So what's the monster and where did it come from

[Froze]

(disclaimer: I do not own the game, however i've watched a streamer play it from beginning to end, feels a bit like pirating but legal(?))

So is the monster just...meat? or does it have a form? how did other crewmates get infected AND transform but not the mc? and what was Trots fightinf against in the room? was he fighting against tentacles or was there a more concrete form of the monster that latched on to him?

Also did Rennick get infected but got a delayed transformation? and some characters said the "oil" transformed the crewmates but the mc literally swims in the contaminated waters and only got hallucinations?

Also fearing if the monsters reach mainland? didnt people have rockets and explosives in the 70s?

[Cutthroat Cutwire]

A theory I saw that I thought was interesting was the idea that the game is playing into the "living Earth" theory and that what happened was that they drilled too deep and the Earth's "immune system" responded by attacking the crew. It would be in line with how white blood cells combat bacterial infections by surrounding and engulfing the threat before breaking them down and dissolving them.

This would mean Finlay was wrong about it spreading and that they'd probably only provoked it further by setting it ablaze but... Oh well, lol.

[Jeronimosss]

Originally posted by King Jester:

A theory I saw that I thought was interesting was the idea that the game is playing into the "living Earth" theory and that what happened was that they drilled too deep and the Earth's "immune system" responded by attacking the crew. It would be in line with how white blood cells combat bacterial infections by surrounding and engulfing the threat before breaking them down and dissolving them.

This would mean Finlay was wrong about it spreading and that they'd probably only provoked it further by setting it ablaze but... Oh well, lol.

I'm more into the Lovecraftian theory, but I like this other perspective very much.

[IronInfantry2016]

Originally posted by Urban Samurai:

It's pretty much this, but whatever was down on the ocean floor was something... big, they wanted to leave it ambiguous a mystery to what it is but overall it seems to be Dead Space underwater.

And just like Dead Space with the markers it seems it was also sealed away.

https://deadspace.fandom.com/wiki/The_Corruption

What if it's a prolog to the dead space games??

[bertpigeon]

Originally posted by Iggy Wolf:

My guess it's a mostly likely an ancient creature or living substance that came through the drill pump when they drilled through the ocean floor. It's "tendrils" seem to act more like veins, having a sort of "heartbeat" that you can hear when you get close, and you can even see it pulsating to each beat. In fact, what we most likely see throughout the game is merely its appendages, and never the actual creature's main body or even face.

Hell, if it is some kind of living substance, then it doesn't necessarily seem to be "malevolent" so much as acting on instinct. It taking over the crew is simply how it assimilates new organic matter into itself. The resulting explosion of body parts and matter and twisting the crews' bodies and organs is simply due to it being chaotic and violent in its spread.

What is notable however is that it seems to alter reality and bend the laws of physics once it gets big enough. By the end of the game, the derrick has parts of the rig basically floating up into the sky, while other parts seem to "levitate" near the creature's veins sticking out. At one point, you see a "hall of mirrors" effect of the cabin windows multiplying and moving around out through said windows.

Whether it's Caz hallucinating at that point or the creature actually bending reality is ambiguous. But it's definitely capable of changing the geometry in the immediate vicinity. Especially when you enter the derrick and yet somehow end up in what looks like rig below it, with the drill hanging in the middle of an abyss, seeping oil. If I had to guess, it's a type of "Leviathan" as usually depicted in mythological stories.

Damn i'm pretty sure this is a total rip off of a book i read. Is it based on a book?

[Iggy Wolf]

Originally posted by bertpigeon:

Damn i'm pretty sure this is a total rip off of a book i read. Is it based on a book?

Not that I'm aware of. Although my description probably would fit one of the "old Great ones" from Lovecraft horror novels. And this particular creature is Lovecraftian horror. So maybe that's why it sounds similar.

[Resident Red]

"Dead Space this, Dead Space that"
I love Dead Space but it's all Lovecraftian horror, they follow the same themes. Lovecraft inspirations are very widespread these days.
Anywho, loved reading the theory crafting, I got the impression that the weird formations looked like DNA (double helix), and the way it attacked the crew was much like cells attacking. Pretty awesome to be honest.

[Neno]

It seemed to be building itself upwards into the sky, so I assumed it originally came from outer space and was trying to return there (like the creature in The Thing). My guess would be that it's not actually hostile to humanity, it probably just happened to have horrific effects on the crew by accident and isn't aware of humans as living beings at all (if it's even sentient itself...)

[Wehzy]

For me its dead space but on an oil rig. The monster is the marker, it makes people ill and then they "transform" - unfortunatly i think there is no explanation what that thing is and how it got there. I hope there is gonna be a DLC or something like that.

really enjoyed this game a lot.

