VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 3: Ulrik

Ulrik's the prickly sort, who won't/can't admit that he actually cares about anyone. His backstory supports his negative worldview, but that doesn't make him an easy person to get along with. If not for Eltcreed constantly prodding Ulrik with potentially uncomfortable banter he'd likely remain a glum, unlikeable person. But Eltcreed's jokes and intentional misinterpretations take the edge off Ulrik's acerbic personality and humanize him. This makes him more entertaining to be around, especially since it takes so long for him to warm up to Cyrus, even in his own route.

Unlike Eltcreed, the stakes in Ulrik's route come up fairly early through his acquaintance, Vice. Vice leads Rafale, an insurgent group that wants to topple the Heights (literally) no matter what it takes and many of the members revere Ulrik for his family heritage. Though most people are unaware of it, the Ferries were responsible for much of the tech that allowed the rebuilding and improvement of people's lives in the Depths following the flood that caused the creation of the Heights in the first place, but the Ferries chose to remain in the shadows while allowing the Valentines to take credit for their work.

Ulrik doesn't particularly care for Rafale, but he and Vice go back years to less pleasant times and he figures they can't realistically do anything to hurt the Heights, so what's the harm?

It doesn't take a genius to see that his dual allegiance to Eltcreed and Rafale are going to conflict, and that Cyrus is going to end up stuck in the middle of it as a noble from the Heights.

Despite the fact Cyrus is still Eltcreed's bodyguard in this route, the story manages to let her step away from him often enough that Ulrik can take focus as the primary love interest in the route. Eltcreed plays an outsized role regardless, but it's not as bad as I thought it might be since he and Ulrik are close friends (not that Ulrik would ever admit it) and a lot of Ulrik's personal story is tied to Eltcreed. We finally get the backstory between the two men and as well as the tie between their families. I actually liked Eltcreed better on Ulrik's route because he wasn't hitting on Cyrus as much and I was entertained by his attempts to get Ulrik and Cyrus to hook up.

The big internal conflict on Ulrik's route is his relationship with his family's legacy and that drives the bulk of his behavior. According to Ulrik, the Ferries were supposed to have gone up to the Heights when the flood came, but were abandoned instead and left to survive on the ground below. Because of this, he's been taught since he was a child to hate the Heights.

For less clear reasons, the Ferries have intentionally chosen to live like paranoid paupers and stay out of the spotlight. His mother told him not to trust anyone because they'll inevitably betray him, and the lesson was hammered home when he found his deadbeat dad, who immediately turned around and sold him to the local tyrant. Supposedly this need for secrecy is due to the knowledge the Ferries possess, but Ulrik never learns what he's supposed to do with it or what he's saving it for, and neither does the player, making the family's drastic measures baffling.

Given Ulrik's surly personality, Cyrus has to wear him down into appreciating her and break through his forced hatred of the Heights (given the flashback to him as a child, his heart was never really in it). It takes a while to do so, and from a best ending perspective, the key to winning his heart is wearing him down with kindness. He even compares her to Eltcreed, who he privately admits has been incredibly kind to him, to the point Ulrik is extra acerbic with him because he just doesn't know how to handle it.

Since Cyrus is not terribly good with her feelings on this route either, she's helped along by a romance novel that Ulrik lends her (conveniently written in an old script so she can read it with less assistance) and I rather liked her progression in this route. She sorts through things at her own pace and while she's not entirely sure what to call her feelings by the end, she knows enough to say she cares about him.

But even though Ulrik has good chemistry with Cyrus and his story isn't as directionless as Eltcreed's, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed in it because Ulrik doesn't really get to do much. He works essentially as Eltcreed's spymaster, which should be a pretty cool job, but we don't get to see him do anything involving his work, and even in his good ending, he doesn't get to save the day. Eltcreed does, and not only that, but Eltcreed even info-dumps on him afterwards because he knows a truth that Ulrik doesn't!

After Eltcreed's wide range of endings I was a little disappointed that Ulrik doesn't have a similar spread, and aside from his good ending, he or Cyrus dies in all of them; sometimes both of them. The biggest difference is whether Cyrus keeps or breaks her promise to him. If she keeps it, he doesn't activate the tower demolition device to destroy the Heights (though Vice does in the good ending--gotta have that drama). If she breaks it, he activates it himself, though it's not particularly clear why since he doesn't seem that keen on it, knowing that destroying the tower will bring the Heights literally crashing down on top of innocent people in the Depths.

