had already been in BioCorp's possession for a very long time. The Faceless probably nabbed it when they revolted against their creators and ran off to form their own civilisation.

That is possible, but it still doesn't explain how Tchort knows anything about High Ones. There is only 3 of them left and logs from the residental make it clear that they didn't know anything about the mysterious pillars origins.

[TΛPETRVE]

Tanner might have had some prior history with BioCorp, depending on how long he actually had been in Underrail before. He knew about the cube, after all, and had it ordered stolen.

Considering how filled the game is with red herrings and outright lies, I wouldn't even be surprised if part of the game's lore is just blatant misinformation.

[Tygrende]

Wait, where did you get that from?

Mainframe.

At least that's how I remember it. Either Mainframe or one of the pillars, but I'm pretty sure it was the Mainframe.

[TΛPETRVE]

When you look at it, Tchort is really nothing but a bio-computer that upgrades its wetware through absorption of the DNA of other species, and very likely just so happens to express itself with the personality of a cenobite, because its conscious is a schizophrenic mess of all the individuals it has assimilated. It may well be possible that it does indeed contain a primordial lifeform, but at the end of the day it doesn't even matter, because Tchort is ultimately meaningless; it has no power over anything but its immediate surroundings, and its destruction has changed bugger all besides taking one small fraction out of the equation that is the internal power plays of one single instable corporation.

[abscisin]

Signed up just to say that Ezra was a 10/10 character. Uncovering the tiny bits of information about him scattered throughout the game was one of the highlights of my playthrough. This guy managed to be more interesting than anyone of the core main story cast.

[TΛPETRVE]

I was a bit disappointed that you can't confront him about it, so you never really learn about his motivations; I mean, he clearly is a sociopath (and a believable sociopath at that, not some sort of exaggerated stereotype), and he's just both involved and distant enough that you cannot discern if he's interested in the well-being of SGS or just wants to keep a keen eye on everything.

But at the same time it also perfectly hammers home how much of a literal vision of hell Underrail really is.

[abscisin]

At the end of the day you don't have any hard evidence against him, mainly just some conjecture, so it makes some sense that you can never confront him. Sure it would have been nice to walk up to him and say "Hey Anton, sup?", but he could just as easily deny everything.

Problem is, we are still missing some details. We have no idea what happened to his partner in crime Vovin, nor what happened to Dr Slavkovic because apparently he never got himself monolith-cryo'd at Thitonus despite agreeing to check it out. We also never discovered exactly what Ezra and later Otis were doing at Tartarus, only that it was probably important. And Project Ascendance is still a complete mystery.

[TΛPETRVE]

Yeah, there are of course a lot of implications and no actual evidence. I do like that a lot, because it gives the game that "make of it what you will" feel that I love so much about Dark Souls, but it also does make the narrative feel a tiny bit inconsistent at times, when some trains of thought are fleshed out more than others.

Ah, speaking of which, I think what I love the most about the game's world building is its sense of scale. Usually in exploration-heavy RPGs you get a map that is supposed to cover an entire continent, dotted with tiny, unconnected settlements, and while the abstract presentation makes suspension of disbelief rather easy, it's still something that bugs me at times. The world of Underrail on the other hand is merely the size of a single real-life city, and as a result everything feels really bloody dense. Awesome.