[Malidictus]

The long and short of it is we don't know and we can't know. The game simply doesn't say, nor offer enough information with which to speculate. Any answers you get are going to be fan fiction. Which is fair enough if that's what you're after.

Here are the minimal facts we know, assuming events are actually real and not all in the protagonist's head:

• The oil rig drill hits some kind of underwater object which is not just rock. This could be a creature, a sarcophagus, a space ship - we don't know.
  
• "Meat" travels up the drill and infests the oil rig, growing throughout it.
  
• Monsters begin appearing. We know the two are related, but we don't know for sure that one causes the other.
  
• The player is never directly attacked by the meat growth and it doesn't appear aggressive so much as indifferent. We only ever see existing monsters cause more monsters.
  
• The meat growth itself appears to be constructing something, using pieces of the oil rig to do it. We don't know what or why, but it acts with purpose.
  
• Monsters retain their original personalities, and seem to operate in a dream-like state not fully aware of what they're doing.

If I were to write my own fan-fiction explanation, I would pose that the meat growth is not hostile or aggressive - simply unaware of or indifferent to human life. However, contact with it allows human beings to transcend their own biology, turning them into Akira monsters that their minds can't really process. As such, their minds retreat to a dissociative state.

[Black Magic]

It deliberately keeps the monster ambiguous and it draws influence from numerous tellings of Eldritch Horror (in this case it's existential since we see it warping reality itself toward the end and it turns out that it's quite likely mere prolonged exposure causes inevitable madness and transformation, ala C'thulhu's mere presence having an effect on the human mind).

There feels like there's some Nyarlathotep in there, since it's implied the crew doesn't actually die but goes on in a torturous, fungal-like state of maddening torture in their twisted, amalgamate forms of flesh and bones.

And there's definitely 'Who Goes There?' (the novella that inspired John Carpenter's movie 'The Thing') inspiration in the game.

My theory is that the existential horror of the being is that it might actually just be the living earth.

So yeah, the idea for me is like, they punctured the comparison of the earth's hypodermis layer of flesh at just the right (wrong) place - and what popped through was the inevitable gush of its weird, reality twisting entrails and 'blood' that proceeded to bleed out into our world as though we had broken a protective layer that kept it in. And now the body of earth is reacting like an angry god. A natural force, with a purpose; as what's seen as chaos in the twisting of human bodies, they all seem to harbor a purpose toward the end's implication.

A raw force or power of creation that they foolishly poked into drilling for oil (much like they say how nature has no favorites). Hence, again, why despite that the transformations are horrific and violent, there is—again—a singular tandem or goal in the culminating construction going on around the protagonist that we see happen.

But that's just my theory — the more unexplainable, the better the eldritch horror. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to theorycraft like this!

That's why Dead Space just fails as a horror for me. It's eldritch without the ambiguity - it's horror without the mystery (which is why I dread the day a sequel to 'The Thing' happens). Not everything needs a definitive answer and in this case, the less we know about what the crew unintentionally woke up, the better the impact.

[Brandonspeed]

found a youtuber who made a great video on this. name's Roanoke gaming, video goes through its pathology as an organism. seemed like a cool video

[nightcoremaniac]

It's more John Carpenter's The Thing than Dead Space.
The Markers in DS assimilate corpses and the Necromorphs surely don't speak or hold grudge like the infected crews as far as I know.

[JefferyNothing]

Originally posted by Badkarma:

It may be the colour palette of the monster but got Color from Space vibes - contact alters everything it contacted. As for not explaining the entity, these are your average people and not scientists, think it helps show the horror of the situation

Yeah this is exactly what i thought too. The colour of the light is almost identical. Also what it does to biologicals is very similar too once they've been touched. Its kind a mix between The colour out of space and The Thing.

My guess would be it was some sort of ancient cosmic entity that had been dwelling at the bottom of the ocean in rocks or seabed. Waiting.

[CowCannons]

I watched this video https://youtu.be/Rve-sSxsLaE?si=DhH8IHBSOdp8_71z was pretty happy with what the dude was talking about.

[Saruto]

(Asking this because I haven't seen if anyone has asked it yet) Now that we know what kind of creature it is, my main question is, what is this creature doing to the minds of the people? Clearly the only ones that were affected were Trots, Rennick and Addair but not the others. The more I think about it, it seems like this creature was going after the people who were the most angry and the ones who were mad at others (at least that's what was portrayed with Rennick and Addair). My other question is, everytime Caz dies, we see a seagle, is there a meaning behind that?