Given that the tower demolition device is central to all his endings, it's a pity that the worldbuilding falters around his family history. It wouldn't make sense for the Heights to have intentionally cast out the family responsible for it because why would they want to make enemies out of the people who hold the keys to killing everyone on their little island in the sky?

Yes, there's civilization underneath the Heights today, but arguably in the years immediately after the flood, when the Ferries were most likely to be pissed, there may not have been enough civilization around to stop them if one of the family members was really intent on murdering the entirety of the Heights.

When Eltcreed infodumps in the good ending, he explains the Ferrie family story a little differently and says that a single ancestor of Ulrik's, the machine's designer, refused to go to the Heights in order to stay behind with his family and asked the Valentines to look after the Ferries so their hatred wouldn't get the better of them. Which sounds like the Heights may have allowed one Ferrie to go up, but he thought better of it and didn't, which still doesn't make sense from a Heights perspective since it places the keys to their potential destruction out of their hands.

It would have made more sense for the story if the Ferrie family as a whole had volunteered to stay in the Depths to guard the device, and that would explain why the family took such pains to stay in the shadows and let the Valentines take credit for all the work they originally did. If that had been the case, they would have been protecting the Heights against hostility, in which case their knowledge would be better kept hidden.

And I also found it silly that Ulrik's ancestor basically decided it wasn't worth telling his family the truth about how his device worked or maybe that they shouldn't hate on the Heights so much and left it all up to the Valentines.

(Note: Yune's route shows the actual conversation where Ulrik's ancestor Arcenclimb decides to stay behind, and it makes the whole Ferrie family hatred on Ulrik's route even stupider because Arcenclimb's wife and child also decided to stay behind. It was a family decision! None of them were denied a place in the Heights! They stayed because only Arcenclimb's nuclear family could go, but his wife's family, who would not have been Ferries, could not.)

Like Eltcreed's route, Ulrik's does not result in Cyrus discovering the truth behind her parents' murder. In fact, it drops out of the narrative entirely, but I found I didn't mind it as much as I did in Eltcreed's route. I suppose it's because her previous life in the Heights wasn't as in-your-face as on Eltcreed's route, where HOUNDS would show up, Fin would show up, and there was the potential for actual travel back to where she came from.

In Ulrik's route, going back to the Heights never moves past being a nebulous goal, and she quickly gains a lot more immediate issues to worry about (like Rafale being out to get her) that she doesn't have on Eltcreed's.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 2: Eltcreed

I entered Steam Prison much like I do other otome. For my first playthrough I role play it out with the idea that I'll choose a love interest based on whoever strikes my fancy, which may or may not be who I thought it would be based on reviews or promotional material.

That did not happen quite as expected this time around because of how the game is structured, with routes being based around whether Cyrus goes to the sanctuary district (possible to avoid on later playthroughs once Yune and Fin are unlocked), and then what she does once she's there (further dividing player choice between Eltcreed and Ulrik on one route and Adage and Ines on another). Given Cyrus's determination to find work after arriving in the sanctuary district, I took the first opportunity given, which locked me into the bodyguard route and limited me to Eltcreed and Ulrik, neither of whom I initially liked.

But between the both of them, Eltcreed is the closest to being the poster boy, so I decided to do his route first.

Given his character design I expected him to be an arrogant bastard, and his first scene did little to dissuade me of that, but he ended up being more of a confident playboy instead. Normally I don't like those kinds of characters because their flirtiness feels so overbearing, and I definitely did not like that his first kiss is without Cyrus's consent, but after she gets curious about it I found I didn't mind as much because she is as dumb as a brick when it comes to romance. Anything other than being overbearingly flirty wouldn't even register as affection, as shown by the fact Fin was clearly devoted to her but she never thought there was anything romantic behind it. (Being raised in the Heights has nothing to do with it. Fin obviously fell in love and Heights people have been thrown into the Depths for falling in love with a non-approved partner.)

