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.