What's the deal with Billy Hope and Morphogenic engine?

[URL]

I didn't really understand that. Is he the Walrider? And what exactly was the morphogenic engine?

[MadHighlander]

It's poorly explained, as horror material often tends to be. But here's how I interpret it. This is ALL SPOILERS by the way, so if anyone is for some reason in this thread who hasn't beaten the game just leave now.

• Billy Hope

Billy Hope is just a human. A crazy human, but a human nonetheless. It's been a while since I played, so I forget if he was terminally ill before they hooked him up to the machine we saw in the climax (which is NOT the Morphogenic Engine, but rather an elaborate life support system) or if he became dependent on said machine over time, but he is dependent on the machine to keep him alive.

• The Walrider

The Walrider was the name of a German boogeyman-type creature, but that's not what's in the game. The Walrider we knew took its name from that Walrider, but it's actually a semi-sentient cloud of nanomachines that lashes out against anything it judges might threaten the safety of its host, Billy Hope, who it relies upon for its own survival despite its strength and ability to pass through most matter. As we see at the very end, though, it's not necessarily bound to Billy, as when he is dying the Walrider switches over to our body.

• The Morphogenic Engine

The Morphogenic Engine is a sequence of images that through hypnotic suggestion and the Magic of Science (TM Copyright) or whatever induces people who spend too long watching it to produce nanomachines similar to those that compose the Walrider. Billy Hope (as I recall) has been exposed the longest, and is now being forced to view the Engine perpetually, Clockwork Orange style, and that's the reason Billy Hope is the only one to have manifested a Walrider-like creature. You've probably seen the sequence of images that make up the Engine in game several times, they're those weird shifting Rorschach inkblot-like things. I remember at least one instance where there's a bunch of passive inmates sitting in a theater watching a video on the projector while the German doctor talks over it, the video part of that is the Morphogenic Engine, as I recall.

Keep in mind, it's been a couple years since I've played this game, and this stuff was poorly explained to begin with, so I may be going completely off track with this, but I'm pretty sure this is the right explanation for everything.

[URL]

Wow, thanks for this answer! It made everything clear to me. The only thing I don't understand now is how can human body produce machines??? But I guess we'll never know.

[AMS Agent Eric Cartman🇺🇦]

WARNING! If you did not progress through the game, DON'T READ THIS!

The Walrider was just a revived nanotech project that came from World War II made by Wernicke himself in order to win the war against the Allied Forces easilly by scaring and kill them, but it was incomplete at that time until Murkoff was founded.

Billy on the other hand, was the first test subject to test out this terrifying Nazi project when Murkoff first opened in 2009.

For the machines, the doctors sent Billy to go inside the pod and inject them with a bunch of nanocloud artifacts to form Walrider inside his body and the machines have life pod to transfer nanoclouds to the host (The Variants) to make them crazy and ruin your mind. It can be seen at the beginning of Whistleblower DLC where Eddie Gluskin trapped inside the pod after he failed to escape by a bunch of doctors who try to restrain him.

Murkoff is not an actual mental hospital, it was treated as a private mental hospital to avoid suspicions and lies by the press to the public about their gruesome activities that they did to the patients. That explains the company's logo that ressemble a guillotine, referencing their dark activities in that so-called "mental hospital".