It helps that Eltcreed has a strong compassionate streak and wants to help the people of his district as much as possible. I was skeptical when I saw his character trait was Charity in the opening movie, but his life really does revolve around how best to look after the people of his district, and he does it by being the biggest voice in the room.

I suspect his desire to make people happy is why he keeps talking about giving love to people who ask, and why he sleeps with so many partners he can't keep their names straight when he wakes up. He's the most eligible bachelor around given his position as administrator of his district and the head of his family's bank. He's socially savvy, and he's physically attractive.

Which leads to one of the more annoying things on his route. While he doesn't have a fan club per se, his admirers essentially function as one and I dislike the digs Cyrus gets when attending social functions with him as anything other than an obvious bodyguard. It's not a major part of the story, but something I hadn't expected outside of a contemporary setting.

Eltcreed is the one who offers the job that spirits Cyrus out of the sanctuary district and into the Depths where the people who have naturally been born on the ground are. Being impressed with her sword skills, he hires her as a bodyguard, but being that the Depths are more technologically advanced, this is mostly for show as any serious combat will be done with guns. Eltcreed is a big Heights buff since his mother was born there and is completely in love with the idea of Cyrus being his pure and shining knight. This results in him putting her up on a pedestal, convincing himself not to bed her as quickly as he would other women, but notably doesn't stop him from being extremely forward with her.

I don't mind that Eltcreed finds her different from previous women he's been with, because obviously that's a factor when someone has dated a lot and found someone new who interests them, but I didn't like the focus on her purity. It's something Fin also does when he returns in Eltcreed's route.

While I don't think they mean her virginity specifically, by raising her up so high it feels like an impossible standard to reach (especially in Fin's case since he's in two bad endings on Eltcreed's route).

Fortunately, Eltcreed stops bringing it up later in his route as Cyrus begins sorting out her feelings and I like that she later initiates a kiss with him instead of always waiting. She never gets to the point where she can comfortably say she loves him aloud, but she's clearly adapting and has figured out what he means to her; so much so that even if she gets the opportunity to return to the Heights (which may or may not happen depending on player choice) she realizes that the Depths have become her home.

Unfortunately Fin proves incapable of moving forward, and his feelings for her have turned into an obsession due the torturous conditioning he went through with his new employment in the HOUNDS. While I disliked discovering Cyrus's sweet partner on the police force turned yandere, it actually became entertaining once I realized that Fin's insanity is the reason the route escalates into a climax at all (instead of being day to day Cyrus following Eltcreed around to various engagements while being flirted with).

First, after Fin discovers Cyrus is alive he kills a fellow HOUND to prevent his boss from learning where Cyrus disappeared to, and when the man's body is discovered the HOUNDS blame the people of the Depths. Then Fin attacks Eltcreed in a fit of jealousy, giving the people of the Depths reason to demand retribution against the HOUNDs.

Obviously neither side is interested in taking blame for something they did not do (it was all Fin!), but the Heights take issue with Eltcreed capturing a chunk of the HOUNDS and taking over the sanctuary district, so they issue an "invitation" for a representative of the Depths to come to the island to negotiate. Eltcreed agrees to go, since it's his district that's closest and he was the one who riled them up.

What Eltcreed knows, but does not tell Cyrus (at least not right away), is that he's certain the representative will be killed as an example to the Depths, but the other district admins feel that this is an opportunity for the Depths as well. If he dies taking out as many of the people of the Heights with him as possible (as a suicide bomber), then he'll become a martyr and inspire the Depths to go to war.

Given Steam Prison's predilection for branching, I shouldn't have been surprised that Eltcreed would have several different endings depending on Cyrus's affection level with him, but the degree of difference was really what startled me. Aside from bad endings (which tend to be brief and can happen at any time in a route), there are four different ways his story can end.

The good ending (the one with the most elaborate ending sequence) is the most different, since it's the only one where he doesn't go to the Heights. Basically, Cyrus sees through his death wish and as his bodyguard she decides the best way to protect his life is to ensure that he never goes, which, good for her! I like that she challenges him to a duel, and being the fighter she is, Eltcreed obviously loses and has to figure out another plan.

But my enthusiasm for this ending isn't particularly great because it ends up ignoring the demand from the Heights for the rest of the story. It chooses to focus on the fallout with the other districts, which withdraw their support in the form of trade while fomenting unrest. Though it's nice that Eltcreed ends up freeing the HOUNDS from imprisonment and forging an alliance with them and therefore the sanctuary district, I wanted to see the Heights issue addressed since the HOUNDS work for the Heights and I'm sure Sachsen would turn around and say no go to any trade the instant he got word.

My preference is what would probably be called the "normal" route. He and Cyrus go to the Heights and she refuses to leave his side even though he'll probably die. She reiterates the knightly promise she made to him when she first entered his service and it's a great callback. We also learn more about what makes Eltcreed tick, from the story of his family to why he likes knights so much.

Their impending deaths are spared by the deus ex machina appearance of Yune, who is the one person everyone in the Heights have to listen to, which disappointed me (I wanted to see how they'd get out of it), but Eltcreed's dialogue with Yune provides a potential win-win situation for both parties and wraps up the conflict between the two sides.

Eltcreed goes bomber on the remaining two endings based on affection. It's just whether Cyrus is with him or not.

While I enjoyed playing his route while I was in the middle of it, the more I think about it, the less I feel it holds up. The early parts were slow given that everything is just going day-by-day, and there wasn't much of a plot. While I know realistically Cyrus had no chance of returning to the Heights on her own, I was disappointed that investigating her parents' murder and clearing her name ended up being dropped from this route entirely.

This was especially egregious since Sachen shows up later in the route (in the incident that leads to the HOUNDS' imprisonment) and tells his men to capture her alive if possible so he can deliver her to "him." Who this person is, never comes up. He could have just called for her capture without saying anything more and it would have been fine because it was already established in the common route that Sachen likes tormenting her.

Because Ulrik is on the same bodyguard story branch as Eltcreed, his route will be next!

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch (also on Windows)
Release: 2021 (2019 on Windows)

Steam Prison is an otome visual novel I've had on my radar for a couple of years, but I knew it would be a long and involved game and my preferred platform for visual novels is a handheld; something I can curl up with in bed, much like a good book. So I dithered until I heard it was coming out for Switch, at which point I picked it up.

And the farther I get from the game, the more I think that it's greater than the sum of its parts. I get the feeling that the writer really wanted to do something grand with Steam Prison. There's tons of worldbuilding, over and above what I expected, with little nuggets slipped in purely for flavor. The character dialogue is great, particularly the moments of levity, and romances largely work.

But the plot doesn't always hold together with characters sometimes doing nonsensical things, continuity issues, and ignoring its own worldbuilding.

Steam Prison follows Cyrus Tistella, an idealistic eighteen-year-old from the Heights, an isolated city-state perched on an artificial island in the sky. It's connected to the ground below by an elevator shaft to the Depths, where the Heights sends its criminals. Life in the Heights is fairly regimented. The government arranges marriages, couples are expected to have a certain number of children as part of the population plan, and falling in love with anyone other than your spouse is a crime.

Cyrus herself is not keen on getting married, but it's not because of any anti-government sentiment. Ever since a police officer helped her find her lost pendant as a child, she's internalized the idea that the police are there to help the people and became a police officer herself. She knows that she has to get married, and once she does she will have to quit her job to raise her children, but she would like to put that off as long as possible.

Before her impending marriage can go through though, her parents are murdered and she's framed as the murderer. Proper due process is denied and she's rushed off to exile in the Depths, where the majority of routes take place.

Adjusting is difficult for her. The sanctuary district, the penal colony portion of the Depths, is run by the HOUNDS. Though they work for the government like the police, they're ruthless in their administration of the district since from their viewpoint, everyone there is a criminal (even the children born there due to having exiled parents). They have no problem taking advantage of their power and no one can easily fight back since prisoners are not allowed anything bigger than a knife.

The only law is whatever Sachsen Brandenberg, the leader of the HOUNDS, wants it to be, and since that conflicts with Cyrus's sense of justice, she can't help getting herself into trouble. In fact, a fair bit of the Depths portion of the common route has Ines, the vice-commander of the HOUNDS (and probably the only decent man in the organization), warning Cyrus that she needs to learn when to let things go if she's going to survive.

Steam Prison branches in an unusual manner. The four routes available at the start of the game fan out from Cyrus's situation in the Depths. She needs to get a job if she wants to live without relying on handouts for food, and whether she stays in the sanctuary district or escapes to the world outside (where people whose ancestors never went to the Heights live) determines whether her romance options are Adage and Ines, or Eltcreed and Ulrik respectively. The remaining two romances, Yune and Fin, involve Cyrus not going down the Depths in the first place or going down belatedly, so they're unsurprisingly locked at the start.

There is a substational amount of worldbuilding in Steam Prison, explaining how the Heights came to be and the animousity between the native people of the Depths and those originating from the Heights; details like how the people of the Heights consider everything below them the Depths, while those in the sanctuary district push the definition further to restrict the Depths to everything outside their district so as to keep their feeling of superiority. "We might be criminals, but we're still better than those people."

And there are nice surprises like how the Depths still worship Saint Yune even though he now lives the in the Heights, and that the Depths are actually more technologically advanced than the Heights. (Though no airships yet, or the Heights would be in for a surprise.)

But the elaborate worldbuilding sometimes trips over itself. For instance, after four hundred years of separation the spoken language between the Heights and the Depths is virtually the same, but the written languages are different enough that Cyrus can't read the books of the Depths. Eltcreed tells her on his route that it's a natural evolution because the two societies have been separated so long, which makes no sense because that's not how language works. We might not understand every word, but Shakespeare remains readable to modern English speakers, and we wouldn't say the problem is with the written language but that people don't talk like that anymore.

On Adage's route his explanation is different and it actually works better. He says it was the introduction of the printing press that caused the Depths to simplify the written language to make it easier to print, making it an artifically induced transition akin to the creation of Simplified Chinese from Traditional Chinese (where people who grew up only knowing the latter cannot read a good chunk of the former).

Also, the existence of the HOUNDS is completely unknown to rank and file police officers in the Heights, even though HOUNDS is made up of former police officers. I can buy that the Heights transfers the partners of lawbreaking officers to the HOUNDS through guilt by association, but what I can't buy is that the government is able to keep a lid on the fact that partners of convicted officers disappear and almost never come back. Even if the HOUNDS themselves remain secret, there ought to be a healthy rumor mill about the mysterious fate of partners of convicted felons. Cyrus was an officer for two years and never saw anyone disappear?

This has to happen reasonably often to keep HOUNDS staffed (in Fin's route it's not even a month between new "recruits") and joining HOUNDS is almost as much an exile as being sentenced as a criminal. Saying that the now partnerless officer was "transferred" isn't going to work if an friend decides to visit and discovers the officer's wife hasn't seen her husband since his "transfer," to say nothing about what the wife suspects happened! They live on an island in the sky. Where can anyone even transfer to?

This roughness in the worldbuilding also extends to Cyrus and her knowledge of love and sex. I'm not surprised that she hasn't paid much attention to either given that she would never be able to choose her own partner in the Heights and her assigned fiance is barely more than a stranger she's seen at a few social events, but the game is uneven at presenting the limits of her knowledge, which is important so we know when those limits have been crossed.

For instance, early on in the Depths she's taken in by a woman named Rielith. There aren't a lot of proper jobs in the santuary district so Rielith feeds herself and her son by selling herself (with her best client being an aggressive lout who works for HOUNDS). Cyrus needs a job, but immediately decides that she does not want to sell herself.

This is the first time the topic of sex comes up in the game, so you would think this means she knows exactly what Rielith is doing. Most of the players would. This is an M-rated game in the US.

But then a short while later she is hauled away by a group of HOUNDS who attempt to rape her and it's clear she has no idea what they're about to do other than it's bad. It just had all kinds of WTF bells ringing in my head. If she hadn't known, the writing could have illustrated that by having her ask Rielith what selling herself involves, and if the writer needed Cyrus to stay ignorant Rielith could demur. That way the player would have the appropriate expectation.

That Cyrus doesn't know where babies come from is a little weird (more specifically she thinks they come from the Temple, which is the seat of the government), but less of a stretch after dealing with the not knowing about sex part. I can understand that a bit better since she lives in a heavily regulated society, has no siblings and does not have any extended family that she could have seen during pregnancy, and all her coworkers are male (she's only female police officer), so I find her ignorance plausible if unlikely. It helps that a couple of her love interests call her out on this.

This jumbled approach also extends to the plot. When it's at its best, it's mostly good. When it's not, it mostly skates by on the strength of its characters. Cyrus's overarching mission is to find her parents' murderer and clear her name, but it's telling that she only accomplishes that in one of the six good endings (which I'm defining as the one where the ending credits song is performed by the current love interest's voice actor). The game is more interested in having Cyrus discover love and romance with some guys under difficult circumstances than following up on what created those circumstances in the first place.

Though Cyrus might learn a few things about her parents' murder en route to other endings with other love interests, there are also routes where her personal quest drops off entirely. The worldbuilding involving the Depths (the part beyond the sanctuary district) is interesting, but the two routes based there have nothing to do with her personal story and take her so far from the Heights that they feel out of place. There's no prison, no pursuit of her parent's murderers.

I get the feeling the writer really loved this part of the world since Eltcreed is from it and he's the poster boy and he's the character most prone to hogging the spotlight.

Steam Prison also does something with its ending branching that annoys me. If the player chooses to physically go to one location to see someone versus calling a different person over, it's obvious that the story should play out differently. However, sometimes the player has a decision like: "Do you trust him?" And that will determine whether Cyrus gets a bad ending, even though the characters involved have no idea whether she does. In fact, in this particular case, Cyrus is waiting for him to show up. If she trusts him, he'll be on time, but if she doesn't it turns out he won't make it because he was thrown in jail, meaning that the result of her decision goes back in time and changes whether or not he's able to meet her.

On a branch of Eltcreed's route the affection meter determines whether a deus ex machina saves the day or our couple is hung out to dry even though there's no earthly reason why the deus ex machina would even care how much Eltcreed and Cyrus do or do not care for each other.

But if there's anything Steam Prison likes, it's lots of endings. Every love interest has a minimum of five, and even the bad endings are generally more involved than a blood splatter and a game over. Every love interest has one good ending (with individualized credits and a song performed by their VA), a few of them have "normal" endings where things don't turn out as well but usually are positive in some fashion (which I'm defining by they have the non-character specific credit song with vocals), and the bulk are bad endings (dour credits song with no vocals).

One thing I found highly unusual in Steam Prison is getting endings for other characters when it's not their route. If the affection between Cyrus and her love interest is too low during any of the routes unlocked at the start, something will happen to separate Cyrus from the love interest and she will get an ending with the alternate choice for the warder/bodyguard branch (for example: Adage will replace Ines).

These endings are generally sad (usually, but not always, involving death), but at least in the warder routes they come with a promise of a brighter future.

I'm not normally a route order person, but I would suggest playing Adage's route first. Though Eltcreed is the closest to being the poster boy and he's the free demo on Switch, I found his route to be the least satisfactory and not the one I'd want to judge the game by. His route doesn't have anything to do with Cyrus's personal story and doesn't answer many questions, even low level worldbuilding ones (like why Cyrus desn't get sick even though she stops taking pills when she leaves the sanctuary district), or gives the less satisfactory presentation. (It's absurd that on his route, Eltcreed, a dude who was born and lives in the Depths, is the one to explain to Cyrus where the HOUNDS get their members.)

Sure, you get the least amount of spoilers doing Eltcreed, but at the cost of the game putting its worst foot forward. (On the other hand, Eltcreed's route probably won't be as disappointing if that's your starting point to begin with.)

Adage's route handles the worldbuilding better, it's on theme for what the game sets up for (Cyrus spending time in prison), and it also concludes the plotline for her parents' murder. After that, route order doesn't matter so much. Ines should be after Adage though, just because the end of his route will change how a certain character is viewed in Adage's.

Though it seems like I've slammed Steam Prison a lot, it did keep me reading, largely because of the strength of its early worldbuilding and because I quite frankly love Cyrus. Despite being a complete dunderhead towards romance, I adore how proactive she is and her stubborn belief in the strength of her sword. She kicks serious ass and often wins fights that in another otome the heroine would lose so her love interest can save her. In a genre where heroines are often praised for traditionally female traits, it's nice to have a protagonist who's not very girly, making Cyrus the most relatable otome protagonist I've played yet.

Next week we'll take a look at Eltcreed's route, because I did my first playthrough blind and locked myself into the bodyguard routes.